CHAPTER FOUR
—“But aren’t ya ever going to fall in love?”
—“A career itself is a romance. I haven’t the time…”
—“Aren’t ya ever going to marry?”
—“My de-aah, when you spend 14 hours a day with your dearest illusion, it loses something.”
—RUTH CHATTERTON EXPLAINS LIFE IN FEMALE, 1933
Now, listen…forget about yourself…You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids gave up jobs and will never be able to find other ones!…If you let them down…they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience and it’ll be on yours!
—ALINE MACMAHON, THE SMART CHORINE, GIVING HELL TO HER DELINQUENT PRODUCER, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933
Let him know you are tired of living alone…. You want him to take charge. You want now to have your nails done.
—U.S. GOVERNMENT “READJUSTMENT” GUIDE, 1945
SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY
If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?
If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”
This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.
My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does she have a job for?”
There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single women, many of whom were also supporting their families, parents, siblings, grandparents—the new dependency in crisis mode. Millions of unemployed single men would ultimately regain jobs and misplaced respect. So would some single women. But more than a quarter of all women who’d been between twenty and thirty during the Depression years would never have careers. They also stood to lose much more.
“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.
Mary McCarthy* describes the complex procurement process in her novel The Group, set in the thirties and written in 1966. For weeks one character schemes and plans to get the item, telling her prospective lover that she will call him as soon as she has it in her hands. After an embarrassing doctor’s “fitting”—what is perhaps the first flying-diaphragm scene in all literature—she leaves with her secretive bag and calls him to find he’s not in. She walks around, calls again, then again, and finally tells his landlady that she is waiting in Washington Square Park. Seated on a bench, the precious treasure on her lap, she starts to reconsider. Hours have passed and obviously he’s not coming. Ultimately she leaves the bag beneath the bench and walks off feeling terribly alone and embarrased.
Many real single women spent the Depression years feeling terribly alone and desperate. Work was hard to find and no matter how irrational it came to seem, there was still a stigma attached to the job hunt. The compromised “forgotten” man—he was the one who needed work. But there were also needy women, and some of them literally began to starve. Fainting, in fact, became a common melodramatic plot point in the numerous backstage musicals of the time. The starving girls were almost always revived by Broadway stars who just happened to be passing by and who went on to make the emaciated girls tap-dancing miracles. Back on earth, of course, fainting was not a career option. Most women who could, as well as those who couldn’t, typed. Even college graduates typed. Barnard College reported that only one third of the class of 1932 who sought jobs found them, and that most of the class at some point took up typing.
“Most of the girls I knew in those years were typists or bookkeepers who had their jobs because they were the only ones who knew how some cigar-reeker of a slob kept his files,” recalled Bess, now seventy-nine and herself a bookkeeper who worked until 1997. “Women weren’t taking over men’s places. What man do you know who wants to cross his legs and take dictation?”
This was still an age of classifieds listing “Jobs—male” and “Jobs—female.” (In fact, this age would last until the late 1960s, when protests and sit-ins inspired newspapers to blend the job offerings.) And it was “Jobs—male,” the jobs in heavy industry, that took the biggest hits during the thirties. Clerical jobs, like all others, thinned out but never to the point where there was nothing. Women who held these jobs both hated and cherished them. There was little else out there and, for the city emigrants, nothing at all to return to.
But there were a few positions beyond typist, telephone operator, unwed teacher, and a handful of actress jobs. The biggest professional openings were in journalism, specifically, in the women’s sections, what were known well into the 1970s as “4F” for “food, furnishings, fashion, and family.” From the 1935 handbook “So You Want to Be a Reporter: A Hard-Boiled Look at the Profession for Eager Cubs,” we learn just how difficult a challenge it will be. A wizened Chicago newspaperman, or someone imitating one, says:
Most of you perusing this little pamphlet have in all probability given many of your youthful Saturdays to the movies. In the films you have seen, there have been women who find work as reporters and go on to break the big story. Fairy dust, ladies, fairy dust. Let’s set the record straight up top…. The majority of reporters are men, many with military records and other distinguished accomplishments to back them up…. But there is a place for the modern woman, if she is well educated, properly bred…but if you imagine in your dreams that’ll be you covering the presidential press conference, take a good deep breath and remember that you are a Susie. “Susie?” Didn’t I mention Susie? All the gang call the new female recruits “Susie” until they do something outstanding and earn themselves another nickname.
