CHAPTER THREE
Am I a boy? Yes I am…Not.
—NELL BRINKLEY, CARTOONIST, BOSTON AMERICAN, 1913
Don’t worry girls! Corsets have gone! The American girl is independent!…a thinker who will not follow slavishly the ordinances of the past!
—COLLEEN MOORE, SILENT-FILM STAR, 1920
On the street, you do not recognize old maids and spinsters anymore. You cannot pick them out. But you will be conscious of an increasing number of women who are alert, handsomely dressed, of spirited car riage. That is the picture of today’s unmarried woman. You may be very sure she has a fur coat.
—PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, HARPER’S, 1929
I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE
It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.
So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.
Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (ette, they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a punishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”
But the new woman was most famous for her refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)
The press continued to recycle the prevailing view of matrimony: that no woman was qualified to do anything else but wed. In The Ladies’ Home Journal, 1900, we learn that “to women, the business world looks to be a great mysterious whirl of which she can understand nothing…. To attempt…comprehension is to strain unnecessarily.” In a 1904 survey, Good Housekeeping asked five thousand men to list the qualities they required in a potential bride and then those features that “repelled” them. The winning prerequisites were an “attractive manner,” “Christian tendency,” “modesty,” and “womanliness,” while “career minded-ness,” “an argumentative nature,” “the urge to smoke,” and “physical imperfection” doomed an increasingly large percentage of the population to a new old-maidhood.
But I doubt that many in the ranks of new womanhood took subscriptions to Good Housekeeping. Author Susanne Wilcox, writing in The Independent in 1909, explained, “The desire to participate in what men call the ‘game of life’ has fastened itself upon many modern women, and their appetites are whetted for more abundant and diverting interests than the mere humdrum of household duties.”
A male peer writing in the same publication in the same year noted, “The average young American woman, especially if college-bred, now leads a life of mental unfolding and progression abreast with young men…many occupations have been thrown open to her…. If she does not find a congenial mate, she avails herself of these opportunities and finds much satisfaction.”
Here were the true perpetrators of Teddy Roosevelt’s alleged “race suicide.” Between the years 1880 and 1913, the U.S. marriage rate hit its lowest point in the country’s history, and an unprecedented drop in the birthrate followed. It further seemed that many who’d already married were determined to get out. In 1870 there had been just 1.5 divorces per 1,000 marriages; by 1890, that figure had doubled, and by 1910, it had risen to 5.5 per 1,000, the majority of petitions filed by women with at least a high school education.
A researcher studying the 1902 edition of Who’s Who isolated the women honorees (977 of a total of 11,000 entries) and investigated details of their personal lives. He found that 45 percent of these prominent women had married but that 53.3 percent of them—for the time an enormous number—said they would never marry, viewing it as a “profound disincentive” to serious work. Many new women wrote essays and editorials in response, pointing out that the majority of white middle-class women eventually married (which they did—80 percent in 1910). But the notion of the best and the brightest refusing to marry and reproduce, preferring instead to conduct scientific research, attend conferences, smoke and/or chain themselves to fences, had taken hold.
According to much-quoted psychologist Stanley G. Hall, “The daughter refuses to do the things her mother did without question…higher education is at fault.” Charles W. Eliot, writing in the North American Review, agreed. “Girls are being prepared daily, by ‘superior education,’ to engage, not in child-bearing and house-work but in clerkships, telegraphy, newspaper-writing…and if they have their ‘rights’ they will be enabled to compete with men at the bar, in the pulpit, the Senate, the bench.” Because many an average new woman had read Chaucer, spoke French, and knew chemistry, she had developed, in Hall’s phrase, “unreasonable expectations” that led her to “abhor the limitations of married life.”
One can almost hear a new woman snort with laughter. Jane Addams once asked rhetorically: “[Is she] supposed to stay at home, to help her mother entertain?…Take a course in domestic science?…How…could any girl stay sane?”
The new women had an altruistic streak. They had come largely from the comfortable middle class—the truly rich upper-class girl did not go to college—and they genuinely hoped to “reclaim” or “uncover” the “individualistic possibilities” in every woman, educated or not. In 1912 Marie Jenny Howe, a nonpracticing Unitarian minister, founded Heterodoxy, the country’s first feminist (as opposed to strictly suffragist) group in Greenwich Village. As a nascent consciousness-raising group, it required of each member only that she “not be orthodox in her opinions.” It helped if she lived in the Village or at least in the city and could attend the argumentative all-night meetings. But Heterodoxites took their show on the road. They were the first to sponsor popular general-interest meetings about feminism, the first of them, in 1913, called “What Is Feminism?” or, as it was officially titled, “Breaking into the Human Race.” These were huge affairs for up to one thousand, and they featured prominent women from around the world addressing every issue imaginable. Here, according to an account, one could “glimpse the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old ‘femininity.’”
The language of Heterodoxy briefly entered the national vocabulary, if only as a source of fun. Political cartoonists played for months with phrases such as the “free-willed, self-willed woman” and “the parasitism of the home woman.” Marie Jenny Howe’s declarations, too, were a source of much joking: “We declare to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves” or “we are feminists!” Feminism, as a term, did not exactly leap into everyday use. (The Oxford English Dictionarywould not include it until 1933.) And that was to some extent because it had so quickly, so immediately, been turned into a joke. But it was also true that no one really believed in the prospect of a larger women’s movement. No one really believed much would change.
Even Ida Tarbell, the first woman “muckraker,” author of History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) and defiantly never wed (“it would fetter my freedom”), had her doubts. As she wrote, “In an urban setting, there are now simply more women outside, doing things. There is a sense of freedom, due to numbers of women…. But that doesn’t mean freedom.”
In a preview of what would be called “sexological” thinking, psychologist Stanley G. Hall summarized the “new” situation in far more draconian terms. The woman who “abhorred the limitations of domestic life” was not just unconventional, newly or blissfully “devoid of the old femininity.” She was “functionally castrated.”
SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA
To young single women who’d been born just as new womanhood coalesced—say, around 1895—the idea of a “new” woman quickly came to seem kind of old. Even if the woman in question was only thirty, to her younger counterparts she seemed aged due to the impression, even in casual conversation, that she was always giving a speech. Of course there were fights to fight, but as one young woman told Harper’s magazine, “the New Women don’t seem to see how there is…life to live!” This dated “new” character with her upstanding shirtwaist and erect posture made one observer think of “a funereal procession of one.” New womanhood seemed to be set to a dirge while the young(er) world was starting to move to popular songs.
This generational divide is reminiscent of the gap so painfully in evidence during the late 1980s and ’90s. It’s fair to say that second-wave feminists were so successful that the entire Western world changed heroically. But if you were a baby while it was changing, if you missed the big battles—and never experienced the old restrictions and unfairnesses—then how could basic freedoms generate a sense of wonder? Of gratitude? How could you be on your guard for hints of sexist regression?
A young woman, twenty-three, an artist’s model and aspiring dress designer, told Life magazine in 1923 the same thing someone twenty-three might have said eighty years later: “I think many of our women’s rights people expect that everyone is going to work for their ideas and causes, even though the battle’s already won as much as it will ever be…. They get very angry if they sense you have an interest in minor things, in how you dress, not in political talk. Or you are not interested in THEM and their struggle to free YOU and your friends. Why aren’t we all grateful?”
