Bachelor Girl

Adobe Digital Edition April 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-194074-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Notes

1

Some early feminists pointed out that the numbers needed interpretation. Women lived longer because, never soldiers or bar brawlers, they often kept their bodies intact past age thirty. They didn’t leave home as often as men, meaning that when census inspectors called, they were in. There also now simply seemed to be more women, because so many formerly hidden middle-class women were out on the streets.

2

Some single women headed west—by themselves. The Oregon Land Donation Act of 1850 was originally intended to entice spinsters and younger women to come west and marry homesteaders. Changes to the law during the next decade allowed several hundred women to stake land claims of their own.

3

There were a few categories of spinster exemption. For example, if a woman had lived a privileged life on the stage or been a famous painter’s model or dancer, she would be presumed to possess a stage trunk full of romantic stories forever putting her out of the banal spinster category. The other “out” was the widow-manque, the spinster who had been engaged to a brave soldier, dead in battle, his picture forever on her bureau. An excellent widow- manque can be found in Jane, one of the two spinstered Sawyer sisters in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, who lost her great love to the Civil War. Although Jane had “never left Riverboro in all the years that lay between and [had] grown into… [a] spare New England spinster… underneath was still the faint echo of that wild heartbeat of girlhood.” Her sister, in comparison, was hard, unyielding, and nasty. And occasionally a spinster character might redeem herself by marrying late, miraculously shedding her dusty paper chains. A great twentieth-century example is Miss Parthenia Ann Hawks of the musical Show Boat (1926), who’d lived “a barren spinster’s life” before her marriage to Cap’n Andy.

4

The corollary of the single woman who refused to bear healthy white children was her married contemporary who sought ways to abort unwanted children. During the mid-nineteenth century, in the decades just before the abortion outlaw, a common image in the American press was “the Aborting Matron,” a piggy, self-satisfied wife downing poison or else portrayed as demonically possessed.

5

The majority of applicants turned back at Ellis Island were unable to prove that they had waiting relatives. Either that, or they had physical problems (usually eye trouble) and/or mental disorders. Being female and single— and especially if there were no waiting relatives—was at times as incriminating as rheumy eyes. Many, many lone female travelers were sent back.

6

The most famous ghettoizing process was under way at the phone company. Telephone operator had been a respectable job, meaning a male job, until corporate expansion created several tiers of more challenging positions. By as early as 1902, the Bell Telephone System employed 37,000 female switchboard operators. Their rationale: Women had “more calming” voices and were “more patient.”