But even here, in provincial married America, all sorts of girls went astray. Even if they did so very briefly.
DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE
The roots of the 1950s marriage mania reached back into the postwar culture: the GI Bill, which made low- income housing and other benefits available to veterans who married; the restrictions these same GI privileges imposed on women (fewer college openings; fewer jobs), and then all that pseudo-Freudian dogma demanding that real women seek out their male halves. But there were thousands who, setting aside domestic destiny, graduated or just left home with something else in mind besides a wedding. Stashing their marriage prospects into imaginary safety deposit boxes, middle-class girls traveled to Europe. Traces of these temporary runaways can be found in fifties films such as
Others left home for New York and jobs in theater, dance, publishing, or just to cut themselves off from suffocating fiances, dull jobs, or like Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella,
Starting in about 1953, at the height of “togetherness”[12]—a magazine-inspired concept advocating the total centrality of nuclear-family life—there seemed to be a rise in the number of single young women settling in New York City. The intensity with which reporters tracked this alleged rise, interviewing employment agents, Realtors, or clerks at all-girl hotels, demonstrates how terrorizing the single female was as mere concept.
“It was still such a radical notion,” says one my subjects, Simone, now sixty-six.
In fact, to get away was like testifying before a miniature version of the HUAC committee: Were we now and had we ever been inclined to hurt ourselves by deliberately ruining ourselves?… Leaving home was supposed to be very, very dangerous…. But we were girls who were not ready for the Donna Reed life. Poor Donna Reed! Even she wasn’t Donna Reed! She was an Oscar winner!… At home, everyone, in that J. D. Salinger sense, was required to put up a false phony self and it just got so tiring…. So you confronted your parents, and they acted as if you’d just announced you’d become a Communist or a Nazi
Many editors, professors, and psychiatric professionals fixated on this “lone female” escapee, studying her like a lab animal who’d been wired to do one thing and was now atypically doing something else. In the press there was the formal bow, or military salute, made to the good-sport all-American wife out in the ’burbs. But the real fascination was with these city types—the astonishing 34 percent who, by 1954, had made it to age twenty-four without marrying. She or “it” was debated, as an entity, in every publication from the
The
For a while, in 1954 and ’55, writers bypassed the gray and rainy adjectives common to sad-spinster stories and rushed on toward the nuclear arsenal: “Atomic Red Alert for Romance!” “From Here to Oblivion—Marry Now or Marry Never!” “Snag Your Space of Shelter, Girls, Before You’re Crowded Out!”
Despite a birthrate like a third world country’s—and despite the fact that more eighteen-year-old girls got married some years than went to the prom—the perception spread that Young White Single Females had to be reined in. In the form of the helpful how-to “service” story, magazines revived one of the world’s older single propositions: to move single women in herds from dry areas (Washington, D.C., ranked worst overall; New York and Boston ran close seconds) to places where men were plentiful. In pieces that included maps, arrows, and literal directions, editors set out to pinpoint where on earth men were most heavily clustered.
Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in general:
According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded… in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women… for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”
In “Memo to the Girls,”
GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE
As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956
“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly way.” Another outraged wife said, “These girls come back from a day in the outside world with something to talk about and what is that? Men. She’s been out all day with men. Other women’s husbands…. [she] is a threat to every self and family-centered homebody.” Another said that she’d “be content to liquidate [this] army of competitors who have