A symbolic battle had been declared against the tedious new woman—its rallying cry a slogan borrowed from a Life magazine cartoon showing a mother draped in a suffrage banner with a daughter in sporty clothes, holding a tennis racket. The mother is lecturing; the daughter smiles but shrieks to herself: “Oh, Mother dear, please I do need to leave to go please, please, SHADDUP!”
A backlash against the educated female had developed from within her own ranks.
In a first-person magazine confessional, “Why I Am an Old Maid” by “A Daughter of New England” (1911), we learn that “men instinctively avoid a woman who can discourse at length on sun spots.” More serious statistics seem to bear out this observation—or at least women’s belief in it.
Consider some figures from Bryn Mawr College. Between 1889 and 1908, the peak political years of new womanhood, only half of all graduates married. Of those who did, some 62 percent continued on to graduate school and nearly all the married new women continued, according to a university report, “to achieve in their chosen professions.” But that changed. Just a few years later an additional 10 percent of all graduates started to marry out of school and the number who continued in their careers simultaneously began to drop. Between the years 1910 and 1918, only 49 percent of married class members continued on to graduate school.
I’ll call it the age of the popular as opposed to the reformist new woman, a new woman without the glasses and the prim boater, and in its place a huge yellow hair bow. (And I mean huge, as if she were wearing two colorful party balloons joined at the nape of the neck and floating upward. In my grandfather’s Springfield, Ohio, high school yearbook, 1911, not one girl in forty-three is minus her gargantuan bow.)
This new girl, known once again as the bachelor girl or “the bachelorette,” had grown up, according to the Saturday Evening Post (1912) “permeated in the modern world.” During the years 1910 to 1913, six states voted in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment. Advertisements, popular novels, quick-change fashion trends—all had been present from the start of her conscious life. Our new bachelor girl wore looser-fitting skirts that allowed her to bicycle everywhere. Some had been on aeroplanes, and others boasted that they’d made cross-continental phone calls. With one million plus cars out on the roads, they’d all been out driving, even if they retained passenger status (there were no laws against women driving, just, initially at least, a reluctance to let them take control).
Much of the Jazz Age imagery we associate with the 1920s—driving, incessant dancing, loose-fitting clothes—actually took shape around 1913. One Boston American columnist described the popular new woman like this: “…the 1914 girl: You’ll recognize her. Just look for a slim creature who is not on closer inspection a boy in a dress, shaped like a pencil.”
One columnist for the St. Louis Mirror called the era “sex o’clock in America.”
Both these comments were made while writing about the phenomenon known as the thé dansant, or the notorious afternoon tea dance at which gin stood in for the tea. Think of a very small racket—it’s crowded and everyone’s dancing to a modern gramophone that spins seventy-eight-r. p.m. records. (The tango, imported from Deauville, France, is the dance of the moment, in part because the General Federation of Women’s Clubs has banned it as immoral.) It’s all very casual. No one has sponsored the dance or sent invitations; like the floating urban clubs of the 1980s, it appears from place to place: in a bachelor’s apartment, in someone’s parlor—provided the parents are out, of course—or in the back room of a restaurant.
The tea dancers come from all over. There are college girls on break, working girls out on adventure, brides-to-be making their way through long engagements. There are many actressy characters who mix freely with the working girls and, as it’s always noted, a contingent of timid girls who look as if they’ve never been out and aren’t exactly sure where they’ve turned up. All of them play dress-up. Some use sashes to shorten their skirts or change the style altogether, attempting to create straight, narrow frocks that cut just above the knee. Using their ribbons, they tuck up long wavy hair to see how it might look cut bobbed and modern. Long, pointy shoes with buttoned straps radically reveal the ankle. Eventually, even the little sisters, the timid girls, show up in skinny dresses and Mother Goose shoes. Instead of hair bows, they wear shimmery bands that wrap around the forehead and sprout feathers.
And so tea dancing spreads from city to city, and the late afternoons grow very long. Adults, alone at dinner, slowly take notice.
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR DAUGHTER IS THIS AFTERNOON?” asked Harper’s in 1914, anticipating the famed 1970s TV query: “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where your children are?”
One red-faced columnist in the Boston American explained precisely where they were: “Tea! Tea! What is this tea!? An excuse, a forum for young girls, many of them obviously of breeding and refinement, dancing cheek by jowl with [female] professionals whose repute is doubtful…and learning the insidious habits of the early cocktail.”
Belle Moskowitz, an impassioned old-school reformer and later a savvy operative in New York State politics, spoke out on drinking and dancing and the “corrosive” influence of these “other,” or lesser, working girls: “[Working] life cries out for rational recreation [but] what?…Girls do not of intention select bad places to go to…. [But] the girl whose temperament and disposition crave un-natural forms of excitement is nearly beyond the bounds of salvation…. she may affect the well being of others.”
One of several sudden reports on female criminal tendencies, The Cause and Cure of Crime (1914), declared, “Many girls are diseased. Physically and mentally contaminated.” The superintendent of one reform school declared, in support, “One bad girl can do more harm than fifty depraved boys…many are…abnormal or feeble-minded and should be held in custody for a long time or for life.”
Slowly, concern that morally corrupt girls were lurking around the thé dansant seemed to fuse with parents’ fears about the men who were forever lurking everywhere. And in this age of new womanhood (or “post” or “fun” new womanhood), when there were “simply more women outside doing things,” these fears were heightened by the sense that girls faced other, unexpected sources of contamination.
BEWARE THE WHITE SLAVER
For several years during the early teens, the nation was captivated by one villain: the White Slaver. He was that legendary fiend who kidnapped young white girls, drugged them with chloroform-drenched kerchiefs, stuck them with morphine needles, then sold them into prostitution. The slaver, usually a “hit man” for a criminal syndicate, preyed most often on new arrivals to the country, single girls just off the boat, the less English spoken the better. Slavers also worked Upstate New York and Pennsylvania towns, luring girls without prospects by promising—and sometimes actually pretending—to marry them, then at some point drugging them and turning them over to colleagues in New York City.
As one typical headline shrieked in 1913: 50,000 GIRLS DISAPPEAR YEARLY! The subhead: “Before the Chloroform, the plaintive cries: ‘Sir, please, I am a decent girl! Who earns her Wages.’”
One girl expanded on this familiar scenario in The Independent: “A girl is sitting there at the films. Or on a bench nearby a tree. They creep behind and…they force a cloth across your face, there goes the needle in your neck or your ankle or arm, and you go dead black for a time, only to wake up in hell. And no chance of getting back.”
As another girl interviewed for the same story put it: “They can take away your own life from you without killing you first.”
