Bachelor Girl

The married women swing into defensive action, and “by the end of October, every mother of every child… knew that Nora was divorced…. Billy [her son] was never invited over to anyone’s house after school… she herself hadn’t been told about the monthly PTA meetings. No one mentioned the Columbus Day Bake Sale.”

Hearing about it, Nora stays up all night making a cake, a handcrafted candy-dotted castle, pink and voluptuous, a real Jayne Mansfield of a cake. No one goes near it.

In 1949 one society matron confessed to the New York Times, “I do not invite unattached women because it seems to me—I don’t like to say this—but you know, Perry and I are so happy and these unattached women just envy the beautiful happiness we have…. They sit there, it doesn’t matter where you put them…. they are so sad and distracted, that they have nothing of this. Frankly, it bothers me to be surrounded by such hungry devouring eyes.”

And occasionally we witnessed the angry single sniper in action. In A Letter to Three Wives (1949), morbid suspicion of the other, experienced woman animates the entire film.

The story is this: Three wives each receive a letter from the town vamp, socialite Addie Ross. The letters inform them that Addie has stolen one of their husbands and plans to leave town with him that very day; one of them, in other words, is in for a nasty surprise at dinner. We never meet Addie; she speaks off camera in an alluring faraway voice, the siren song of the willowy bitch. The three women spend the day together, each dropping off into long spells of contemplation. How has her marriage, and how has she, been disappointing? The mood is thick with apprehension, ill ease, and finally paranoia until the moment we know. As it turns out, they all are safe. One husband had planned to leave with Addie but changed his mind. All is well and Addie and her giggly voice recede, though it’s clear she’s had a wonderful time torturing these three to the very core of their feminine souls.

Still, women were interested in reading and watching films about women in situations other than domestic panic. Some of the period’s most popular films concern women who had jobs, and not only the Mildred Pierce psycho-careerists who haunted “women’s films.” Claudette Colbert played a haughty novelist in Without Reservations; Ginger Rogers played a tough editor in Lady in the Dark; in Laura Gene Tierney was a graphic designer, and Rosalind Russell in Take a Letter Darling had a male secretary (who eventually accused her of anti- womanhood as if it counted as an un-American activity). Most delightful was Bette Davis in June Bride, playing a top magazine queen who’s got a bum but loveable writer fiance in her past. During the course of one horrific wedding shoot, she’s tossed back together with him and, ultimately, has to choose: power, top job perks, great apartment, or a loving if irresponsible man from the past.

They surrender, all, but with seconds to go before the closing credits, a holdout that is less a suspense tactic than a means for allowing female viewers two full hours of screen time to watch funny, smart-ass women brilliantly run the show. (A similar device operates in some of the era’s most popular radio soap operas, for example, Portia Faces Life and The Romance of Helen Trent, each primarily about love relationships, the stuff of female life, but as experienced by, respectively, a lawyer and a Hollywood designer.)

This same kind of “holdout” was at the core of the bobby-soxer phenomenon. There were other elements, of course, namely, advertisers thrilled to have unearthed an independent peer group (pubescent girls) that ran a slice of underground economy (baby-sitting). Bobby-soxing further gave to Shirley Temple a mature but still cute persona to inhabit before retiring. But most important, to be a late-forties bobby-soxer was to be a young woman between girl and wife. Soon enough she’d emerge from the protective cocoon of rumpled jeans, saddle shoes, and daddy’s shirts. Soon she’d begin her husband hunt in earnest. But just for the moment she was off the market.

Once-upon-a-time single women might have urged her to stay there, or at least not to rush.

In 1949 the New York Times interviewed female members of the college class of 1934 to see how their lives had played out during the Depression and World War II. Of the entire class, 82 percent were still married and only 12 percent worked “outside the home… the predominant experience of the class of 1934 was as housewife.” We also learn that almost 90 percent had children, and that as of 1949 many of these kids were not yet in school. The story moves along to its point: “A strong note of betrayal runs through… the study. These women entered public life in a flush of post-suffrage optimism. They belonged to a generation of women which stressed and exalted in the importance of jobs for women.” Real jobs. Not the kinds of jobs they ultimately found going through the “Jobs-Female” section of the classifieds. Some of them “understood the employment realities.” Others were bitter, like the interviewee who concluded that her life had been worsened by having to work in a “lesser position.”

But it would be far worse—and there was a consensus among the women interviewed—to go through life singly. To be single was to “experience the feeling of contamination,” as one expert put it in Ladies’ Home Journal, or as Time somewhat awkwardly described the single state in 1950: “pin-stuck with a cramp of isolation.”

Of course there is a women’s film that deals specifically with issues of singular contamination and isolation. It’s called, appropriately, Autumn Leaves (1956), and stars Joan Crawford, as a spinster who marries a man she does not really know in order to improve a life spent inside her L.A. bungalow, where she types manuscripts with maniacal speed and efficiency. As it turns out, her husband, a younger man, is plainly maniacal—a kleptomaniac, a pathological liar, prone to crying and “shrieking like a woman,” until Joan has no choice but to “put him away.” At the home, he receives electroshock treatment, a procedure usually associated with snarly, uncooperative women. Joan, soon after, receives a jolt of her own. Seated on the edge of a straight-backed chair, hands mangling her purse, she confronts the psychiatrist, the authority figure who had replaced the preacher as the man who brings the bad news.

The diagnosis: As a late-marrying spinster, she does not represent to her husband an actual wife. Rather, she represents “neurotic need.” If she had children or seemed at all a sexual creature, she might have been a mother figure; as it is she is more of an “aunt.” It is clear that he will have to leave her because she is, in her tainted spinsterish way, as sick as he is. Still, there is some twisted hope for them both. The wounded man and his neurotic need walk together across the hospital grounds. He pauses at a point to examine her hand, which is bandaged. Once, before his commitment, as she lay sobbing on the ground, he dropped the typewriter onto her wrist, making it impossible for her to earn a living. In so doing, he had graphically demonstrated his desire to be a man. A starting point.

Anyway, at least, they were married. And nothing would have more social significance in the 1950s.

Sociologist David Reisman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), once remarked that in the nineteenth century the failure to marry was considered a “social disadvantage and sometimes a personal tragedy.” In the 1950s, however, it would become “a quasi-perversion.”

CHAPTER FIVE The Secret Single: Runaway Bachelor Girls; Catching the Bleecker Street Beat and/or Blues at the Barbizon

It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle or murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, ON AMERICAN WOMEN, 1838

The Single Career woman… that great mistake that feminism propagated may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.

—LIFE MAGAZINE, SPECIAL REPORT ON WOMEN, 1956