Bachelor Girl

apartment she has, the same hairstyle, has read the same books and has the same recipes and goes to the same kinds of events to meet the same men. In the movies, Doris Day had moved to the city and day one found a spacious brownstone she paid for with her unemployment check. The next day she ran into Cary Grant, who accidentally spilled coffee on her, gave her a job, and eventually married her. As Sheila observes, her life has taken a slightly different course. Thus she’s decided to kill herself and spends most of the novel both looking for a mate and shopping for a nice, reasonably priced coffin.

But let’s put aside all the feelings of terror and doom and look at some of the more common low-grade anxieties that plagued the 1970s single pioneers. The best depiction of this ill ease, the widespread state of singular dislocation, may be found in a little-known film called T. R. Baskin (1971), starring Candace Bergen. Here is a young single woman, well educated and interesting, ready to experience life, yet self- protective and a little shy. Her circumstances, that is, the 1970s, don’t favor the self-protective and slightly shy. She has just moved alone to Chicago, has her own apartment, works at an anonymous office job, and on the weekends attempts to go out with her friends—but it’s always a struggle. In groups they go to restaurants and clubs or to apartments far more garishly decorated than her own. The parties always start up quickly. Never is she really a full participant.

By the early seventies, the singles culture had reached the point where men very often assumed that single women they met wished to have sex with them. That’s the atmosphere here—uninvited male hands suddenly everywhere. Men attempting to feed our heroine Kahlua, whiskey sours, and spilling the drinks down her shirt. More than once we watch T. R. struggling out of a male hold and explaining to friends, who tease her, call her a prude, so uptight (then practically a curse word), that she must go. Like a lot of reserved young women, T. R. is uncomfortable in the anonymous new single world. I think of the old shop girls and how the same questions applied: Will the heroine maneuver out of the dreary job and away from all those awful people? How can she avoid parties like sexualized rackets if they scare her? And what about the friends determined to find her a one-night guy? Why, as T. R. might have said, do I have to be this age and single right now?

THE BIONIC SINGLE

In many ways it was an excellent time to be young, single, never-married, or even divorced. Penny, a science writer, now forty-nine, says,

People don’t understand that the 1960s progressed very slowly in terms of actual change. On tape, it all looks like a… colorful streak! But for a long time girls had helmet hair and pleated skirts on, stockings with garters, not panty hose, plus squishy-toed heels. To go out, you prepared for upwards of two hours. You went out “put together” or you—my mother said this—“put your face on” and then, all “faced up,” you could face the world. Even though the fashions had this baby-doll quality, the little dresses and booties, you still had on so much makeup and support garments that you kind of looked armored…. Most girls, remember, got married— that’s what you did; you got married and that was the progression. A lot of people lived through all the weirdness of the 1960s in a married couple. But when things really crashed—in 1969 and I’d say 1970—they really crashed. The changes started seeping out from there, and there was no going back.

Consider that in 1957, 53 percent of the American public had believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally. During the early seventies, a similar study found that just 33 percent of a large sample group had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them “neutrally” and 15 percent approvingly.

There was even a weak but nonetheless official endorsement of single womanhood from the New York Times. In August 1970, the Times ran an editorial announcing the emergence of “the Liberated Woman.” It began by providing necessary context.

Because western societies are increasingly rich, they can afford to educate more of their women and provide them with leisure. Because science has eliminated most of the drudgery if not the tedium of farm [and]… household work, millions of women are free to leave the fields and the kitchens and work beside men… those women who have no taste for marriage or childbearing will feel less constrained by society to adopt roles which are uncongenial….

That was not to incite all solo girls to rush out and change. As the authors went on to note: “The family has proved to be a durable human institution in many social settings…. The revolution in the status of women will change much and will leave much else unaltered.”

One of the biggest changes would be in mass perceptions of unwed women.

During the next few years the single woman would enjoy her own widely endorsed public honeymoon. Newsweek reported the following year that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” There were stories on dropout wives, and some sociologists and economists predicted that we would eventually find ourselves in a “totally singles-oriented society.” Frozen dinners for one. A rebellion against the terms “double- occupancy” and “family discounts.” The Mary Tyler Moore show was in its prime, Rhoda and Phyllis still popping in to complain before fleeing Minneapolis for their own single sitcoms. In 1974 the New York Times wrote, “In all respects young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago. [They are] self-assured, confident, secure.”

For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time ever, single women began to think about establishing adult, fully furnished lives by themselves. Landlords, who’d clung to the image of stewardess-with-dead-plants (or, not that it was said out loud, “dead stewardess”), began to see a new kind of single female tenant—older, meaning thirtyish, more established and serious. In the words of one young woman, “Do not dare call me a swinging single. I’m an unmarried grown-up.”

“Women’s lib,” as it was still called, had started to change things. “I never in a gazillion years thought I would rent, much less buy a house without being married or at least living with someone,” says one never-wed art appraiser, “age—deliberately vague.” But, she says, by the time she’d reached thirty, “I was tired of living out of the big version of a suitcase—not having the nice things in the style I wanted them in because, goddamit, I was supposed to have these things selected from my registry, or to pick them out together with my husband, with whom I was to establish a real, permanent home…. I didn’t even have a nice car. Everything was on hold and I was just too far along in all the other areas of my life to live without a decent shower curtain or wineglasses.”

One marketing executive called it learning to “think singly.” And everyone, even the very married, was advised to learn the dance steps.

By 1975, one in four households were headed by single women, the combined results of so many women waiting to wed and so many others having their marriages unexpectedly end. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of that year made it much easier for women to buy condos and entire houses and to have aligned in their wallets as many credit cards as they chose. (Before that, in many states, it was impossible for a woman to get credit except under her husband’s name.) And many were using them “to buy very ‘nice things’ like Limoges china and Baccarat crystal,” as The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1975. “They don’t feel that a woman’s home life begins when she marries.”

“It’s hard to imagine attaching much importance to an ashtray, or to even now believe you owned an ashtray, but I bought a Steuben ashtray,” says “Jo March,” forty-six, special-events manager for a large department store. “It was so clear and heavy and big it took over the room. I saw it that way, anyway. Because it was ‘real.’ Because it didn’t fold up or come in garish colors. I’m not sure I even liked it, I just wanted to have a Something that told people I was living in that place for real, that I was a big girl, and that I had taste.”

The other enormous change in single lives was the addition of children.

Back in 1960 an approximate 10 percent of all unwed mothers had kept their babies; ten years later that number had climbed to 45 percent, and in 1975 fully half of all unwed mothers—in most major cities in the Western