Quickly this new terror found its way into melodramatic plots. Especially onscreen. By World War I, movies had evolved from primitive hand-cranked “flickers” into longer films shown in makeshift neighborhood theaters. One of the first box-office hits in film history was called Traffic in Souls (1913), a white-slaving film that was thought to have no commercial prospects. It was seventy minutes—much too long for nickelodeons, which could handle only one-and two-reelers—and required a legitimate theater (where plays such as The House of Bondage and The Lure ran briefly before being shut down). More important, as one critic prematurely put it: “Who among us wants to witness a tale of unfortunates abducted, put to sale, forced to the sickening biddings of madam or whoremonger?”
The answer was just about everyone. Traffic in Souls grossed $450,000 after showing for a few weeks at twenty-eight theaters in New York City.
It is true that hundreds of young women were kidnapped, drugged, and then sold, usually into out-of-state brothels. And it’s true that several state and federal commissions eventually conducted mass investigations. But for a time the white slaver was foremost a mythic devil whose presence seems directly linked to that of the single working woman. Women who had sex outside of marriage, circa 1912, would most definitely have been part of the groupings loosely called “new woman” or “bohemian.” The average working woman may have “spooned” (“petted”), but she was likely to have remained a virgin. Despite that technical point, she was still out there, a girl without a husband, alone on the street. In other words, she was a walking sex target. Terms that had been at the edges of the vernacular since Bowery days suddenly began to reappear. A girl was said to be “flaunting it” or “showing what she’s got.” The white slaver represented, I think, an epic punishment for all those singles who were “flaunting it,” asking for it, seeming, whether they were or not, overtly sexual.
(A punishment theme turns up in many of the era’s popular-film titles: The Girl Who Didn’t Know, The Girl Who Didn’t Think, The Price She Paid. In one white-slaving film, Damaged Goods (1914), the action came to an abrupt halt about midway through, and a doctor appeared on screen to lecture about syphilis. This seemed an odd non sequitur. But in fact syphilis was a serious sexual threat, a much more common occurrence than white slaving, and there were few ways of discussing it publicly except as a cameo topic in a larger story of female sexual depravity.)
At the same time that white slavery was a vicious cautionary tale, it also served as a secretive sex fantasy. If it was a terrifying act to contemplate, it was also titillating. The language used to describe new women, working women, single women was often so hostile that the male anger behind it is palpable. A destructive or at least demeaning rape narrative was, for some, probably satisfying as a daydream or masturbatory scenario. For single women themselves, guilty or perhaps confused about their sexual impulses, the fantasy of a man rendering them helpless and submissive, with the evil details, the horrid fate left to imagine, well, it could have made the average workday pass a little faster.
That is not to be glib. White slaving was a real and extremely serious crime. The Rockefeller Commission and other smaller committees spent years patrolling docks, brothels, rackets and their upscale counterparts, cabarets, and while few people were ultimately prosecuted, Congress passed the Mann Act, a law prohibiting the transport of underage women across state lines for the purpose of prostitution.
Still, the passage of the Mann Act would not become the lasting legacy of this episode. Nor would the vilification of men who preyed on defenseless young women. The primary message, unspoken but unmistakable, was to condemn women out on their own and also to scare them. The idea that you, as a girl alone, could be lifted from life and that nobody would notice became—and would remain—a significant element of single lore.
Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the first beloved single-girl icon of the twentieth century was not the bachelor girl or the tea dancer or anyone new in between. She was someone who didn’t quite exist.
BEHOLD THE GIBSON GODDESS
The Gibson girl, a well-bred upper-class beauty, independent, athletic, and terrifically busy, appeared first as an illustrated character in a 1902 issue of Collier’s. She was named for her handsome, sociable, much reported-on creator, Charles Dana Gibson, an illustrator who had for years drawn variations of this all-American girl the way someone might doodle the same image over and over at school or work.
The finished product would become the official, polished trademark of new womanhood.
The Gibson girl was classically elegant and feminine—tall and thin, with small hands and feet, china-white skin, and a retroussé nose. But she was also strikingly athletic. Her shoulders were well proportioned. Her hair was piled high, creating the illusion of greater height, and loose strands around the face suggested that she’d just come in from riding or tennis or some other mildly strenuous sport at which she had displayed a calm mastery. She was windswept perfection. A Valkyrie holding a teacup.
At Collier’s, the girl’s home for many years, the staff practiced editorial taxonomy, organizing and subdividing the character’s various incarnations into seven distinct types of modern goddess: the Boy-Girl, the Flirt, the Beauty, the Sentimental, the Convinced, the Ambitious, the Well-Balanced or Rounded. Regardless of her precise type, the magazine declared, “she is incarnate, a representation of modernity, individuality, and personality.” As a female fan wrote in a letter to the magazine: “We admire most about her the manner in which she keeps her own counsel.” When pictured with one of her inevitable suitors, the Gibson girl rarely looked directly at him; rather, she gazed off into the distance, suggesting that she saw on the horizon possibilities beyond that man, or suggesting perhaps to the man that he would never penetrate to the core of her self-containment.
The girl, whether girl-boy athletic, well-balanced friend, flirt, or beauty, became a young single icon in the same way that white slaving became the iconic crime committed against the single girl: through the burgeoning media. The slave scare came alive on film; the Gibson girl was born in print and took on larger life as she was reproduced in a mass-merchandising campaign historic in its scope.
It’s true that stage stars and characters such as Trilby had appeared before on wallet cards, postcards, and wall-size posters (many saloons were miniature shrines to certain adored actresses). But the Gibson girl appeared everywhere: on china dishes, drinking glasses, furniture (vanities, dressers, hallway chairs and chests), calendars, flasks, cigarette cases, flatware, paper dolls, dress patterns, hair ribbons, ink blotters, and on down a long list that ends in lockets and thimbles. Her image also inspired look-alike pageants and song and essay contests, and of course she had dances and drinks named for her.
It was as a mass commercial entity that the Gibson girl had her greatest impact on single-womanhood. Nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century advertising concentrated on endorsing and explaining a product’s merits, at very great length and often in very tiny print. The emphasis was on solidity and tradition, a confident masculine promise of quality. But as single young women attained some purchasing power, it became clear that the old ways—selling only to wives and mothers—would not hold. Nor would the dull thousand-word odes to the sturdy reliability of a detergent. The Gibson girl provided a form of early branding, a visual shorthand for a product’s values that had previously required great amounts of text to describe.
As early as 1915, the Ivory Soap girl, traditionally a symbol of saint-like purity, had become a rouged and healthy-looking Gibson type. These ads contained less text than had previous ads, and the illustration of the girl was larger. In this way, the Gibson prefigured the eventual death of testimonials and the rise of psychological advertising, that is, the use of images to put forth a dream world, a perfect person—things and qualities you might have, that you might actually be, if you would only buy the product. Just as early silent films propagated cautionary tales for new women, ads began, just a little bit, to peddle images of freedom and beauty.
Ironically, the Gibson girl also seemed to reassure those who believed that “new woman” was an oxymoron, or should be. Generally speaking, these were confused and troubling times—years of violent strikes and demonstrations, of anarchist bombings. Little more than a decade before, the president, William McKinley, had been assassinated, and the First World War was already under way in Europe. In some drawings the Gibson girl seemed soft and ethereal rather than sharp, and brilliantly new. Sometimes she was just a pretty head that floated high above a soothing landscape, making her less a symbol of modernity and change than an angel.
