Bachelor Girl

Girl gets off bus in Port Authority Terminal, goes into Bickford’s, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for Daddy. Life. Something.

—JACK KEROUAC, “A BEAT TOUR OF NEW YORK,” HOLIDAY MAGAZINE, 1959

I DO, I DO, I HAVE TO

I had a friend for a while when I was single who, between day jobs, worked as a performance artist. According to her self-produced catalogue notes, her art consisted of, or was “located” in, the re-creation of “aesthetic epochs,” as they were “parsed out in the locution, Decades.” That meant she continually redid her apartment according to themes such as “1922” and “1890.” The 1950s, however, represented her greatest triumph—a live-action tableau vivant starring a single girl, living alone in a single-girl apartment that is outfitted with the perquisites, the furniture and clothing, of married life.

“Jill,” as she was known within the installation, asked all visitors to leave their shoes at the door, directing them to period shoe racks that held all manner of appropriate footwear: bowling shoes, saddle shoes, impossible pumps, sensible shoes to look good beneath a gray flannel suit. If there were no shoes that fit, visitors walked in socks among the various pieces: the blond-wood Scandinavian couches and modular chairs, and the coffee tables— low and slatted or biomorphic—each stacked with amoebic ashtrays, old issues of Life and Look. A dwarfing hi-fi cabinet opened onto a tiny TV screen and turntable. The space was small, and because she’d made a breakfast nook and a sewing room and because there were filmy stockings everywhere on lines “drying,” visitors selected decorative pillows and hit the floor.

During the run of this “show,” Jill appeared in lima bean–green midriffs with striped pedal pushers. Or she’d whip open a door wearing mock Dior New Look tea dresses, squealing “hel—loow,” Annette Funicello trying on a mid-Atlantic accent. Most all of this annoyed her boyfriend, Jim, a writer who lived in the space with Jill, whose name, he liked to remind people, was really Ann. Jill would French-inhale her cigarette and squeeze his arm sympathetically. She understood. Here was a man who every day for months had been asked to impersonate a “beat poet, struggling,” when all he wanted to do was write or drink his coffee. But it was hard even for Jim to deny that life inside this made-up 1950s could be absurd and amusing. Jill served pancakes, fondue, and highballs all at once. And we all played a game she called Do the Dot. This required participants to gather around the ancient TV and stare expectantly at the tiny screen. Slowly the tiny white spot, the old TV warmup dot we’d all forgotten, would materialize at the center. It glowed there a minute, then expanded into a mess of bad reception. Everyone screamed for an encore and Jill would turn the TV on and off and then again—on and off—until she’d start to maniacally laugh and sometimes pretend to faint.

She’d get up, go on to the next activity, but the point, I always thought, had been made: Had she been a real fifties single, a bachelorette, alone, with all the perquisities of married life but no marriage, she might have gone crazy.

Simply stated, marriage in the 1950s was the absolute norm. In 1953, Look magazine rhapsodized: “Not since the age of Victoria has the idea of the happy home compelled such overt sentiment and general admiration… advertisements with their happy parents and rosy children in a setting of creature comforts and domestic bliss, the magazine covers with their warm scenes of family life… testify to the expectations with which men and women enter the blessed state.”

Young women earned great praise for their compliance with the prerequisites and demands of this blessed state. Especially considering—and everyone had to concede the point—that some had once led different lives, lived at least a little bit like “Jill.” As a 1952 Good Housekeeping guide to marital relations put it, “Having worked before marriage, or at least having been educated for some kind of intellectual work [the woman] finds herself in the lamentable position of being ‘just a housewife.’ …In her disgruntlement, she can work as much damage on the lives of her husband and children and her own life—as if she were a career woman and, indeed, sometimes more!”

But as it was expressed in almost every publication, public-service announcement, newsreel, and classroom lecture, a Female Miracle had occurred, resulting in the birth of a new “unique femininity.” In reaction to the postwar man shortage, or to the pop–Freudian imperatives to “adjust,” many women had abandoned their drive to work in the world of men. Look editors, as if celebrating a new-model car, wrote: “Forget the big career… now she gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. The wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts more feminine than the emancipated girl of the 20s and 30s… if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates more loud Hosannas than ever before.”

Single life more than ever stood out as a social aberration, what an old family friend of mine calls “living polio. Not married, you were in the iron lung. Paralyzed.” And there was resolutely no excuse for it. One 1954 home-economics textbook spoke out harshly. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and mentally defective, almost every girl has an opportunity to marry.” A popular female advice columnist seemed to feel even more strongly. “Every American girl must acquire for herself a husband and a home and children… any program for life in which the home is not the center of her living, is worse than death.”

Occasionally, a writer broke ranks and published a story with a title like “There’s No Right Time for a Girl to Marry” (the New York Times, 1952). But these were anomalies and served most often as dartboards for more conservative writers and for the corporate heads who felt moved now and then to speak out about the necessary place of the American female in the home. (The manufacture and sale of furnishings and cars had become huge business, and between 1950 and 1958 sales of major appliances alone would rise by 240 percent.)

It all sounds a bit crazy, I have to say, almost science-fictional. But the rhetoric is backed up by numbers. By 1951, almost 60 percent of all American women were married—one in three of them having wed by age nineteen. By 1957, 14 million girls were engaged at age seventeen and many more were married by age twenty, and most of them were mothers at twenty-one. In 1958, 97 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen gave birth. Betty Friedan would later estimate that the U.S. birthrate in the mid-1950s had come close to overtaking India’s.

I interviewed one woman, a pediatrician, married at twenty in 1956, divorced in 1968 with four kids. She laughed, then deeply sighed as she recalled “the marriage-attack-from-Mars years.”

If I tried honestly to describe it, I’m not sure my own four girls would believe it. One example, in high school, if you did not have a date for a Saturday night, that meant you stayed in, hiding out, and swearing your younger siblings to silence. And I mean you were HIDING. In your room, with the lights off, in the event a boy you knew passed in a car and saw your light on. That meant they would KNOW you were in without a date…. College years, it was all right to date around for a year or so… [but] if you weren’t set by junior year, and there was another group of new freshmen coming, oh, that meant your life was slipping away…. Land[ing] a guy seemed like the only possible way you were going to survive economically…

It is hard to read a magazine or watch a movie from that time and imagine any woman living in peace by herself. Everyone in the culture seemed programmed to harangue her. The Saturday Evening Post warned in 1952, “It’s harder than ever to snare a husband!” Unless, of course, one made sacrifices, for example, abandoning school. The writer, Rufus Jarman, speculated that the dreaded war brides, all 113,000 of them, had moved in on American women because too many of “these American dynamos had those three letters of doom—Ph.D., doctor—in front of their names.” To the GIs, the American single had shown “superior airs” and no instinctive gifts for housekeeping. But now, he noted, “most girls who are doing postgraduate work for various high-flown careers would drop their studies and get married in a minute if the right man came along.”

Some limited exceptions were made for artistic types—dancers, actresses, fashion designers—and it further helped if one resembled Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn. Later in the decade, exemptions passed to younger celebrities who had a tough kind of girl/boy quality—Shirley MacLaine (married, though her husband lived full-time in Japan) and Francoise Sagan, who, at twenty-one, had published a wild unapologetic mistressy novel called