It goes on to describe a life so grueling one might be reading a publication of the U.S. military. Yet by 1934, the Labor Department estimated that there were 15,000 “girl reporters” (compared with a total of only 7,105 in 1920), including several hundred editors across the country. Although most of these young women found themselves on the casserole-and-sweater beats, they kept at it, and by 1950, there were 28,595 female journalists.
Within a few years, the existence of so many reporters would inspire a rush of “girl-reporter” movies as well as the birth of comic-strip perennial Brenda Starr. But at the time, books and movie serials featured reporter like snoops, detectives with blond hair, nice manners, and remarkable powers of deduction. Nancy Drew, who debuted in 1930, drove a blue coupe and with her two girl pals, Bess and George, solved community mysteries. Detective Judy Bolton went to work in 1932, and that same year Joan Blondell, best known for playing sardonic chorines with a past, became Miss Pinkerton, a nurse who investigates a murder on the large estate where she lives and works.
These fantasies tried to pull struggling women into small mysteries and story lines more captivating than those of their own lives. But plenty of women were out there having real-life wild adventures of their own.
ON THE ROAD, FEMALE EDITION
There were always a few women reporters who published more than their recipes. Many of these writers had been encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who held a weekly woman-only press conference, inviting prominent journalists including Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press; Genevieve Forbes Herrick of the Chicago Tribune; Marjorie C. Driscoll from the Los Angeles Examiner; Grace Robinson, the New York Daily News; Elenore Kellogg, the New York World; Ruth Finney of Scripps-Howard, and Emma Bugbee from the New York Herald Tribune. Over time, the First Lady had come to view women as a class apart, a group having its own distinct, neglected problems, and she believed reporters might best bring these postsuffrage issues into public debate. Even those not within the inner circle got the message. Freelance writer Grace Hutchins makes the perfect example.
During the mid-thirties, Hutchins spent two years traveling the country in search of the Forgotten Woman. She found a great one: Miss Bertha Thompson, aka Boxcar Bertha, the famed lifelong female hobo. At age thirty or thirty-two—she wasn’t quite sure—Bertha told Hutchins her life story. How her family had hit the road in desperation years earlier. How she’d learned to read and spell by sounding out the words painted on the sides of passing freight cars. Her mother taught her the rest of what she needed to know, a body of knowledge that might be entitled “Don’t Count on Men.”
At the time Hutchins met her, Bertha had established a chain of female “transient bureaus” that functioned as M.A.S.H. units and impromptu wilderness kaffeeklatsches. She described her fellow travelers as a “great army of women, all motivated by the same things…no work, family barely on relief…no prospect of marriage, the need for a lark, for sex, freedom, living and the great urge to know what other women were doing.”
Bertha couldn’t possibly have kept up with the traffic. According to Hutchins, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 homeless women wandering around, many of them teenaged runaways who slept outside. The YWCA estimated in its 1933 Christmas message that there were 145,000 women who “very well could be” described as “home-less and footloose…at dangerous odds.” In 1935 the Salvation Army reported that in eight hundred cities across America there were 10,000 women a night asking for shelter. Another source of information about transient women was social scientist Thomas Menehin, who wrote of his travels “hoboing” his way around the country in 1936. His estimates: One out of every twenty tramps was a “girl,” although many, like Veronica Lake in Sullivan’s Travels (1942), dressed as a man for protection. Life on the road was extremely tough; women were in constant danger of rape, especially in the public shelters.
Or so it was assumed. Menehin, like others, did not have any hard data on what homeless women did at night or, for that matter, by day. Did they band together, or was it a rule of the road to trust no one? Where did they sleep? “The Forgotten Man” became a vivid national icon in part because he turned up in newsreels. With the colorful exception of Boxcar Bertha, Forgotten Women were invisible. Writer Meridel LeSueur asked, point-blank, in a 1932 issue of The Masses:
Where do they go when they are out of work and hungry?…they are not on the breadlines. There are no flophouses for women…you don’t see women lying on the floor of the mission in the free flops…or under newspapers in the park and trying to get into the Y without any money or looking down at the heel. Charities take…only those called “deserving.” The lone girl is under suspicion by the virgin women who dispense charity…. Where do these women go?