Ultimately Mr. Gibson grew tired of drawing her, just as his public became slightly bored with her limited exploits. And as it happened, another, far jazzier female icon was already in view.
But first a brief eulogy for the Gibson girl, circa 1916, courtesy of one male columnist in San Francisco: “She is as thrilling as a phone pole.”
COME FLAP WITH ME
In 1920, the year the suffrage amendment became law, the Flapper—not the suffragist or anyone remotely like her—emerged as the supreme incarnation of the early-century single woman.
She burst to life in all forms of popular media as a much more precise and confident variation of the “1914 girl,” the bachelor girl who’d snuck out to the tea dance, her hair tied up in imitation of a bob. Now all hair was short, waved, and often covered by a cloche modeled on a World War I GI helmet; dresses, tubular sheaths set off by long strands of beads, hung from the shoulders. The eyes were kohl-lined and the lipstick so dark it almost looked purple. (Ann Douglas in her remarkable study of New York in the 1920s, Terrible Honesty, reports that one popular lipstick brand was called “Eternal Wound.”) Above the regiment of pointed shoes, the flapper wore sheer hose that she often rolled down several inches along the thigh, suggesting socks and schoolgirls while at the same time alluding to a stripper. According to flapper legend, as created largely by enamored advertisers, corsets had been banished and beneath her boyish yet exotic finery she wore lingerie. My favorite brand name of the era: “Silk and Nothingness.”
The Bowery girls, like the shoppies, had formed a premodern female youth group based on work and class. The new women were an educated contingent of serious and brave politicos, the bohemians a diverse band of self-declared eccentrics. The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part. (A sheath was much simpler, and cheaper, to sew than a shirtwaist.) One talent-agency secretary, interviewed in Look during the 1960s about her flapping years, explained:
I was a shy girl, not a girl who danced on tables at roadhouses, or not even on the dance floor…[but] I liked the clothes, how modern and how comfortable they felt…. You dressed in your flapper’s clothes, you drove around—everybody drove around—you seemed to belong to a club…you seemed more confident. You…were looked at as one of the “popular kids” [and]…you could start to feel that way. Big deal that you had two left feet, couldn’t drive either…. You were the most up-to-date Modern there was. That’s what everyone saw.
It was during the postwar, postvote flapper era that modern life as we’d recognize it began to take shape. In 1920 the country was officially declared an urban rather than an agrarian nation—a cityscape wired for communication via telephones, telegraphs, movies, and radios. Speed had insinuated itself into every area of modern life, and nowhere was this acceleration more heightened and intriguing than in Manhattan. It wasn’t only all the cars, or the young women in the cars (called “rolling hotels”) riding with men they had previously courted at home in sight of parents. Neither was it jazz nor the complex new dances that made the spiel look crude and dated. A slightly manic style was spreading in all sectors of the New York population: Housewives, using “revolutionary home technologies,” finished their work in several hours, then rushed around trying to fill in their afternoons. Shop girls and businessmen alike “wolfed down” lunch while standing at counters. Society parties vied with secretive, strange, but no less ambitious costume balls in Greenwich Village; single girls threw parties; coeds threw parties. Everyone went out, drove somewhere, walked briskly; people started running for sport.
The flapper was the female embodiment of this tempo shift.
She was the first single woman ever to wear a wristwatch. To drive and possibly own a car and to have her own “revolutionary home technologies” in the form of unusual new products. The most important among these were tampons (developed by nurses during the war and later patented by a male doctor), depilatories, and tanning lotions, this last essential ever since Coco Chanel had decreed that to be modern was to have been running around, exercising, in the sun.
If flappers were the embodiment, the “supreme incarnation” of all this newness, that’s because they were the first singles to be viewed as a peer group and as a peer demographic—a distinct subset of the population interesting from a sociological as well as an economic perspective. Like that late-1940s creation, the teenager, flappers were identified as unique consumers to be studied and pampered as if they had the buying power of wives. Or something close to it. In 1900 there were 5,237 female college graduates in the United States; by 1910 there were 8,437; and in 1921, more than ten thousand young women had graduated either from college or graduate school. Combined with all those already out there in the workplace, these young women formed the rearguard forces of a significant social movement: more women living for longer periods of time on their own before marriage. If they weren’t likely to rush out and buy major appliances, they would buy much more expensive merchandise, and more of it, than ever before. Advertisers, primitive marketers, set out to “speak” to them, as if through a national megaphone.
For years, most female ads featured women’s faces or women posed behind counters, most often kitchen counters that cut them off at the waist. And that included the all-modern Gibson girl Ivory Soap ad; she had appeared as a blushing face inside a circle. The Gibson may have advanced the concept of single-girl “branding,” of targeting and specifically addressing an identifiably single woman, but flappers took it further. Flappers appeared whole—walking dogs, stretched out across cars, crouched and set to dive wearing shiny Jantzen bathing suits. The point, lost on very few young women, was that for a time they could seem wholly formed without marriage, or while ostensibly in search of marriage. The point was further made to women no longer considered young at all.
In 1915 Cosmopolitan had pronounced that women of “all, all ages, every one” could and should be “beautiful, fascinating, attractive.” Ten years later a male correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post marveled that beneath “the aegis of flapperdom” women pushing thirty, even thirty-five, were now saved from the taint of spinsterism.
It was that war, cracked open the world!…Now these beneficiaries of war work…[have] evolved into the business-like art-loving fashion-setting spinsters of today…burst free from her thin-necked anxious service-without-pay chrysalis, [she] spreads her purple and gold wings…sail[ing] gracefully into the horizon blue of a new existence.
The term “flapper” actually dates from the First World War, although there are still disagreements about its origins. Critic Edmund Wilson wrote that it was derived from the flapping sound of a baby duck’s wings as it struggled to fly. Others have pointed out that “flapper” is an old term for a young prostitute, while still others have nominated the clacking sound of those long beads as a girl ran out of the house or as she danced. But the preferred theory of origin lies with the “beneficiaries” of wartime jobs.* In bad weather, many factory workers put on enormous boots they did not bother to buckle as they left work. Perhaps they were too exhausted. Perhaps they liked the sound of buckles jangling as six girls wandered the street. Six girls across, six pairs of flopping boots, and a lot of giggling: That was the original sound of flapping.
The finalized flapper icon was likewise a product of the war years. By 1918, there were more than three hundred films circulating the country at any given time, many of them featuring well-defined flapper characters. The movie bibles Photoplay and Modern Picture World (b. 1911) referred to the actresses who played them as “America’s Pals,” girls just like the reader, with one enormous exception. The pals all had “It.” As defined by scenarist and director Elinor Glyn, It—the quintessential flapper trait—was a form of perceptual physics. In the heat of a media frenzy, the celebration of something “new,” all of a culture’s most desirable traits attached themselves to one young icon everyone else then imitated. But It, the sum total of many tiny acts of adorability, was hard to mimic. It just came to you: a shoe positioned at a clever angle. Well-timed winking. Clever tap-dancing moves away from lecherous men. A fashion columnist summarized in Vogue, “One has IT or one does not.”
