Bachelor Girl

forgotten the true functions, duties and gracious giving pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself. There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour…. It is against order and I really think humanity.”

Training young women to capture husbands now underwent a vast CinemaScopic fifties-era renaissance.

In 1955 alone there were more than three hundred promarriage, antisingular tomes. From one foreword: “It would seem that some have come to view marriage in its current state as… disappointing for women, and especially those who have taken the higher degree.” As if it was 1910, the author concluded: “The lure of the city and its many pleasures will make of many potentially fine and worthy wives unnatural defeated spinsters… sick and lonely women.”

As always, commentators dragged the discussion back to education and the eternal topic—“what should we teach our women?” One home-economics professor from a college in Virginia wrote in the Reader’s Digest: “Unless there is a direct application to the home, or the conflicts and issues that will confront her in the home, in [dealing with] her husband or children, it is not valid education; it is unfair to the girl and confusing.”

One 1956 home-ec textbook provided a quick-study list of thirty-five tasks to perform before a husband returned from “his labors.” Here’s a small sampling of what the fifties singles studied:

1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal—on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most are men are hungry when they come home!

2. Minimize the noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Have them properly dressed to give their greetings.

3. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow… speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.

Whatever her interests, the single girl picked up a magazine, went to the movies—got into a conversation with just about anyone—and heard about what single girls had heard about since 1860: how to catch a man and make him stay. For example, a February 1952 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal provided a “quick inventory for bachelor girls”: “What about your… hair, complexion, clothes? Are you a good talker, dancer, listener? Do you have a sense of humor? Hobby? Outside interests?… If anything is lacking you must go to the hairdresser, psychiatrist, whatever is needed. Only then are you prepared to face the world.”

These articles and books prescribed ways to achieve a kind of robotic period perfection, “a rigorous ideal that is… to be desired by any woman who cares about her future.” But in fact the physical attributes of 1950s “perfection” were intensely difficult to attain. The dictates of the female ideal were repeated and reprinted as if they were a paper doll’s mantra: “I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, 122 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, a 25?-inch waist, 34-inch bust, and 36-inch hips.” Famed anthropologist and frequent commentator Margaret Mead found it startling—and not necessarily “good”—that the average 1956 girl was fifteen pounds lighter than her counterpart thirty years before.

New products appeared to assist in her transformation, most dramatically, hair dye that one could use safely at home without burning the scalp or turning hair purple (both incidents documented in a 1922 diary). Shirley Polykoff, a female advertising executive who, along with Estee Lauder and PR magnate Eleanor Lambert, were the professional “exceptions” to every rule, brought hair dye into the average bathroom or, for many single girls, into the kitchen sink. Her idea was to convince women that by changing their hair color they could change themselves. Wives would become more interesting to their husbands. Single women, suddenly more assertive and more feminine, would attract more men. As one promotional piece explained this proposed alchemy:

By changing the color and hue of your hair, you can change your entire way of being. It frees you to behave and act in ways you would never have dreamed possible when you were your former self…. And you can do it in secret. People will notice you and think, “She seems different.” “And her hair!” “How did she get it to look so lovely?” “Is it a wig?” “Is it dyed?”

Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”

Playboy magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented with three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.

The only instructions: “Make one blond. Make one a brunette. And make one a redhead. It doesn’t matter which.” In the Playboy schematic, what mattered was mammary glands—bosoms, bazooms, jugs; only class-A breasts could really alter the average woman. Although, even then, she’d be a joke. One popular Playboy cartoon at that time was, in fact, called The Bosom. Here was the story of a woman who measured 43-22-36. In each issue, the Bosom tried, despite mighty gravitational pull, to walk down the street.

Because so many people thought and often talked about blondness and breasts, even the most highly educated single found herself forced to consider the merits of Clairol and falsies or, more bluntly put, peroxide and “stuffing.” And she confronted an onslaught of beauty advertising—campaigns and strategies way beyond hair dye —that would have made a devoted flapper faint. In its 1956 issue on the American Woman, Life took great glee in itemizing the tricks and tools of the chase. That year alone American women had spent $1.3 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, $660 million on beauty treatments; $400 million on soap and electric grooming devices; $65 million on “reducing.” And that leaves out of the calculations all the clothes that were purchased to allure what Playboy called “the female’s permanent cash box. The hapless soon-to-be-broke American male.”

If some single women were repelled by this competition, others were matter-of-fact. Wrote one woman in the Life extravaganza: “If the race is to continue, we like to provide a second parent. So we go about the serious business of finding husbands in a serious manner, which allows no time for small luxuries like mercy toward competitors. Nature turns red in tooth and claw, every method is fair and rivals get no quarter.”

To say the least, this materialistic—and carnivorous—vision of the single world was disturbing. Columnist Anita Colby, a single working woman herself, wrote in 1956, “Emotionally we single women are at the greatest disadvantage of all women… we face a frightening world by ourselves…. Our enemies are loneliness and insecurity. Anxiety is a familiar houseguest.” But she had some encouragement to add. “Don’t go around feeling unfulfilled, jealous of your married friends, looking at every man you meet as ‘game.’ …You have a life of your own.”

As early as 1957, there were 11.5 million single women over eighteen in the United States, compared with 14.5 million single males. Not all of them were updated Eve Ardens—self-deprecating, not quite beautiful, resigned to it—nor were they pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts, the name, in fact, of a character in the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. In this, a bored wheelchair-bound photographer casually watches, and names, his neighbors, following a whole courtyard of minidramas and intrigue, including of course one nasty murder. Miss Lonelyhearts, in a subplot of a subplot, is a single woman who appears in a lone window frame, pacing in boredom. At one point she pretends to throw a dinner party for two when she is all by herself. Another time she brings home a man who attacks her. She breaks down. She takes too many pills. But the average young woman, if she lived alone, was not necessarily “playing dinner” or playing with bottles of mil-town.

She was happily “astray.” Or at least surviving nicely. And she wrote home to say as much on expensive stationery that had on it the word “Miss.” One 1957 Science Digest survey of 6,750 single women, age twenty-five to fifty, reported, “We now seem to be in a nation with a certain group of females who do not look forward to getting married…. they keenly desire other experiences outside the normative marital pattern. They may not always understand why they feel as they seem to. Yet they nonetheless do.”

From another report, written at the University of Michigan: “Whatever secrets they’re not telling… we can