Bachelor Girl

It was that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a forty-room house…. I don’t dislike children, please! I just can’t stand the way you are forced to “react” to them in a way that somehow expresses wonderment with a hint of jealousy because you don’t have any. It’s so sad! Another sad reminder…. I feel like I’m watching [on TV] old fifties footage of the baby boom in the ’burbs only it’s set in the present…. You walk down the street, you’re late and rushing, but wait, you can hear it in the distance getting louder—it’s a stampede! Strollers. And these women never think to move their triplets’ stroller. It’s like, okay, I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over.

Some, like Gail, call this confrontation “pure arrogance on the part of anxious younger women… the there- but-for-the-grace-of-God shit.” Some wish only to clarify their own views on the child issue. Martha, forty-four, says:

I’m not childless, I am child-free. And neither is my dog a substitute child. My dog is a fine dog. I am not confused on this point…. It’s hard to believe, but I like my life…. I feel like I earned my life and my feelings about it. Because believe me, living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are young and not following the feminine script…. I write nothing permanently out of my own personal script! I’m ready now to do these things, if they come up. I just wasn’t before and that doesn’t make me a monster or a rule-breaker or a bitch who just, obviously, doesn’t like kids because she complains when she is nearly flattened by strollers on Seventy- second Street…. Mothers take a perverse pleasure in punishing nonmothers. “How dare she speak that way? Oh, that hostile body language! She must not have any children!” That’s the refrain of our age.

The media refrain has variations, but in essence it remains the same: No matter what the single woman says, she can’t really be happy. Her life is barren and disappointing. Friends consider her a social exile. She is in danger at all times when on her own, and she could miss out on becoming a mother. She is, as Anthony Trollope wrote of his thinned-out, run-down Lily Dale, “blank, lonely and loveless.” She is living the “long afternoon of unmarried life.” I quote from a classic 1930s spinster novel: “Librarians never marry. And they never die.”

Repeat.

Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.

But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.

During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of Sex and the City. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues (premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.

And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like… a man. Her ex- boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”

He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.

I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in school: “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”

Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to then, then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”

She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of women’s historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document I’ve quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.

There are many excellent overviews of women’s history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).