Bachelor Girl

would such women fare emotionally?

Everyone at least had an answer for that last one: very poorly.

This conclusion was rooted in a kind of pop-Freudian mandate that had evolved during the war. According to the tenets of this new “understanding,” modern woman was no longer merely frigid or heartless; she was a full- scale neurotic. In Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), a bible of sex-role hysteria, authors Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg labeled the twentieth century a time of “epidemic neurosis” and characterized women as its most appalling victims. Theirs was an existential crisis, for they had lost their essential identity and purpose. That is to say, females had been torn from their place in the home, metaphorically removed from the hearth. As the two doctors explained in both the book and in a series of stern filmed lectures:

Thousands of women became deeply and genuinely uncertain about whatever they undertook. More and more conscious of themselves as “drags” upon their husbands in the competitive struggle for place and prestige, frustrated at the inner core of their beings, they proceeded to react in a number of ways—as male-emulating careerists, as overdoting, restrictive or rejecting mothers, or as a combination of career women and women suspiciously placing too much stress in one way or the other on the natural maternal function. In short, they became neurotics.

And those were the healthy married ones. The mid-twentieth-century single woman presented a scarier case. As the authors saw it, the country had already faced down the feminists, bohemian nuts, and, worst of all in retrospect, the suffragettes, whose “ferocity… led to property destruction on a large scale; damages ran into the millions. The government seemed powerless to deal intelligently with the situation. Women had truly gone berserk.” And now came the lost woman, plagued by a “bundle of anxieties” all of which were grotesquely heightened in the unwed woman. “If she hasn’t a husband and is seeking one she is fully aware that others of her kind have the same primal purpose…. She cannot help but observe [women] scattered about profusely… stenographers, secretaries, hat-check girls, models, fashion designers or female riveters… they are no longer secluded, hidden away, but out hunting, as it were, in packs.”

These edicts had to be viewed in their proper Freudian context. As explained in numerous books but most forcefully in Modern Woman, all women had a biological and social imperative to mate, then to reproduce. Throughout her life, in other words, a woman was really no more than half of a human unit, who alone could not evolve and maintain her own superego. As a “half,” she would not ever be able to make up her own mind—a primary trait of many fifties TV heroines. And never would she possess a fully formed conscience. Only a man could provide the already unsteady, unmoored modern woman with moral balance.

Of course women did not walk through life upset because their “primordial rhythms” had “broken,” nor did they believe—not really—that they inherently lacked some essential mental component. But many beleaguered single women believed they now had not only a personal but a societal obligation to find a man. This led to an epic outburst of tension—at least as it was reported in magazines—and especially between friends who had come to share the same (nagging, anxious) suspicion: Wasn’t every woman a potential “other”?

Many books appeared to help her in battle—“finding,” “attacking,” “getting,” “securing,” “safeguarding.” Reading about single life circa 1948 is like browsing through a collection of busy war strategies that alternate with wordy, scolding conduct guides. A great example of the latter genre is Anything but Love by Elizabeth Hawes (1948), a thick book that was to serve as “a complete digest of the rules for feminine behavior from birth to death, given out here in print, but also put forth by the author… over the air… in popular magazines and on film… [advice] seen and listened to monthly by some 340,000,000 American women.”

A few of her dictates, all eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth century:

All girls want to be whistle-worthy, and that raises what is… the biggest worry in your life: Does he see you as pretty?… One of the miracles which mass production has wrought is that every single American girl can be seen as pretty. Our ugly ducklings can be turned into beautiful swans.

The main purpose of girls getting jobs is to meet men they may subsequently marry. A girl may continue to hold a job and earn her living in whole or part to age 23. Thereafter, only if she has become a successful star of stage and screen.

Occasionally something appeared that single female life as pitiable, it went without saying, but manageable for a reasonable amount of time. Jean Van Ever, in 1949, published How to Be Happy While Single, a practical guide to living life alone before marriage. As she wrote: “Meal planning, marketing, vacuuming, and the wear and tear of housekeeping… these skills are worth the struggle to master, so, while you have the chance, practice up. Even if you have a job and you are tired at the end of the day. Practice.”

But increasingly the “authorities”—and they were everywhere—didn’t bother with the particulars of single life (the hunt, the frustration, the outfit changes). They cut to the point and the point was to marry. To reproduce. And, of course, to consume. In 1947 the Daughters of the American Revolution released a statement that echoed those issued by far less conservative organizations: “The social order must now reassert itself. That is our job. That is our purpose. Those who follow their own paths, no matter how worthy, those who do not participate in the reconstruction of the society, to marry, to bear American children, must be labeled ‘Selfish.’”

In 1948 the U.S. Women’s Bureau held a conference to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, calling it “The American Woman, Her Changing Role: Worker, Homemaker, Citizen.” The keynote speaker was Harry Truman, who changed the order of the roles in the title; “homemaker” went first and “worker” last. It had been psychological doctrine. Now it was an executive order.

THE AGE OF ANXIETY

Despite the at times surreal amount of cheerleading for marriage, for home and “womanhood,” the divorce rate was actually rising.

It had become much easier to accurately count the number of divorces nationwide. Before the era of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and primitive computerized records, the actual number of failed marriages remained hazy. A 1995 edition of the Monthly Vital Statistics Report explained that after the war—well beyond the initial 1946 surge—there was a steady rise in the divorce rate. Ultimately, between 1946 and 1950, the number of divorces and annulments would total 4,020,000.

Magazines, newspapers, dime novels, even newsreels were quick to jump on the rising divorce story. One anonymous woman interviewed for Harper’s Bazaar in 1946 wrote, “It seems like everyone is getting divorced and, yes, that does scare a lot of women, including me on occasion… [but] I think what it comes down to is keeping up an interest in all areas of your marriage. Even if you are dishwater tired.”

But if a woman happened to be dishwater tired, how was she to recognize what the Reader’s Digest called “separation signs”? And what was she to make of the sudden presence of so many obvious divorcees?

Suddenly, in good communities, in any community across America, there were newly divorced women seen committing basic acts of daily life—smoking, retrieving the newspaper or mail, putting out trash, shopping, chasing kids. Divorcees had always seemed a little tarnished and sad, but in a certifiable man crisis they took on new characteristics. They were now directly threatening. Sexual. (As the divorce rate began its brief but dramatic decline during the monogamous fifties, the divorcee portrait—floozy blonde; blinds down at 2 P.M.—would become more of a gross sexual parody.)

Alice Hoffman gives a superb recounting of divorcee paranoia in Seventh Heaven, a novel set in the early 1960s on suburban Long Island. At the start we meet several housewives attempting to place a new neighbor. Finally, after much speculation, they come to what must be “the only explanation,” even though none can “bring themselves to say the word divorced out loud…. [But] the word was there, it had entered their vocabularies and now hung above them, a cloud over their coffee cups… they were all so completely married, and they were in it together…. And yet there it was, across the street, a hand without a ring holding a Windex bottle.”