seat on the subway. These features always included a shot of the girl in a bathrobe, hair twisted up in a towel, as she prepared for a date. No one has ever looked so excited while painting her toenails.
In other shots of her at a desk, or stopped on the street, waiting to cross, she looks sad. Months have passed and she’s learned a few things—about married men, wolves, loneliness—and she wonders perhaps if she shouldn’t just pick herself up and go home. Then the last panel. Girl in the tiny shared living room, staring out at the skyline or, more realistically, at fire escapes and squat brown water tanks. The scene is so hypnotic that she has the essential epiphany: There is so much here to see and to learn that to return home, where she’s seen and learned all there is to know, would be a kind of death.
I’m sure some looked at these pictorials and saw a titillating but pointless risk. Others saw a travel poster on which a special message had been engraved for them in invisible ink. It said, “Come join us!”
CHAPTER SIX
The Swinging Single: Career Girls, The Autonomous Girl, The Pill Popper, and The Lone Female in Danger
I used to pick out the people who lived alone—on the subway, the street. Every time they had these glassy eyes, like nothing’s living in ’em. Dead.
Whatever your age, your single state is nothing to be ashamed of. Let the girls who marry at 18 or 20 defend their position. They’re the ones who are missing out.
We have a message for the men here today: FUCK OFF FUCK YOU. You have caused enough grief humiliation for centuries… Leave your lie-wives and girlie-friends. Give us back the names we came with. Go!
THE SECOND COMING OF THE SINGLE GIRL
Images of the 1960s have been so long in circulation that someone born in 1984 could easily assemble his or her own timeline or montage: JFK and Jackie; the Zapruder film; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; Vietnam (with asides for the Beatles, the Apollo missions, LSD), and, depending on one’s mood that day, conclude with Woodstock and microminis, or Kent State and My Lai.
In most schematics, single womanhood as a significant phenomenon does not make the charts alongside the antiwar crusade or the blossoming of the counterculture. It bubbled along throughout the sixties as a bright and sexy trend, a magazine story or pictorial that could also be played as maudlin or scary. As a serious, permanent social fact, it would emerge with the women’s movement of the early 1970s. And the early women’s movement was the last and, as many, many frightened people viewed it, the least serious of the uprisings. Who was being hurt, exactly? Was the phrase “white middle-class woman” next to the word “oppressed” an oxymoron?
One “then girl” explained: “Nobody took you seriously if you were married and presumed to be a housewife —you were just another married speck. What were your problems—and who cared? If you were single, even if you were wearing bright yellow vinyl boots like I was, you were still just a girl who was going to become a housewife. No great tragedy…. As someone who might have a complicated political or social situation—forget it. You were invisible.”
By the mid-1970s, however, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live —what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”
Traces of this new single appear as if on cue in 1960. First, the 1960 census reported that 9.3 million households, about 18 out of every 100, were headed by solo women. (And the dramatic rise—more than a million since 1950—was genuine; it did not reflect the fact that there were simply more households overall.) More women, it seemed, earned their own money, and because there was more readily available housing, they did not have to live with relatives if they chose not to. True, most of these women were safely identified as widows, but close to 2 million were divorcees, 900,000 were separated from their husbands, and most shocking of all, 1.4 million of these women had never wed. “Who Needs a Man Around the House?” asked the
By the early sixties, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenaged daydream, had lost some of its hypnotic force. The number of divorces nationwide had doubled in the ten years since 1952. Thousands of housewives, already identified as “miserable” and “suffering,” were sending rescue notes to magazines, begging advice.
By far the most controversial element of an evolving single consciousness was the introduction in 1960 of the Pill. All over the country, college-aged girls, “nice” girls from “fine” schools, began taking it en masse and saying radical things about sex—or so it seemed to a population unaccustomed to this open public discussion. More alarming still, they sounded very blase about the things they said. These young women “assume that [sex] is a possible and probable part of a single girl’s experience,” wrote young reporter Gloria Steinem in
Many young college women used their training in logic to support this newly constructed morality. One of Steinem’s subjects had affairs out of marriage because, in her considered view, women were meant for lots of sex. As she reasoned, females were the only mammals capable of orgasm during times they were unable to conceive, therefore orgasm must have served some other purpose, namely pleasure. Another argued: “I’m not preaching against the institution of marriage by having affairs beforehand and I’m not going to produce illegitimate children for society to take care of. People who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A companion of hers solemnly concluded, “With one hundred percent birth control you are not running the risk of
