Bachelor Girl

help herself. Either she’d been born hard or, to paraphrase from numerous magazines and dime novels, something human had been ground out of her in hard times. She was missing a vital piece. The word malevolent began to appear before the words woman or female.

The mannish sexological ice block seemed healthy and whole in comparison. Here was a woman missing more than sexual warmth or desire. She was missing her heart. And this freak condition was best open to exploratory surgery on film. As early as the mid-twenties movies had featured intense, almost rabid female bosses who spit out orders. They hired! They fired! They lived in art moderne palaces around servants they hired and fired! Most important, they dismissed romantic love as a plebeian distraction. At least for the first forty-five minutes of the movie. A classic example in this brittle-bitch genre is Smouldering Fires (1925), starring Pauline Frederick as a corporate executive named Jane Vale (that’s for “vale of tears” as opposed to “wedding veil”). Miss Vale shrieks her way through staff meetings. She yells at ninny secretaries who seriously discuss makeup and men. She has a signature motto: “Be necessary to others and let no man be necessary to you.”

Then, unexpectedly, Miss Vale falls in love with a younger man and seems to change, but not in the way we anticipate. Instead of becoming a “real” woman—warm and sexually receptive to her husband—she becomes a female martyr. Reworking a classic spinster story line, Miss Vale relinquishes her man to the one person on earth she feels for at all, her younger sister. The girl is nineteen or so, an eager, sweet college kid; the hero is thirty- seven. At one point, watching her fiance and sister dance, remarking on how “young” they seem, she realizes that she has missed the boat or, more appropriately, gotten on the wrong elevator. She lets them go. During the Depression years, she might not have been quite so giving.

In Baby Face (1933), a heartless-woman masterpiece, Barbara Stanwyck, a speakeasy bartender, puts on a decent dress and works her way up within a corporation, starting on the first floor as a filing clerk. We know immediately that she’s an operator. She casually asks a colleague how she got such a great perm. She asks another one where she got the fabulous shoes. She shows up with the perm and identical shoes the next day. Soon she’s headed up the corporate skyscraper. On each new floor (accounting, mortgages, et cetera) she’s transformed: better clothes and hairstyles, an entirely new professional manner. At each stop she lures then abruptly drops at least one ardent lover, although one man she keeps around—a strategist and booster, who’s advised her and helped finance her climb. Finally we see her at the top, draped in one of those sparkly floor-length gowns so many thirties heroines wear just to swish around the house. In this key scene, the lover and friend charges into her office. He needs cash. He’s desperate. And he asks her point-blank for some jewels he once helped her buy. She stares at him. Thinks. And then she delivers a heartless-woman manifesto: “I have to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got is those things. Without them, I’d be nothing… I’d have to go back to what I was! No! I won’t do it, I tell you, I won’t.”

And she doesn’t.

In Dangerous (1935), Bette Davis plays an actress who when refused a divorce, tries to kill her husband by smashing the passenger side of their car, his side, into a tree. (The staged accident was a common heartless-woman maneuver that would be adopted by the overly anxious, neurotic single bitch of the late forties.) To her dismay, the husband lives as a cripple. As a heartless bitch, naturally, she has to leave him, and ruin her own life—retiring from the stage and wandering the city drunk. One evening, a fan spies her out having her liquid supper. He comes over and compliments her, though she alternately ignores him and denies who she is. After much back-and-forth and many drinks, she admits her identity. A romance grows slowly. When he gets too romantic, however, she barks, “Oh, don’t be so intense!” He asks her to marry him. Her response: “Oh, it makes such an issue of everything!” And, as it happens, she’s still married to the man she disfigured. After more drinks and many fights, plus a failed rehab sequence, she goes back to the husband, begrudgingly attempting to act the wife. Let’s put it this way: If the guy could have moved, he would have killed her.

The greatest entry in the heartless-woman genre is Three on a Match (1932). In this bizarre tale, three old school friends meet by chance, each having turned out just as a childhood prologue had predicted. Joan Blondell, recently out of prison for theft, works as a chorus girl. Bette Davis, very young, skinny, and timid, is a stenographer. Elegant Ann Dvorak is married, wealthy, and has an adorable child.

They meet for lunch. Ann, at one point, turns to Joan, the ex-con, and says, “It’s you I really envy—your independence and your courage… I accepted the first man who wanted to marry me—I thought it meant comfort and security.” The two friends stare at Ann in disbelief. She goes on: “Oh, I suppose I should be the happiest woman in the world—a beautiful home, successful husband, and nice youngster. But somehow the things that make other people happy leave me cold. I guess something must have been left out of my makeup.”

As if on cue, they light their Chesterfields—three to one match. According to superstition, one says, the last to get her cigarette in there and lit will suffer a horrible fate. In this case, no big surprise, that’s Ann Dvorak. Whatever it was “left out of [her] makeup” kicks in like a drug.

She flees her home, taking the child with her onto a cruise. Then, leaving him alone in her stateroom, she wanders the ballrooms looking for men. She picks out a scary sort, a gangster with a round face and tight striped suit, and off they go at port, leaving the boy on the ship. (The father eventually rescues him.) Inexplicably, then, she cuts off all contact with her family and begins a life of petty crime. One day months later the husband runs into the girlfriends, Bette and Joan, and decides to make a new life with them—that they will be the “three.” He marries Joan and hires steno girl Bette as the little boy’s governess.

Another day months later Ann shows up outside the house, her thuggish boyfriend looming behind. Annoyed, he pushes the ragged-looking Ann toward a smart-looking woman approaching in furs. Ann looks up to see Joan, her replacement, home from shopping. She asks after the boy, then gets to the point. She needs money. Joan gives her a little, and Ann is gone, back to her gangster. She gives him the money; he shoves her. “Hey!” he shouts, “ain’t that dame married to your husband?”

Throughout these years, single women were objects of suspicion. Perhaps they worked when men did not. Perhaps broke and alone, they hitchhiked from place to place—as unwomanly a thing as a knife fight. In mass-movie fantasy, some grew into self-contained man-eating monsters.

But most real women, like most men, were just frustrated. They had been forced to take an unexpected detour from what they once would have called “the normal things.” And this tangent had lasted so long that the once-upon-a-time state known as Normal now seemed exotic. Especially for the young among them—all those who had grown up without dance crazes and arguments about flappers and smoking. Asked what she remembered about these years of “massive economic dislocation” (as common a phrase as “Jazz Age”), Bess the bookkeeper said, “I wanted panty hose. I wanted a room that had fewer than four sisters and a cousin in it. I wanted to get married—well, forget that. Forget the room while we’re at it. Panty hose.”

THE SWING OF THINGS

The original new women, now in their fifties, had organized their networks and pushed hard for their causes—aid to indigent families with children, civil rights, minimum-wage laws, nationally sponsored health care— and they had a stalwart ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Several of the circle headed New Deal agencies, and as a unified block they spoke out about the unspoken everything, from the harassment of unwed mothers to the instant need for antilynching legislation. Now they looked toward Europe.

Genevieve Parkhurst asked in a 1935 issue of Harper’s: “Are the women of America going to realize the destiny marked out for them when they began their long march toward emancipation? Or are they, like the women of Germany, to stand accused of having betrayed themselves?”

The American Women’s Association called upon all American women to fight fascism, which dictated that women stay in their homes and reproduce for the glory of the Fatherland.

I imagine average American women hearing this and blinking up into the light, confused, exhausted, and