But most every silent screen star, and many of the women who watched and read about them tried hard to evolve their own unique sense of It.
Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford began their careers playing richgirl flappers, roadhouse dollies, and office workers who expressed their sense of It by suggestively blowing cigarette smoke into the faces of their leading men. Colleen Moore and Louise Brooks introduced the slick black helmet haircut and a speedy double-talking sense of It that was deceptively fun and eccentric. If asked to be fully candid, their characters might have confessed: “I am so cute and charming, you will inevitably fail to understand that I am also crazy, irresponsible, and destructive!” Even D. W. Griffith, master of the epochal silent film, took on a flapper who, in attaining It, seemed to have injected amphetamines. Carole Dempster, a wild-eyed, frizzy-haired actress, swam marathons, rode bikes or horses, played tennis, tossed hatchets, and, whenever possible, did the jitterbug, which had been called “a dance of anxiety and bitterness.” All within the course of one movie.
But the star with the essence of It was Clara Bow, a redhead with a strategically placed beauty mark and a Brooklyn squawk that would ruin her career in the sound era. She played all variety of flapperish working girls—a manicurist in Red Hair (1928), a swimming instructor in Kid Boots (1926), and, among many others, a lingerie shop girl in It (1927), a film that grossed an astonishing one million dollars. The Bow characters were distinguished by their effervescent refusal to accept class distinctions. In many of her films, her characters “land” a better kind of guy by easing in and out of social milieus (the Ritz and Coney Island all in a weekend!) relying only on their high-spirited personalities to erase any awkwardness.
But having It, running around, trying hard to seem fresh and daring, could be interpreted in other ways. To many Americans, the flapper, as depicted on-screen and in the three thousand magazines published monthly circa 1923, was little more than a potential slut.
Sex and danger were big selling points in flapper films, as reflected in their titles: Strictly Unconventional, Speed Crazed, Wickedness Preferred, In Search of Sinners, Dangerous Business. And the flappers, the It girls, were portrayed, at best, as lightly naughty. For example, they shoplifted. They stole boyfriends. Drank. Or, in many cases, they were chorus girls, a job title that encompassed all the above tendencies. The American Film Institute has cataloged 101 flapper films that featured “chorines,” among them, Sally of the Scandals and An Affair of the Follies.The naughty fictional flapper was also sometimes a schoolgirl. In two-reelers typically entitled Honey and Sweetie, student flappers lounged around their rooms smoking and—this was often depicted as an activity—“wearing lingerie.” After a while the coeds put on clothes and attended their classes. For the rest of the film they flirted with handsome professors, who seemed frightened.
Naturally these films were accused of encouraging the worst aspects of It: sexy, louche behavior that could ruin lives. In fact, they seem most to have encouraged female viewers, potential It girls, to become actors. Many 1920s movie stars, all those friendly “pals,” seemed less talented thespians than they did cute, clever girls. How hard could it be? As early as 1920, the Department of Labor estimated that 14,354 young women listed their occupation as “actress.” And so “actress” entered the flapper pantheon, along with “showgirl” and “lingerie saleslady,” as something tawdry.
The first Miss America pageant, held in 1921, barred both divorcées and actresses from the competition and looked very closely at those girls dressed as flappers. Local censorship boards drew up laundry lists of things actresses, playing flappers, could not do or have done to them. In Port Arthur, Texas, one could not “make goo-goo eyes at the flappers.” In Pennsylvania, “views of women smoking will not be disproved as such, but when actresses are shown in suggestive positions or their smoking is…degrading, such scenes will be disproved.” In Kansas, no kiss could last longer than thirty feet of film, and in Connecticut and several other states directors could not stage activity in a bedroom or a kitchen. How else to keep flappers, actresses—all these swarming sexual girls—in proper check? Their insidious influence was felt everywhere.
The backs of magazines were repositories of tiny ads promoting “French cures,” euphemisms for abortions, as well as paid testimonials to the miraculous “harnessing of vulcanized rubber,” a miracle product like Flubber. It could make a tire! Or a bouncing ball! More to the point, it could and would make a condom. By 1926, this latter item could be purchased in almost any drugstore or gas station in the United States, and it was widely known to be advertised in the Sears catalogue.
But the flapper—student, actress, or career girl—was not in most cases a sexual vixen. She was trying on a part and playing a tease. And she always learned her lesson. One of many films to teach it to her was called Wine of Youth (1924). We start with Grandma and the man who would be Grandpa, on the couch, happily holding hands. The screen fades and it’s the same couch, only on it now we see Mother and her fiancé, soon to be Father. Fade to the present, where Mary, the modern daughter and her modern friend Trish announce that they each plan to take what they call a “trial honeymoon.” No sedentary courtship for them. Together, with their fiancés, they plan a camping trip. Mary explains the point: “to know…how a man is in everyday life before you give your all.” But as it turns out there are things about the prospective grooms—how they look in the morning, for example—that a girl doesn’t need to know right away. She needs time to adjust. In the end, we see the same couch again. On it the modern couple, Mary and her man, is shown chastely holding hands.
“In the end, she was a good girl,” Colleen Moore told the New York Times in 1971 about the flapper. “All she did was have a cocktail and smoke a cigarette.” Others pointed out that while she drove and danced and all the rest, she also went to school in greater numbers than any women before her. The flapper, in short, was more than a silly screen icon or someone’s shorthand for “troubling young woman.” She was a real young woman with complex views and expectations, and she left us a useful pile of press clippings to explain them.
Many of these “New Girl Sounds Off” stories established journalistic formats still in use, for example, point-counterpoint or He says/She says; going undercover as a kid; the luncheon interview in which the reporter watches the girl eat as she gives a four-hour account of her life. There were always two recurrent topics. One was men. And there was Mother.
I’ve excavated two variations on the problematic mother.
The first was the educated and slightly bored Lady of the House. To many girls, Mother, other people’s mothers—the idea of mothers, generally—suggested a nation of cultural gatekeepers, fierce defenders of cleanliness and manners and the so-called finer things. The slightly bored lady of the house is often pictured as pearled and buxom, like the club-lady matrons in the Laurel and Hardy shorts. The fat-and-skinny twosome are always moving her piano or painting her parlor and, as they go about it, creating a horrible mess. Gradually, they destroy the matron’s precious aesthetic order, ruining paintings, smashing curios, obliterating the palace. (It was as a wrecking team of big, fat female life that Laurel and Hardy attained their greatest popularity.)
Mother Number Two was a new woman, a onetime progressive reformer, desperate because her own daughter had no political views and had never even heard of the National Women’s Party, the ERA-devoted Congressional Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, nor even the National American Woman Suffrage Association. What views the girl held seemed to concern her right to act as she chose and to denounce her mother. Consider some of the contemporary first-person story titles: “The Harm My Education Did Me,” “Confessions of an Ex-Feminist,” or, more to the point, “The Injurious Strain of My Mother’s Devotion.” As far as one girl was concerned, such impossible new women had “crammed their bookshelves with pamphlets on venereal diseases [and] suspected all…male acquaintances of harbouring a venereal taint.”