One read about these women on very slow news days, in stories that often seemed more like public-service announcements. Women who made the news were valorous like Eleanor Roosevelt, brave and spunky like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, glamorous—the duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich—or extraordinary, like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the mega-sportswoman. (At a time when there were no organized women’s sports, Zaharias served as a one-woman Olympic team. Asked once if there was anything she didn’t play, she answered, “Dolls.”) But the average single woman wasn’t asked very often what she thought or did. And when someone—a man, an official—happened to ask, certain assumptions about her character seemed always to creep their way into the questions.
THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEART
One of the key single-female motifs in Depression-era America was the heartless woman. She stole jobs from men. She stole herself away from men who needed her. She even stole cosmetics from stores. She could not help herself. Either she’d been born hard or, to paraphrase from numerous magazines and dime novels, something human had been ground out of her in hard times. She was missing a vital piece. The word malevolent began to appear before the words woman or female.
The mannish sexological ice block seemed healthy and whole in comparison. Here was a woman missing more than sexual warmth or desire. She was missing her heart. And this freak condition was best open to exploratory surgery on film. As early as the mid-twenties movies had featured intense, almost rabid female bosses who spit out orders. They hired! They fired! They lived in art moderne palaces around servants they hired and fired! Most important, they dismissed romantic love as a plebeian distraction. At least for the first forty-five minutes of the movie. A classic example in this brittle-bitch genre is Smouldering Fires (1925), starring Pauline Frederick as a corporate executive named Jane Vale (that’s for “vale of tears” as opposed to “wedding veil”). Miss Vale shrieks her way through staff meetings. She yells at ninny secretaries who seriously discuss makeup and men. She has a signature motto: “Be necessary to others and let no man be necessary to you.”
Then, unexpectedly, Miss Vale falls in love with a younger man and seems to change, but not in the way we anticipate. Instead of becoming a “real” woman—warm and sexually receptive to her husband—she becomes a female martyr. Reworking a classic spinster story line, Miss Vale relinquishes her man to the one person on earth she feels for at all, her younger sister. The girl is nineteen or so, an eager, sweet college kid; the hero is thirty-seven. At one point, watching her fiancé and sister dance, remarking on how “young” they seem, she realizes that she has missed the boat or, more appropriately, gotten on the wrong elevator. She lets them go. During the Depression years, she might not have been quite so giving.
In Baby Face (1933), a heartless-woman masterpiece, Barbara Stanwyck, a speakeasy bartender, puts on a decent dress and works her way up within a corporation, starting on the first floor as a filing clerk. We know immediately that she’s an operator. She casually asks a colleague how she got such a great perm. She asks another one where she got the fabulous shoes. She shows up with the perm and identical shoes the next day. Soon she’s headed up the corporate skyscraper. On each new floor (accounting, mortgages, et cetera) she’s transformed: better clothes and hairstyles, an entirely new professional manner. At each stop she lures then abruptly drops at least one ardent lover, although one man she keeps around—a strategist and booster, who’s advised her and helped finance her climb. Finally we see her at the top, draped in one of those sparkly floor-length gowns so many thirties heroines wear just to swish around the house. In this key scene, the lover and friend charges into her office. He needs cash. He’s desperate. And he asks her point-blank for some jewels he once helped her buy. She stares at him. Thinks. And then she delivers a heartless-woman manifesto: “I have to think of myself. I’ve gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been bitter and hard. I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed. All I’ve got is those things. Without them, I’d be nothing…I’d have to go back to what I was! No! I won’t do it, I tell you, I won’t.”
And she doesn’t.
In Dangerous (1935), Bette Davis plays an actress who when refused a divorce, tries to kill her husband by smashing the passenger side of their car, his side, into a tree. (The staged accident was a common heartless-woman maneuver that would be adopted by the overly anxious, neurotic single bitch of the late forties.) To her dismay, the husband lives as a cripple. As a heartless bitch, naturally, she has to leave him, and ruin her own life—retiring from the stage and wandering the city drunk. One evening, a fan spies her out having her liquid supper. He comes over and compliments her, though she alternately ignores him and denies who she is. After much back-and-forth and many drinks, she admits her identity. A romance grows slowly. When he gets too romantic, however, she barks, “Oh, don’t be so intense!” He asks her to marry him. Her response: “Oh, it makes such an issue of everything!” And, as it happens, she’s still married to the man she disfigured. After more drinks and many fights, plus a failed rehab sequence, she goes back to the husband, begrudgingly attempting to act the wife. Let’s put it this way: If the guy could have moved, he would have killed her.
