Bachelor Girl

mumbling something like “panty hose.” As historian Lois Scharf wrote in Holding Their Own (1982): “The massive economic dislocation… riveted the attention of Americans along the entire ideological spectrum… events overseas… [were] completely subsumed by anxiety… demoralized… disintegrating families,” and within a few years, she might have added, the complete indifference of many young women.

In 1935, shortly before her death, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented that the original new women had failed to train successors. Others admitted that they had, in fact, alienated many young women by publicly insulting the popular culture of the 1920s. All that was true. But if many young women were apolitical, it was not because they felt excluded by older feminists. With the exception of the very wealthy and the very lucky, most young women had missed out on the basic things they’d been raised to expect, as one young woman told the New York Times: “dating, driving, horseback riding…. I never went ice skating or out dancing…. One year our school play was canceled because the stage was considered unsafe and there was no money to replace it. Also we had no sets and costumes.”

As the Depression finally eased, this young woman, like thousands of others, would officially attempt to have fun. As early teenagers, these “kids” threw parties, listened to music—big-band, swing—that offended their parents, evolved an inside slang (“ugly duck” and “scrag” versus the “fly” or “nifty” girl), and traveled in high school packs, kid constituencies that, as in the 1920s, formed a discernible if less extravagant youth group.

As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”

This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:

There was a longing to run around with your friends, and talk fast about… pure nothing…. I remember our mothers couldn’t understand why we wanted to have many boyfriends, instead of just one. And music, oh yes! My mother, I remember this, called it “Jewish sex music”! Maybe the clarinet was too phallic for her. Benny Goodman was prominent…. We were always dancing, in basements or someone’s living room. Sometimes it got a little lewd. But, believe me, in the average crowd, nobody had sex. We ran around with boys…. After the Depression years, going out for a soda—that was fun. Oh boy! And if you happened to go with fifteen other kids who all wanted to sit in the same booth—even better!… Nobody knew what was coming. I remember thinking about two things. I was going to find a husband. And I was going to college. Not in that order.

But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The Atlantic Monthly, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”

During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster factories.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical Life feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen girl, Susan, eleven, was pictured deep in training to be “a winning female!”

In one panel, Susan makes beds. In another, she studies the way her mother fixes her potentially “beguiling” nails. In still another photo, Susan sets the table. “Homemaking doesn’t come instinctively to a teenaged girl,” Life explained. “It’s easier to teach a little girl than to nag at an older one…. Now the child can do simple meal planning and cooking, creditable bed making and charming table setting.”

It was a familiar process. Evidence is dragged forth to prove that what society wants for single girls is what these girls want for themselves. Back in the nineteenth century, no intelligent young woman wished for bedrest, the prescribed “cure” for hysterical antifeminine behavior. Yet after all she’d been through—the shrieking fights with mother! Her insane demands not to wed!—wasn’t bedrest what she secretly craved? Likewise, after the Depression, after all she’d been through, did she really want to do tough academic work? Ignore for a moment the actual facts, for example, that 15 percent more women were enrolled in college in 1938 than in 1933. Instead consider some of the expert arguments.

To begin with, the number of female professionals had increased by a mere 8.5 percent during the 1920s. If single women were serious about careers, as opposed to mere jobs, wouldn’t that figure be higher? It was further noted that professional women earned less than their male counterparts, so much less that they could not possibly be serious about sustained and important careers. And even in “female” professions, men outearned them. In 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953 a year, women just $1,394; male social workers received $1,718 compared with women’s $1,442.

Young women continued to draw up their own personal blueprints, and to present their own plans. And they were continually besieged with these retorts. In one 1938 Coronet piece, a twenty-year- old relates a conversation she had with her mother. The daughter said she wanted to see France; her mother replied, “So did Amelia Earhart,” the aviator who’d recently gone missing. “See to getting yourself settled! Figure that and someday you can take a trip.”

Those who took the solo trips—college, careers without husbands, forays to Greenwich Village—found it no more difficult, than those who’d gone before. But they were viewed differently in the post-Depression world. Why now would anyone risk their security? In novels and stories, we find images of women missing more than their hearts; they are falling apart.

Let’s look at two popular novels. Ann Vickers (1933), by Sinclair Lewis, concerns an ambitious social worker who becomes a prison warden and reform advocate, somewhat like Clara Barton. In coordinating such a difficult career, Ann Vickers has sacrificed anything resembling a coherent personal life. She has an illegal abortion. When she does finally marry, it ends in divorce, and she takes up with a gangster. Although successful (and popular!) as a prison warden, she suffers a nervous breakdown.

In The Folks, Ruth Suckow’s novel about the Iowa farm family, we pick up the story of Margaret Ferguson, the dark and arty girl who ran off to Greenwich Village and rechristened herself Margot. Finally, after several years spent living in New Mexico with her married lover, she returns to New York City. Margot’s life has been, to choose one word, controversial. Her family doesn’t understand; in fact, only one small-town neighbor has ever understood at all. “Margaret’s generation of girls is wonderful!” she had said to herself during one of Margot’s rare visits home. “They went out and grabbed at life.” Margot’s thoughts precisely. Yet that was years ago, and now, at almost thirty, she finds the city of dreams and adventure changed and cold. “She felt a bitter hatred of the noise and the hugeness around [Grand Central] station, making her think of how she was now to earn a living. Everywhere [she] seemed to see these smooth metallic girls whom she hated. They were like the modern buildings, not individualized but stylized… groomed into urban smoothness.”

Later, wandering her old neighborhood, Margot is stopped by a sight even worse: a “hag” selling pencils on a street corner near the apartment where she once had burned candles and danced with scarves. It’s an archetypal moment in the single narrative: The younger woman sees her future in the older one, in the lonely and forgotten hag selling “pencils she knew no one wanted to buy.” During the mid- and late thirties, protagonists like Margaret- Margot were held up as icons of female disaster. If college and career could make you crazy, the unconventional life was like a suicide. Usually writers posed it as a question: What became of runaway girls, not just the down-and-out but the bohemians, the superannuated flappers, the Margots, who’d set out to see the world without a guidebook? The answer: Either they’d wise up and marry or they’d eventually take a place on the street corner.

Jean Rhys, in her melancholy novels, was a premiere chronicler of the aging adventurer now about to fall apart. The best of her slender oeuvre is After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). Here we have the problem called Julia, a Londoner long ago self-exiled to Paris, where she’s had her share of exotic experiences. Now she is older and broke. One former lover, noting her shabby clothes, observes, “It was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from one to another had