As if writing for the girl groups of the early sixties, another annoyed daughter wrote: “I’m out of here, mama, and don’t you try to come my way, too.”
Still, it was sometimes mothers who provided the most insightful information about their daughters. An excellent example is “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” by Mrs. Virginia Kirk, published in McCall’s in 1929 and deemed so compelling it was reprinted in the Literary Digest in May 1930.
Mrs. Kirk was concerned. Her “own daughter was nearly ready for that stage in her education [high school]; and she wanted to know what the girl had to face.” Although she was “ten years out of university” Mrs. Kirk appeared so youthful “that she could pass for seventeen.” And so, posing as a student, she infiltrated the high school scene.
She got it firsthand. The number of girls who smoked was on the rise. Nearly 95 percent of all students did not attend church, although most seemed to have notions of a “secret personal religion.” Moving on to the primary topic, she reported that sexual behavior remained the same as in her day. Boys craved physical contact. So did girls, though they were “afraid of the social and biological consequence, not to mention the religious aspects and reasons.” But, she emphasized, sex had lost some mystery due to “semi-realistic and suggestive” film content. Any mother who ignored the subject or “berated” her daughter was pushing the girl “closer” to an unmarried sexual encounter.
Mothers also needed to know that “treating,” the ancient dating ritual, had become a standardized business transaction. Boys understood that they were to fund goods and activities—a corsage, car, food, movies, plays—and girls were expected to allow an increasing degree of sexual progress as dates and sums accumulated. But of course many girls were reluctant. And of course boys resented this fact and punished the recalcitrant girl by calling her a “gold digger,” a bitch out for only one thing: boys who could produce a paycheck from a part-time job or generous parental grants. Girls denied the charges. But how to explain? Although they were flappers, flirtatious and bold, they still were nervous. And because they were flappers, because they were flirtatious and bold, they had their doubts about men and the romantic scheme in general.
Wrote Mrs. Kirk: “Marriage can no longer be represented to them as an infallibly ideal state, since they only need to look around to see scores of their elders making a failure of it.”
To a reporter, at lunch or over drinks, some young women tried to explain their conflicted feelings, their “inability to live life according to the rules” or their “unwillingness to conform.” Most hoped to explain how “in due course [they would] do something quite grand.”
The interviewer was always intrigued by his subject and at the same time scornful. In my favorite, “An Interview with a Young Lady” (1927), the subject, an “aspiring writer” who has taken “a man’s point of view as her mother never could,” explains herself well, then gaily leaves the interview that’s posed as lunch. Having observed her manner, her “tendencies” (the blotting of lipstick on linen napkins, uncrossed legs, and a hat that never left her head), the interrogator watches her swish out to the street, “confident, with a new kind of walk.” But, like all others of her kind, she was unknowingly “dogged by a slinking gray figure with horrible designs upon the security of her later years.” In fact, the interviewer had throughout the lunch glimpsed the “gray figure,” the phantom spinster right there in the restaurant, “huddled in the corner.” As “the beautiful young lady” passed through the door, the “repulsive gray figure…winked slyly…pointed after her,” and followed.
After several years of such stories, the girls’ “divergence from the normative,” the “contrarian stands” and “elaborate risk-taking,” as it was said, became annoying. Enough was enough.
“These little jabs at our customs and traditions can not continue indefinitely…” wrote one columnist. “Human beings are born to marry, as they are born to die. Nature has overloaded men and women with the instinct that leads to marriage, that the race may be perpetuated; and at the proper age the young man turns to the young woman, as she also turns to him…. Such is the nature of human creatures.”
Doctors began to warn against “foolish flapper fads,” especially a “wearing down” of the internal organs due to late nights and too much alcohol. In 1926 Dr. Charles Pabst, writing in the Literary Digest (below a photo of himself holding a test tube), reported, “The girl of today confronts severe internal derangement and general ill-health.” She also risked ruined skin and lung trouble, due to “roofless cars,” cigarettes, and “funny” diets. (The most popular, said to have worked wonders for several screen stars, consisted of tomatoes, spinach, and orange juice). Most terrifying, said Dr. Pabst, was the undocumented “fact” that the flapper increased her chance of contracting TB by 100 percent. At around the same time, another doctor, writing in the Journal American, discussed the possibility of flapper sanitariums that would be designed in “modish surroundings” to “pacify” the girl so she would not die, running off in the woods, to escape.
In the meantime, with few, if any, actual TB cases linked to flapperism, Dr. Pabst addressed more mundane health issues such as boils, advanced dermatitis, and haircut risks, for instance, “folliculitis,” commonly known as “pimply mange,” a severe rash that resulted from shaving the back of one’s neck. Hair dye, too, seemed problematic. Many thousands of flappers had dyed their hair blond using peroxide and other crude chemicals that left them with scalp burns, lacerations, severe skin peeling, and hair loss.
There was also an inevitable “moral derangement,” a slackening of values in flappers themselves and in younger women who’d missed the first wave but had nonetheless been sadly influenced. In a series of studies, 1928–1931, designed to measure movies’ influence on young women, several academic researchers determined that 17.5 million kids, mostly girls between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, regularly attended movies. Their favorite star: Joan Crawford, then a brassy flapper who seemed to spend entire films dressed in lingerie and often, for fun, jumped off of yachts. As one girl told an interviewer: “When I go to see a modern picture, like Our Dancing Daughters, I am thrilled. These modern pictures give me a feeling to imitate their ways. I believe that nothing will happen to the carefree girl like Joan Crawford, but it is the quiet girl who is always getting into trouble.”
Soon after, the New York Times ran a story entitled “How the Flapper Aids Church.” It seemed that this overly energetic female was driving men into the ministry in unprecedented numbers. The president of the Christian Missionary Alliance stated with great conviction, “Better a hungry heathen with a club than a thirsty flapper with a lipstick.”
By 1927, some relief seemed in sight. The first generation of “jazz babies” had grown up and retired from the scene. A surprisingly large number seemed to have transformed themselves into something else entirely: flapper graduates. As alumnae of this movement, they went out into the world with confidence, insouciance, and a wardrobe and vocabulary to match.
Commentators, editorialists, and well-dressed ladies worried that second-stage flapperism might become a way of life. Imagine it: Each year more girls went to college, fooled around yet somehow still graduated, then, well-dressed and outspoken, became career women. As it turned out, more women during this time married and had babies than any peer group in thirty years. But the impression of a dangerous “flaming youth” refused to die a natural death.
There was no choice but to kill her.
At the close of 1928, the New York Times ran a front-page obituary for the Flapper. To replace her, editors endorsed a diaphanous, vaguely European creature called the Siren. She was an imaginary woman of great style and mystery who possessed an “air of knowing much and saying little…a mysterious allure.” These truly feminine qualities, especially the part about saying little, “spelled death” for the flapper, that “fashion-killing” young woman who through sheer “force of violence established the feminine right to equal rights in such formerly masculine fields as smoking and drinking, sweating, petting, and disturbing the peace.”