The greatest entry in the heartless-woman genre is Three on a Match (1932). In this bizarre tale, three old school friends meet by chance, each having turned out just as a childhood prologue had predicted. Joan Blondell, recently out of prison for theft, works as a chorus girl. Bette Davis, very young, skinny, and timid, is a stenographer. Elegant Ann Dvorak is married, wealthy, and has an adorable child.
They meet for lunch. Ann, at one point, turns to Joan, the ex-con, and says, “It’s you I really envy—your independence and your courage…I accepted the first man who wanted to marry me—I thought it meant comfort and security.” The two friends stare at Ann in disbelief. She goes on: “Oh, I suppose I should be the happiest woman in the world—a beautiful home, successful husband, and nice youngster. But somehow the things that make other people happy leave me cold. I guess something must have been left out of my makeup.”
As if on cue, they light their Chesterfields—three to one match. According to superstition, one says, the last to get her cigarette in there and lit will suffer a horrible fate. In this case, no big surprise, that’s Ann Dvorak. Whatever it was “left out of [her] makeup” kicks in like a drug.
She flees her home, taking the child with her onto a cruise. Then, leaving him alone in her stateroom, she wanders the ballrooms looking for men. She picks out a scary sort, a gangster with a round face and tight striped suit, and off they go at port, leaving the boy on the ship. (The father eventually rescues him.) Inexplicably, then, she cuts off all contact with her family and begins a life of petty crime. One day months later the husband runs into the girlfriends, Bette and Joan, and decides to make a new life with them—that they will be the “three.” He marries Joan and hires steno girl Bette as the little boy’s governess.
Another day months later Ann shows up outside the house, her thuggish boyfriend looming behind. Annoyed, he pushes the ragged-looking Ann toward a smart-looking woman approaching in furs. Ann looks up to see Joan, her replacement, home from shopping. She asks after the boy, then gets to the point. She needs money. Joan gives her a little, and Ann is gone, back to her gangster. She gives him the money; he shoves her. “Hey!” he shouts, “ain’t that dame married to your husband?”
Throughout these years, single women were objects of suspicion. Perhaps they worked when men did not. Perhaps broke and alone, they hitchhiked from place to place—as unwomanly a thing as a knife fight. In mass-movie fantasy, some grew into self-contained man-eating monsters.
But most real women, like most men, were just frustrated. They had been forced to take an unexpected detour from what they once would have called “the normal things.” And this tangent had lasted so long that the once-upon-a-time state known as Normal now seemed exotic. Especially for the young among them—all those who had grown up without dance crazes and arguments about flappers and smoking. Asked what she remembered about these years of “massive economic dislocation” (as common a phrase as “Jazz Age”), Bess the bookkeeper said, “I wanted panty hose. I wanted a room that had fewer than four sisters and a cousin in it. I wanted to get married—well, forget that. Forget the room while we’re at it. Panty hose.”
THE SWING OF THINGS
The original new women, now in their fifties, had organized their networks and pushed hard for their causes—aid to indigent families with children, civil rights, minimum-wage laws, nationally sponsored health care—and they had a stalwart ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Several of the circle headed New Deal agencies, and as a unified block they spoke out about the unspoken everything, from the harassment of unwed mothers to the instant need for antilynching legislation. Now they looked toward Europe.
Genevieve Parkhurst asked in a 1935 issue of Harper’s: “Are the women of America going to realize the destiny marked out for them when they began their long march toward emancipation? Or are they, like the women of Germany, to stand accused of having betrayed themselves?”
The American Women’s Association called upon all American women to fight fascism, which dictated that women stay in their homes and reproduce for the glory of the Fatherland.
I imagine average American women hearing this and blinking up into the light, confused, exhausted, and mumbling something like “panty hose.” As historian Lois Scharf wrote in Holding Their Own (1982): “The massive economic dislocation…riveted the attention of Americans along the entire ideological spectrum…events overseas…[were] completely subsumed by anxiety…demoralized…disintegrating families,” and within a few years, she might have added, the complete indifference of many young women.
In 1935, shortly before her death, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented that the original new women had failed to train successors. Others admitted that they had, in fact, alienated many young women by publicly insulting the popular culture of the 1920s. All that was true. But if many young women were apolitical, it was not because they felt excluded by older feminists. With the exception of the very wealthy and the very lucky, most young women had missed out on the basic things they’d been raised to expect, as one young woman told the New York Times:“dating, driving, horseback riding…. I never went ice skating or out dancing…. One year our school play was canceled because the stage was considered unsafe and there was no money to replace it. Also we had no sets and costumes.”
