Bachelor Girl

world—kept their babies. When interviewed, most of these women said they’d like a mate and a large number indicated that they had wanted to live with the baby’s father. Then they’d go on to explain why, for many complex reasons, it was not possible. But that didn’t change a thing about the baby. He/she was hers and belonged to her alone (not in any way to her parents, spouse, priest, “society,” or the baby’s father), and she planned to raise him/her on her own. Starting in 1970, more young mothers every year would never marry.

It had also become easier for a single woman to adopt. In 1968 New York City officials had looked at the “staggering illegitimacy rate” and decided, according to one city-administration official, that “half a home would be better than none.” Borrowing from a Los Angeles program, New York social services offered to qualified singles “children termed hard to adopt,” meaning over the age of three, handicapped, or mixed-race. The adoptive parent had to meet specific criteria—have a steady income and a college degree. It was important that they have primary family members nearby. As it happened, all of those who qualified were women, former or full-time social workers, either widows or divorcees.

The most visible symbols of change were not these sudden mothers minus fathers but the outspoken and very cool-looking single celebrities. The best example of the breed was without a doubt Gloria Steinem. Steinem began her public life during the early sixties as a hardworking journalist, who happened to be very pretty and went to A-list parties and dated famous men. She hated being referred to as a “woman writer,” which of course meant the secondary, soft kind of reporter. But from the start of her writing career, she’d been drawn to women as a subject. To mass changes occurring in women’s lives. And to situations that exposed what was not yet called sexism. She also chose female subjects who seemed to have much stifled anger and no voice, most famously Pat Nixon, who managed to express much outward public rage at Steinem’s perceptive and honest portrayal.

The details of Gloria’s life intrigued people. She’d grown up poor and neglected, then won a scholarship to Smith and spent a year abroad as a Neiman Fellow in India. She returned to New York and settled into an Indian- themed studio in the East Seventies that she kept filled at all hours with interesting people—politicians, reporters, actors, and, increasingly, prominent women. Over the years, Gloria was most frequently pictured out dancing with her wealthy, good-looking beaux. But by the early seventies, once she’d been declared the new voice of feminism, magazines like Newsweek stopped the dance-party photos and went with long vertical shots of her giving speeches, the sort where the viewer begins at the shoes and works up the long, long legs to the incredibly short dress, to the famous hair, and then, lastly, the microphone.

No matter what Gloria Steinem said or did, no matter whom she interviewed—and she was for a long time a political columnist for New York magazine—it would be noted only that she “did something for clinging dresses,” thanks to legs “worthy of mini skirts.”

She was described as “the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.” Even after she’d founded Ms., turned her apartment into a sort of women’s shelter, and become the women’s movement’s most important player, its secret weapon—the one not perceived as ugly, angry, or cranky—here’s how people wrote about her: “She stands there, striking in hip-hugging raspberry Levi’s, 2-inch high wedgies and a tight poor-boy t-shirt. Her long blonde-streaked hair falls just so above each breast and her cheerleader-pretty face has been made wiser with the addition of blue-tinted glasses; she is the chic apotheosis of with-it cool.”

Gloria Steinem liked to state that “young girls were refusing to be blackmailed into domesticity.” But no matter what she said, the ultimate question for Gloria Steinem was always What about you? She was gorgeous, though well into her thirties, and so what was she waiting for? When all was said and done, people wanted to know When Would Gloria Settle Down?[14] Otherwise put, when would she shut up and get a man?

She married for the first time at age sixty-five.

THE SINGLE TAKES A SLIDE

The 1980s, by any estimate, marked a low point in the public accord between single women and men, each side accusing the other of roughly the same crimes: insensitivity, dishonesty, stupidity, and sometimes martyrdom. It was during the late 1970s that this public mudslinging got under way. In newspapers and books and on TV talk shows, the women—“liberated,” successful, often divorced—suddenly began to lament a shortage of intelligent, sensitive men. And it was more than mere numbers, more than the well-known fact that so many men were gay. It was the quality of the men themselves. As Mademoiselle had put it with great prescience back in 1955, “Perhaps there is only a shortage of desirable men—men who are not too fearful and too repressed or too smug or too uninteresting.”

In stories typically entitled “Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” prominent women denounced the single- male population—those “guys” hunkered down in dated bachelor pads, who readily lied and preferred jail bait or the standard fuck-and-run. Reporters in cities everywhere gathered groups of men in bars, apartments, offices, and asked them to answer the charges. Sessions sometimes lasted well into the early morning. Christ! Weren’t these bitches just spinsters-in-training? Victims of women’s lib? They were probably dogs. There were references to dry vaginas.

And the conclusion: If there was a shortage of men, it was only because so many women out there were female losers. As one man, forty-one, told the New York Times: “All these intelligent, articulate frank strong women… [who are] attractive, beautiful and who now feel so much better about themselves, now look around only to find men suffering from various sexual and psychological dysfunctions? Who’s jiving whom? If you’re not turning us on, baby, check your assets. You really haven’t come a long way. You are boring us.”

On it went, from 1974 to 1980:

Women: “I have lost all patience with men who like little girls.”

Men: “Women want to see your pay stub and your investment portfolio before accepting a drinks date.”

Women: “Aging bachelors can age all on their own, without my assistance.”

Men: “What do women want? They want to be free to do whatever they want, as long as a man pays for all of it.”

Both: “It’s just too hard… I think I’ll stay home… I got an answering machine!”

Columnist Russell Baker, in 1978, questioned the value of so many staying home alone.

The women’s movement attempts to lionize the female bachelor. Newspapers, books, and magazines recite happy tales of women who, having successfully skirted the perils of husbands and nestbuilding, have found contented anchorage in private harbours alone with their TV sets, their books, their wine, their pictures, their telephones, and their self-fulfillment…. you wonder whether we are becoming a race that is simply afraid of people.

There were many women out there in other parts of the country who were not afraid of people, not angry, and not included in this press coverage of the single and her minidramas. Single life as presented in the mass media was a phenomenon of the big cities and the affluent areas in particular. Said one woman in the mid-seventies:

I just laugh when I read about the exciting single life… what wonderful chances there are for a girl alone today. That Cosmopolitan Girl! Wow! I’m a secretary to a man who owns a liquor store—the only other men I meet are married liquor dealers. If it hadn’t been for my kids, I would’ve moved to a bigger town—maybe Detroit, when my husband took off. But I bring home ninety-five dollars a week—before taxes, get that—and my mother takes care of my two little girls while I’m working…. Where is my wild single life? And I am twenty-eight, thank you.

At the same time, no matter their circumstances, all single women had many unlikely things in common.

To speak of the very tangible, unmarried women’s household incomes averaged 60 percent less than two- income (usually married) households; unmarried men, however, maintained household incomes just 15 percent less than those of married couples. Single women paid more taxes than married women—as much as 20 percent more (“America has a severe case of the singles,” said Money magazine in 1976). And there was also the bizarre single world of insurance. For a long time it was hard for single women to buy homeowner’s