Bachelor Girl

paraphrase an actual headline—how to get rid of the women. A Time story complained that women flirted at work and, as evidence, reported that Douglas Aircraft had been forced to close its Santa Monica bomb shelter due to “lovemaking” during the lunch break. It seemed that women wore transparent blouses and “peekaboo” sweaters that distracted men.

Other publications quickly leapt on the story. There was an excessive powdering of the nose on company time. Absenteeism due to menstrual periods or constipation or both. Rampant gossip. Business Week, once so enthusiastic about this addition to the workforce, reported in 1943 that single women had been caught “soliciting” for extra cash, although it was unclear where the alleged munitions-plant prostitution had occurred. WACs were the target of endless jokes and nasty cartoons. Suddenly everyone knew the acronym “PWOP” (pregnant without permission). The subject of their underwear, specifically, what color it was, became a conversational topic. There were more than 300,000 WACs, and not a week passed without some newly invented scandal, very often involving suspected mass lesbianism. As if to purge the last impression, a 1944 Tangee lipstick ad showed photos of seven uniformed women and this declaration: “We are still the weaker sex. It’s still up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible.”

The New York Times Magazine apparently agreed. In 1943 it ran a piece called “What About Women After the War?” The question was answered, primarily, by a female personnel manager who adopted the tone of an advice columnist. “Different women want different things,” she wrote. “I think most of them—whether they admit it or not—want only to marry, have a home and a man to do their worrying (and sometimes their thinking) for them.”

The Labor Review for September 1945 casually reported that the Department of Labor was now “laying down recommendations on separation of women from wartime jobs” and the “ways and means [to] cushion the effects of transition.” The “transition” wasn’t smooth; it was brutal. Several states reinstated old restrictions that forbade women from lifting more than twenty-five pounds in the workplace, to cite one of many examples, or hired only “first-class” mechanics, when most women rated only third-class status. Unions reinforced seniority clauses, and the GI Bill would give veterans preference in all government hiring; the civil service accepted applications only from veterans.

A little less than a year later, women had lost well over a million factory jobs, half a million clerical positions, 300,000 jobs in commercial service, and 100,000 in sales. Women’s share of all jobs had dropped from 36 to 28 percent. Married women who could not coordinate the demands of child care and household work, women who were chronically late or exhausted, became “voluntary withdrawals”—whether they wanted to leave their jobs or not; single women rated no such sacrificial titles. They were fired. Women who remained in the expanded postwar workforce—about 17 million, more than half of them single—found themselves seemingly quarantined within a tiny range of jobs. During the first quarter of 1946, writes historian Susan Hartmann, “government employment agencies placed 40 percent of female applicants in household and other service jobs, 13 to 15 percent in semiskilled positions, and less than 5 percent in professional managerial or skilled work. In June of that year, 70 percent of jobs open to women paid less than .65 an hour.”

A 1946 survey of former WACs revealed that less than half of those employed had been able to find work that in any way related to their extensive wartime training.

Of course they had not really been expected to. In 1944, one radio executive had publicly predicted, “For nearly every man returning to his former job, there will be a woman returning to her former (or future) occupation —caring for the home.” The chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers urged women to leave “for the sake of their homes as well as the labor situation.” The president of TWA reiterated what was fast becoming common knowledge: Most women in business had been there only temporarily. “They intended, and rightfully, to return home after the war or marry and make new homes.”

HOMESICK

Immediately be for the war, marriage had undergone a mass revival due to the Selective Service Act, the 1940 draft law that raised bridal terror to new levels of intensity. (Will he come back, and if not, will I ever meet anyone else?) Among these rushed unions, there were many casualties—prewar, the divorce rate stood at 2 per 1,000 and by 1946 it had doubled. But many of these instant early weddings had been more like extended blind dates and the divorces that followed were as predictable and as unavoidable as schoolyard breakups. At war’s end, marriage was still an essential and blessed institution. Whatever else you’d done—worked, begun to smoke, learned to drive—the next obvious and necessary step into adulthood was to wed.

“What else was this stupid war fought for?” asked an “engaged girl” in Mademoiselle magazine in 1945.

In a national poll conducted two years before, young women were asked to choose between three distinct life options: (1) home and husband, (2) the hard-to-imagine career/marriage combination, and (3) the single career woman. Three quarters of the participants answered “home and husband,” while 18 percent sought having both the man and the job. Only one in nine envisioned an independent life and a career as opposed to a job.

There was, however, a problem, and that was the verifiable man shortage. It was drastically bad form to say so, but 250,000 men had died overseas, and—this part could be said—thousands had returned with foreign brides. Those who returned solo seemed “resistant” or “reluctant” to wed, or, more to the point, a little scared of the American women they’d found at home. A former correspondent for Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper read throughout the Allied universe, told The New York Times Magazine in March 1946: “Being nice is almost a lost art among American women…. After three months in the land of challenging females, I feel that I should go back to France!” That same year Harper’s reported, “Many American war veterans are bearing some unexpected rehabilitation difficulties in coming home to what used to be a pleasantly pliable and even appealingly incompetent little woman and finding a masterful creature recognizing no limit to her own endurance.”

That is to say, she’d had a job, she’d lived alone or with a group of other working women and had somehow mislaid her supply of charming helplessness.

One World War II veteran I interviewed recalled:

When we came back from the war, yes, my God, there was a sense that [even] if we’d changed, we hadn’t expected women to change…. There were lots of women everywhere, very breezy, confident. It was… a little shocking at first, but not really a bad thing. I remember being on a subway and this woman just sitting down next to me and starting a conversation, and all I remember thinking is, she’s not even going here for a pickup, she was chatting. Women didn’t do things like that before…. Now they were different, more of a presence.

He might have added that there were just more of them. As actor Glenn Ford spat at Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946): “Ha!… There’re more women out there than there are insects!”

Cursory reports from the Census Bureau confirmed that women had become the majority sex in the United States. Obviously there’d been war losses. But medical data was also starting to show that men had a higher susceptibility to disease and infection and that women in general had stronger immune systems.

In the spring of 1948 The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover to the news that women were “The Stronger Sex.” They had stronger hearts. They faced far fewer bar brawls, stressful commutes, industrial accidents, et cetera, but the news still was not good. Because of their newly discovered strength, women were more likely than ever to end up alone—widowed and unable to beat out the competition for a replacement—a condition that was made to sound far worse than that of all the many men who would simply be dead. (The piece led with an illustration showing buxom ladies with butterfly nets desperate to catch their weak, elusive prey.) The Times had in ways been covering this story since late 1945, when it first reported that because of war losses, population shifts, and female longevity, 750,000 women would most likely have to live without husbands. Three years later it was time to assess damages and ask the important questions: What was going to happen to all these women? What would it mean for society if there was suddenly a permanent single class? Would government, at the local or federal level, in some way be responsible for their welfare, and how