Bachelor Girl

insurance: because there was likely to be no one home during the day, she was considered a bad risk.

And they shared less tangible things.

Most significant was the fact that women, even if they loved their single lives, were not accustomed to spending so much time by themselves. In Toward a New Psychology of Women (1979), Dr. Jean Baker Miller, a feminist and psychiatrist, addressed this absence of “connection.” She described one subject, a “bright career woman” about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who was “very active and effective” but essentially depressed. As difficult as it was for her to believe, this woman had found that she could not feel happy without a man around, even briefly, to watch her and approve her efforts. After many years of training to perform in front of or manipulate men—not that she would have put it quite that way—she found that she needed the affirmation, if not the security of a regular relationship. As quoted in a story on the book:

I know it’s bullshit… but what if there isn’t a man there, watching me? Then it’s like this moment—whatever it is I am doing—doesn’t matter…. Of course I really care about my girlfriends; that’s a given in my life. But those bonds can’t really ever develop into what I’d call the fundamental thing. To make it real, or meaningful, or whatever, there has to be the sound of one man clapping. I know this sounds totally sick.

Miller argued that such women—and there were a lot of them—suffered less from father fixations or advanced insecurities than they did problems of “affiliation,” what Miller called the learned overemphasis on connections to men. As she wrote, “They lack the ability to really value and credit their own thoughts, feelings and actions. It is as if they have lost a full sense of satisfaction in the use of themselves and of their own resources or never had it to begin with.” One single woman, thirty-one, put it bluntly: “There’s the sense that there has to be the other person there.”

There was also the shared sense that the singles scene, or culture, or business was becoming an embarrassment. “I went, I swear, once to a ‘singles fair,’” says a bonds trader, forty-eight, married now but at the time the kind of woman who had “affiliation” issues. (“I always sat on my couch facing kind of sideways, with my legs curled up, as if I was having a conversation with someone. I wasn’t.”)

She recalls leaving the fair after one group exercise: To walk out of the hotel hosting the event and into a nearby “department store and to walk out with the names and phone numbers of three single men. I would rather have risked the humiliation of being rejected at Studio 54 than have had to do that,” she says. “This was the key to my future?”

Singles expos, singles magazines (Your Place or Mine?), and humiliating gift books (How to Make Love to a Man, with chapter headings such as “Wash the Dishes Nude”) made single life seem sleazy. And it was still, more so than ever, a dangerous way to live.

City cops and social workers routinely made statements to newsmagazines such as, “Young unmarried women are destroyed by seeing liberation strictly in terms of sexual freedom.” They referred to the fact that the single murders so common in ’73 and ’74 had continued and now most often had a drug connection. And they didn’t mean the much beloved Quaaludes. (Just to give some sense of how “beloved”: In 1979, Edlich’s Pharmacy at First Avenue and Fiftieth Street reported filling eighteen thousand prescriptions for methaqualone, generic for ’ludes, more than half the entire state’s total and more than half went to young women.)

“Nice” girls were found in motels far west on Forty-second Street, overdosed on heroin, and others OD’d from the lines of cocaine that were passed around on party platters. Girls from the suburbs were found in Central Park, unconscious or dead. Rape attacks were up or just reported more consistently.

The head of the New York City rape squad very memorably put it this way: “Single women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”

And there were deeper, less immediately palpable terrors still.

In January 1979 the New York Times reported, “Hospital at last identifies its shopping bag lady.” Pictured was an old Hungarian woman who’d been found a while back wandering, stupefied, her possessions—old photos, letters, postcards, canned soup, pretty scarves—neatly arranged inside Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s shopping bags. The director of the Human Resources Administration’s Office of Psychiatry noted that “there are probably a couple of hundred shopping bag ladies in the city.” (If you had looked up the very first reference to “shopping bag lady” in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 1977, you’d have found “see tramps.”)

Her cheeks had collapsed around her gums. Her hair was gray and spongy, and she wore whole sets of clothes on top of other clothes as if she were her own personal closet. She looked like a character summoned to the present from an old fairy tale, only the summoning spell had played a trick. She was not the pretty, wide-awake heroine you’d been expecting. She was the embodiment of all that can go wrong to the pretty and wide-awake heroine. Hers was one of the classically awful female fates—the hideous hag—and there was nothing comfortably mythic or metaphorical about her at all.

CHAPTER SEVEN Today’s Moderne Unmarried—her Times and Trials: Ice Queens of the Eighties and Nineties, Baby Brides, Slacker Spinsters, and The Singular Cry of the Wild: “Hey! Get Your Stroller Off My Sidewalk!”

There is a thin and pretty woman in New York who thinks that Bloomingdale’s is the loneliest store in the world because, on Saturdays, so many couples shop there.

—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1974

There is a single woman in New York, bright and accomplished, who dreads nightfall, when darkness hugs the city and lights go on in warm kitchens.

—THE NEW YORK TIMES, 1987

I am so lonely I could die. I wake, realize I don’t have a boyfriend and put my head in the oven…. I go to parties, night classes, museums, various clubs and mixers with my eyelashes curled hopefully and am wracked with disappointment to find only more hopeful women with curled eyelashes. I go to dinner parties and my throat seizes up with envy as I watch the happy couples, who are my friends. My nights are long with longing. Grief. Also, I have a large bridge in New York to sell you. Ho. Ho. Ho.

—CYNTHIA HEIMEL, PLAYBOY, 1997

To close this book, I naturally set out to identify the preeminent single icons of the moment, and to analyze how they had evolved out of all the many preceding incarnations. Most important, I needed to know if “single icon” as a term was still culturally relevant. The work itself at least seemed easier. After months of handling frail brown- edged magazines and fifth-generation copies of out-of-print books, I enjoyed arriving at my Internet portal of choice and typing in single women. As it turned out, that was like typing in the name of a continent: an entity so massive and complex that thousands of possible routes crossed any small section.

After several hours spent on-line I changed my metaphor. Single life seemed more like a huge, overcrowded refugee camp, the refugees desperate for help in escaping.

Here is the world’s most extensive catalogue of single life and thought, and it is dominated by a highly particularized collection of personal ads, and popular e-dating services, interspersed with creepy bride-buying offerings. (“Bulgarian girls! Russian, as well as from the Belarus and Ukraine! Also beautiful girls who will make fine wives from Greece and Turkey!”) Hoping to find less depressing expressions of single life at this point, I hung around in the ubiquitous chat rooms. But these “rooms,” with their cheesy masquerade-ball requirements, seem as awkward and unnatural a place to communicate as the sixties-era “trystorium.” (That included, as you may