Bachelor Girl

Van Ever, Jean, 174–75

Vanity Fair (Thackeray), 48

Viorst, Judith, 226

WACs (Women’s Army Corps), 168–69, 170

Wald, Lillian, 36

war brides, 171, 185

wartime jobs, 164–70

black women in, 166–67

in Civil War, 45, 46–47, 90

competence in, 167–68

for educated women, 165

in films, 167–68

number of, 165, 169

preparatory campaign for separation from, 168–69

propaganda for, 130n, 165–66

temporary nature of, 167, 168–70

WACs in, 168–69, 170

in World War I, 129, 130, 142–43

Wasserstein, Wendy, 40

Welter, Barbara, 27

Wharton, Edith, 19–20

“What About Alice?” (Cohen), 248

What Should We Do with Our Daughters? (Livermore), 142

“What’s Wrong with Ambition?” (Weaver), 189–90

Wheeton, Ellen “Nelly,” 34

Where Are My Children?, 38–39

white slavery, 122–24, 125

Who’s Who (1902), 116

“Why Women Don’t Marry” (Tompkins), 111–12, 145

widows, 172, 198–99, 209, 235

widows-manque, 23n

Wilcox, Susanne, 115

Wilson, Edmund, 129–30

Wine of Youth, 132–33

witches, 17, 197

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 37–38

womanists, 109, 114

Women, The (Luce), 39–40

Women of New York, or Social Life in the Great City, The (Ellington), 77

Women of Steel, 166

Women’s Bureau, U.S., 147, 175

women’s colleges, 26, 114, 143

“women’s” jobs, 103, 150, 152, 170, 178

Women’s Moral Reform Society, 31

women’s movement, 208, 233, 234, 236, 251

see also feminists

Women Who Went to the Field, The (Barton), 47

Wonder Woman, 167

Woolf, Virginia, 110

Wordsworth, William, 17

Work-a-day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions, The (Laughlin), 86

Working Girl, 101

World War I, 126, 127, 129, 130, 142–43

World War II, 146n, 164–70, 178

see also postwar period; wartime jobs

Wright, Fanny, 35

Wylie, Janet, 227–28

Wylie, Philip, 228

Wyman, Jane, 198–99

“yellowback” romance novels, 60

“Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman), 47–48

Yezierska, Anzia, 66–67, 69

Zaharias, Babe Didrikson, 155

Ziegfeld Follies, 94

About the Author

BETSY ISRAEL is a journalist and former editor who has contributed to the New York Times, Elle, Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Redbook, People, Mademoiselle, Vogue, New York, Spin, Playboy, and the Los Angeles Times, among many others. She is a former columnist for Glamour, US, and New York Woman, and was a contributing writer for Mirabella. She has written numerous screenplays and is the author of a memoir, Grown-Up Fast: A True Story of Teenage Life in Suburban America. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.

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Praise for Bachelor Girl

“Bachelor Girl is such a delectable read that it belies its stature as a profoundly important synthesis. It takes a witty and perceptive stance on the culture, but it’s also a prodigious journalistic investigation that disinters the droll and moving social history of the single woman in America.”

—Marcelle Clements, author of The Improvised Woman: Single Women Reinventing Single Life

“Bachelor Girl is essential reading…. It provides a unique framework for understanding today’s single girl.”

—USA Today

“Ms. Israel’s book provides a useful history of single working girls and new women of all stripes, from the