As the Depression finally eased, this young woman, like thousands of others, would officially attempt to have fun. As early teenagers, these “kids” threw parties, listened to music—big-band, swing—that offended their parents, evolved an inside slang (“ugly duck” and “scrag” versus the “fly” or “nifty” girl), and traveled in high school packs, kid constituencies that, as in the 1920s, formed a discernible if less extravagant youth group.
As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”
This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:
There was a longing to run around with your friends, and talk fast about…pure nothing…. I remember our mothers couldn’t understand why we wanted to have many boyfriends, instead of just one. And music, oh yes! My mother, I remember this, called it “Jewish sex music”! Maybe the clarinet was too phallic for her. Benny Goodman was prominent…. We were always dancing, in basements or someone’s living room. Sometimes it got a little lewd. But, believe me, in the average crowd, nobody had sex. We ran around with boys…. After the Depression years, going out for a soda—that was fun. Oh boy! And if you happened to go with fifteen other kids who all wanted to sit in the same booth—even better!…Nobody knew what was coming. I remember thinking about two things. I was going to find a husband. And I was going to college. Not in that order.
But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The Atlantic Monthly, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”
During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster factories.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical Life feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen girl, Susan, eleven, was pictured deep in training to be “a winning female!”
In one panel, Susan makes beds. In another, she studies the way her mother fixes her potentially “beguiling” nails. In still another photo, Susan sets the table. “Homemaking doesn’t come instinctively to a teenaged girl,” Life explained. “It’s easier to teach a little girl than to nag at an older one…. Now the child can do simple meal planning and cooking, creditable bed making and charming table setting.”
It was a familiar process. Evidence is dragged forth to prove that what society wants for single girls is what these girls want for themselves. Back in the nineteenth century, no intelligent young woman wished for bedrest, the prescribed “cure” for hysterical antifeminine behavior. Yet after all she’d been through—the shrieking fights with mother! Her insane demands not to wed!—wasn’t bedrest what she secretly craved? Likewise, after the Depression, after all she’d been through, did she really want to do tough academic work? Ignore for a moment the actual facts, for example, that 15 percent more women were enrolled in college in 1938 than in 1933. Instead consider some of the expert arguments.
To begin with, the number of female professionals had increased by a mere 8.5 percent during the 1920s. If single women were serious about careers, as opposed to mere jobs, wouldn’t that figure be higher? It was further noted that professional women earned less than their male counterparts, so much less that they could not possibly be serious about sustained and important careers. And even in “female” professions, men outearned them. In 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953 a year, women just $1,394; male social workers received $1,718 compared with women’s $1,442.
Young women continued to draw up their own personal blueprints, and to present their own plans. And they were continually besieged with these retorts. In one 1938 Coronet piece, a twenty-year-old relates a conversation she had with her mother. The daughter said she wanted to see France; her mother replied, “So did Amelia Earhart,” the aviator who’d recently gone missing. “See to getting yourself settled! Figure that and someday you can take a trip.”
Those who took the solo trips—college, careers without husbands, forays to Greenwich Village—found it no more difficult, than those who’d gone before. But they were viewed differently in the post-Depression world. Why now would anyone risk their security? In novels and stories, we find images of women missing more than their hearts; they are falling apart.
Let’s look at two popular novels. Ann Vickers (1933), by Sinclair Lewis, concerns an ambitious social worker who becomes a prison warden and reform advocate, somewhat like Clara Barton. In coordinating such a difficult career, Ann Vickers has sacrificed anything resembling a coherent personal life. She has an illegal abortion. When she does finally marry, it ends in divorce, and she takes up with a gangster. Although successful (and popular!) as a prison warden, she suffers a nervous breakdown.
In The Folks, Ruth Suckow’s novel about the Iowa farm family, we pick up the story of Margaret Ferguson, the dark and arty girl who ran off to Greenwich Village and rechristened herself Margot. Finally, after several years spent living in New Mexico with her married lover, she returns to New York City. Margot’s life has been, to choose one word, controversial. Her family doesn’t understand; in fact, only one small-town neighbor has ever understood at all. “Margaret’s generation of girls is wonderful!” she had said to herself during one of Margot’s rare visits home. “They went out and grabbed at life.” Margot’s thoughts precisely. Yet that was years ago, and now, at almost thirty, she finds the city of dreams and adventure changed and cold. “She felt a bitter hatred of the noise and the hugeness around [Grand Central] station, making her think of how she was now to earn a living. Everywhere [she] seemed to see these smooth metallic girls whom she hated. They were like the modern buildings, not individualized but stylized…groomed into urban smoothness.”