The siren quickly would be revealed as the brainchild of French couturiers concerned about the straight, unremarkable silhouette of flapper dress styles. And the attempt to delete flappers from the cultural record would ultimately fail—but not because the siren proved so blatantly artificial. Those much-feared “second stage” flappers, the ones said to have transposed young flapper moxie into grown-up careers and single lives, simply refused to give it up. They had moved on in life, but their “true selves,” as one put it, lay hidden behind a “jazz mask.”
Writing in The New York Times Book Review, an “unrepentant flapper” recalled:
dancing brown-skinned in a hula-hula skirt…learning how to smoke and swear and stand up for myself…proud of my nerve…shameless, selfish and honest, but at the same time consider[ing] these attributes virtues…with the sharp points (worn) down…the [flapper’s] smoothly polished surface [will] provide interesting, articulate, unstuffy companionship to men in years to come…. Be thankful that we could be the mothers of the next generation.
Many feared that women who cherished their memories of younger years (even if that meant life three years before), would not, en masse, become the next mothers. They would never wear down peacefully into housewives who bought large appliances. They would not even make proper spinsters.
THE ALL-NEW IMPROVED SPINSTER
So we come to the last of the Jazz Age single icons: the New Spinster, the single icon most likely to be crowned ancestral career woman. She had a surprisingly good job. A nicely decorated place of her own, in which she was often pictured seated in an art moderne chair beside her telephoning table. She was well dressed, she had her own car, and her days were so busy she required a diary, an antique sort of Filofax made of red leather, monogrammed and chrome-bound, with a lipstick case to match. As she perceived it, the mechanics, “the orientation,” of her own life “allowed her to glide along smoothly.” All she had to do was to slip into a casual dress or blouse with skirt, toss on a jacket and a pair of pumps, and rush to her car, without asking anyone’s permission. One reporter described her like this:
Today’s spinster is fashionable to a fault. She…knows how to buy and because she is spending money she has earned, she has both assurance and discretion…And because she had avoided the extra duty and unexpected worry which are so often part of married life [she’s] kept her looks…at 35 or 40 the unmarried woman looks fresher and younger than many a married woman of the same age!
And she was patient in a way only a mature, confident person could be. When barraged with public queries—“How could she bear missing the truly grand things in life? Husbands? Tender babes?”—she calmly explained that nothing had been ruled out and that her life was full. She further ignored all melancholy longings for the spinster of yore, that sad, faded dame missing her teeth. (The same annoyed question—Who would perform the vital free labor spinsters once provided?—had been raised in 1860 and would arise again in the early 1960s.) As she saw it, the advantage was hers. She had not gone soft in the middle (or, some added, the brain) as had her married sisters and friends. And she knew men “in a way no wives would ever” because she worked so closely with them.
Occasionally new spinsters wrote about life and inserted the slightly regretful “I look at my beatific sister with seven beautiful children…” sentence. But the majority of them wrote about their lives the way this thirty-year-old woman did in The New York Times Book Review,1928: “The average spinster of today is…as a rule self-supporting, independent, very busy and surprisingly contented. If she is missing the best things in life, she does not seem to realize it!”
Of course this newest spinster confronted some of the same problems as had her predecessors. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote at the time: “There has occurred a rush of activity such as no one could have predicted even a decade ago…still values have not fundamentally changed.”
In other words, no matter how fashionable she appeared, she could not always peel off the scarifying old spinster markings. For example, many wives maintained a “considerate” refusal to discuss sex in the spinster’s presence, so that she would not “too acutely feel her loss.”
More significant, an unwed woman was still considered on permanent call to her family. Just as immigrant girls had been required to hand over their paychecks, so new spinsters were expected to keep an open-wallet policy. In the early sound film Mannequin,proud factory worker Joan Crawford explodes at her poor potato-peeling mother who has given her b’hoy of a brother (played, appropriately, by Bowery-boy star Leo Gorcey) her own week’s pay. Whipping a tea towel on a chopping block, she shouts: “I coulda bought a pair of stockings with two dollars, and I needed them…. he doesn’t want to find a job, and why should he? When he can get enough quarters and dimes outta my salary to throw around the pool hall. I’m sick of it!”
Among more firmly middle-class families, the situation was even worse. Mothers loved to throw lavish Sunday dinners. “Enormous chunks of meat for all!” read the caption of a cartoon defending the single girl who’d been asked to “bring in a few things.” There’s a horde of people in the background, watching her, waiting for her to leave and get the ham, the roast beef, bread, vegetables, puddings, cakes, and anything else that will be needed. The point seemed to be that because she supported no one but herself, she could contribute lavishly to the family fund. Brothers seemed to have felt this entitlement most acutely. Even if these men had jobs, the jobs never brought in enough cash. They had children, demanding wives, and other personal interests to support. And so, as it was reported again and again, brothers hit up their single sisters for cash, knowing that loyal single sisters would keep it secret. Many sisters came through. Thus, in the story, her moral superiority to the family is revealed not by hard work and generosity but by loyalty and discretion.
Of course some sisters saw it differently, and they wrote about it, one calling the condition “the New Dependency.” For years after, novels and short stories took on the issue. In Josephine Lawrence’s novel But You Are Young (1940), heroine Kelsie Wright, a savvy manicurist, is furious at her vampirish family, who wait each week, in a row, for the communal envelope. Kelsie rushes into a difficult marriage as if she were an immigrant panicked to get a green card.*
The new dependency became a subject not only for married-women/single-girl debates (by then as common as ads for talcum powder). Editorialists and college presidents joined in the discussion. Unanimously they sympathized with the sponger and somehow blamed the giving sister. One much-circulated and reprinted pamphlet explained this point of view: “How can this young man ever hope to get back on his feet when he is demoralized into taking such ‘gifts’ from an unwed sister? It saps the moral strength, turns our bright young men soft, unenterprising…ruined for all chances of manhood by the humiliation of taking handouts from a sister.”
And there was worse in store for the new spinster.
SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE GIRL
The response, or backlash, came in the form of sexology, a pre-Freudian system designed to scientifically classify types of sexual behaviors. Sexology was often confused with “free love,” the thrilling, somewhat baroque concept popularized in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. In fact, sexology, a conservative response to new women workers, concerned just the opposite. It reworked elements of phrenology (the categorizing of persons according to skull differentiations) and eugenics, the study of superior human breeding, to codify acceptable sexual practices, and then to regulate it.
An antivalentine to the single women of America, sexology propounded that sex was good, wondrous, life-affirming—if it was the right kind of sex. That meant married sex, as performed in the missionary position, either for the purpose of procreation—that most erotic aspect of female sexuality—or to make marriage stronger, more “companionate.” Women who were awkward, embarrassed, or for whatever reason uninterested, were diagnosed as cold or, a new and frightening word, frigid. Single women, who were presumed to miss out on intercourse entirely, were thus automatically considered frigid.
As far back as 1910, when “race suicide” was a familiar and threatening term, bookstores had been stocked with antisingular tracts condemning the “social worker” or “New Woman.” They had titles like Antipathy and Coldness in Women and The Poison of Prudery. Now sexology made the point specific to the flapper and the new spinster and any other variation of single working women. What Should We Do with Our Daughters?, a 1921 compendium of expert commentary, featured many viewpoints, although most may be summarized by one Dr. Ely Van de Warker, who declared, “The effort of women to invade all the higher forms of labor is a force battling with the established order of sexual relations.”
From another doctor: “Discovering…her innate feminine charm in the selling of dry goods [treating it] as a more alluring expression of her female self than that of the homely status of wife and mother, the girl exposes the grave crisis of the modern age…. This bounding into the world represents a futile struggle against nature…it touches on disease.”
The experts were very precise about the origins, symptoms, and lasting effects of this disease. There were several different strains among unmarried women.
First, there was the “war working woman,” the woman who’d bravely pitched in during the Great War and was thus also referred to as “a warrior maid.” More commonly she was called an intersexual, a single woman who because of her odd experience somehow had fused with a male inner soul and who, though she appeared female, acted like a man. Charlotte Haldane, writer and antifeminist, viewed this “specimen” as a “significant enemy of motherhood.” As she explained, “The development through the experience of war work [led to] the phenomenon of the war working woman,” also the “more or less unsexed or undersexed specimen.”
Next came the so-called “mannish lesbian” or “mannish woman” who took things further by dressing the part. (The definition of “lesbian” as we know it still had not settled and the term was often used to describe a woman who dressed like a man.) In medical journals and many popular articles—the word warning often appeared in the headline—these women were referred to as subnormal or inverts. Inversion, as described by Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology, matched precisely the traits ascribed to the new woman/flapper/new spinster:
Not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for smoking cigarettes…but a…toleration for cigars. There is also a dislike of needlework, and domestic occupations while there is some capacity for athletics…brusque energetic movements…direct speech…[and] an attitude towards men, free from any suggestion of shyness…these will often suggest the underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer.
Ultimately in the late 1920s, lesbianism began to take on its modern denotation: two women in a romantic and sexual pairing. No longer was the word used as a universal term gathering together schoolgirl smashes, the living situations of women in settlement houses, and heterosexual women who suffered subnormality and inversion. Lesbianism was, in sexological terms, about as bad as it got. As early as 1902, the Pacific Medical Journal had declared that “female boarding schools and colleges are great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality…. If carried into life, such learned perversities would lead to permanently skewed relations with men.” By 1925, the situation was much worse. Commented a woman sexologist that year: “Such a fate is so contrary to the fullness of female human development little can be said to express its horror.”
Statistics on lesbians, as so defined, are difficult to find, but one can find a bizarre number of estimates concerning frigidity. In 1925 leading sexologists estimated that 40 to 50 percent of all women were frigid, the highest numbers to be found among the more educated classes. According to experienced sexologist Weith Knudson, there were five categories of frigidity. Twenty percent of all women had turned out to be “cold,” 25 percent could be called “indifferent,” 30 percent “compliant,” 15 percent “warm,” and just 10 percent “passionate.”
From a sexological point of view, women living alone, especially those who made no effort to find a husband, were to blame. Knudson wrote angrily, “I have emphasized repeatedly that dysparunia”—the technical label for frigidity—“signals an inner negation…. obstinacy cancels the will to submission…. There are women who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything.”
But readers were assured that such an ungrateful unwed female would suffer for her obstinacy.
Walter Heape, an active commentator on sexological matters, called spinsters—all varieties—the “waste products of our female population…vicious and destructive creatures.” He suggested that like wounded dogs, they might, with the slightest provocation, snap entirely. “A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside,” he declared. “It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff…. As the number of these women increases every year and, in systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women.”
In other words, the single idea was contagious, and as it spread these women became increasingly scary. By 1929, the vicious psycho-spinster, a frustrated, vindictive harridan, had debuted as an American character. Walter Heape was one of many who characterized the evolving nightmare. Here is a part of his 1928 study of “inherently frustrated women who have failed to marry by the 25th year”: “She is…the guardian…[seated] in every auditorium of every theatre…haunt[ing] every library…in our schools, she takes little children and day by day they breathe in the atmosphere of her violated spirit.”
Sexology promoted itself as a salvation, a means for innately shy, prudish young girls—or girls who’d been wrongly swayed while at school—to marry and to enjoy a natural womanly sex life that led to many wonderful babies. There was the promise of great joy, if only a woman cooperated and did it right. Even the frigid might be brought back to life. But it was also true that some new spinsters were so deeply frigid, so mentally scarred, that there was no hope for their recovery or return to life.
This sad old girl was shown, as always, to be socially pathetic (“The normal woman must have something to live for, if it be only a cat,” wrote Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins in 1927.) But now she was also potentially sick. According to Tompkins in “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan, for some new spinster misfits the “ways of sex will always remain a sealed—and rather horrid—book she reads at her peril.” Others of these “nuns by blood” would evolve a “repose, a gentle power of indifference” that sometimes made them “bewilderingly” interesting to men “who wonder if they may not be awakened.” The sad truth, however, was they would always be dormant. Even if they wed, their strange stillness would render any union abnormal. “Such women may marry and have ten children without seeming to come into any close relations with life: to the end they are stray angels, cool and aloof. The man who marries one of them will have no tempests to encounter, yet his way will not be…easy…for he can never fall back on his sex with her.”
The language of sexology, its strict hierarchies of frigidity and lesbianism, suggested that there was serious scientific proof for such claims. If anything, sexology gives us proof that female freedom was so terrifying, so unthinkable, that it had to be killed off—and not just by inventing replacement icons. Finally, all female abnormality would be smothered beneath a pile of specious scientific findings.
HOW THE NEW SPINSTER MADE OUT
In spite of these warnings, most young women still felt “a Ferris-wheel-at-the-top thrill,” as one of my own subjects put it, about trying on a single life. Even if the top jobs were closed to women,* there were still so many dizzying possibilities they seemed to pass by as if in a movie montage. My favorite character in search of career is the fictional Carol Kennicott, the determined, unintentionally hilarious heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street (1920). In one early packed paragraph, we learn that Carol had “hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations,” and that with each disappointment, she “evanesced anew—becoming a missionary, painting scenery, soliciting advertisements,” and on and on until she’s talked into marriage by a doctor from the Midwest with the promise of his rising hometown for her to conquer. Stuck in dreary little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she takes up urban planning, working to change street directions and move buildings, not that anyone has asked her to. She runs away once, to Washington, but comes back, because she’s waited too long. She has a child. She is not a career girl at this point but a middle-aged woman from, and even she has to admit it, Gopher Prairie.
Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the Atlantic Monthly had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel, The Job (1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days…beyond a dull consistency of…machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiancé in a successful real estate brokerage.†
She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are creative…with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be sort of superman.”
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the Saturday Evening Post, continued well into the 1920s to praise the new spinster as that sleek figure in a modish cap, freed of the troubles of her married friends. But she understood the point Crystal Eastman had to make. It would increasingly be difficult. With some resignation, she wrote in 1929,
The normal social unit is made up of a man and a woman in love, courting or married. The unmarried woman who has made a job the other half of her social unit…is bound to be somewhat extraneous…out of the social picture…. The masses…administer printed condolences and sedative terms—“new woman,” “bachelor girl,”—but the world in general has not approved the sight of a lady jogging through life alone.
All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.