Later, wandering her old neighborhood, Margot is stopped by a sight even worse: a “hag” selling pencils on a street corner near the apartment where she once had burned candles and danced with scarves. It’s an archetypal moment in the single narrative: The younger woman sees her future in the older one, in the lonely and forgotten hag selling “pencils she knew no one wanted to buy.” During the mid- and late thirties, protagonists like Margaret-Margot were held up as icons of female disaster. If college and career could make you crazy, the unconventional life was like a suicide. Usually writers posed it as a question: What became of runaway girls, not just the down-and-out but the bohemians, the superannuated flappers, the Margots, who’d set out to see the world without a guidebook? The answer: Either they’d wise up and marry or they’d eventually take a place on the street corner.
Jean Rhys, in her melancholy novels, was a premiere chronicler of the aging adventurer now about to fall apart. The best of her slender oeuvre is After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). Here we have the problem called Julia, a Londoner long ago self-exiled to Paris, where she’s had her share of exotic experiences. Now she is older and broke. One former lover, noting her shabby clothes, observes, “It was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from one to another had become a habit…she had not saved a penny.” All true. As Julia explains to one of them, “You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have money, you can go one way…. If you have nothing at all…you go another.” And sometimes rather than fight, you take up residence in a fantasy world. “Every day is a new day,” Julia dreamily tells herself. “Every day you are a new person.”
There were millions of single women in 1940—office drones, struggling reporters and nurses, end-of-the-road new women, the homeless, and all those still waving a tattered bohemian flag. But what became of any of them was once again a question put indefinitely on hold.
HOW I WON THE WAR
So much has been written about the experiences of women during World War II that I will not describe in the usual minute detail how they “answered the call to duty,” as invoked by the deep, paternalistic urgings of mid century newsmen—Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Lowell Thomas.
Let’s instead look at it this way: The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return. As one California woman wrote in her diary in 1942, “All plans changed last week or fell away.” Single meant “available,” but not as prospective brides to men. The War Manpower Commission, supported by the Office of War Information, produced voluminous amounts of working-girl propaganda to fill the void.
Millions of suddenly essential female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.
Suddenly it was glorious and patriotic to be single. Newsreels with titles such as “Glamour Girls of 1943” reported that with “industrial advances” a girl might do “practically anything!” There were no limits to “the types of jobs a woman could do…. whether she has a husband or not.” Any single gal who didn’t step up, sign on, cooperate, was considered as much a disappointment and failure as those who had favored a career over marriage in decades past.
One female worker recruitment film, entitled To the Ladies, and shown as part of newsreels throughout 1942 and ’43, opens with an establishing shot of fictional Middletown, USA. The camera pans the sidewalks, town squares, store windows and finds only women. They’re young, hair down, in flowered dresses, or they’re older, more professional-looking, hair piled up, shoulder pads piled up nearly as high. We intercut between life scenes: girls at a drugstore counter giggling over sodas and twirling in their seats…women buying nail polish…women having lunch…women going to the movies in the afternoon. The Voice of Authority asks us to compare this lackadaisical portrait with others from around the world.
Why, look at the women of England! Forced to send their kids off to the country or into tube stations. And the French! Here we cut briefly to fashionable women tearing up their last good clothing to use as tourniquets for bleeding soldiers. We also watch a Russian grandmother building something in her kitchen that looks like a bomb. Meanwhile, back in innocuous Middletown, idle females carried out the “meaningless household chores” that had previously been declared their purpose in life. As the camera moves back and away from the street set, the women look like little kids rushing around as they play.
As if the point hadn’t been made, a companion film, Women of Steel, introduced a shop-girl welder and her Hungarian great-grandmother who, using her blowtorch, lit a male coworker’s cigarette.
There she was, the one singular female icon to arise from this antisingular period: Rosie the Riveter, industrial pinup, her hair back in a snood or kerchief, her body swimming inside overalls, one hand holding the signature blowtorch. What’s rarely mentioned is how few ever made it to welder status and the coveted role of human cigarette lighter. And of the few who did, 99 percent were white. At the time, many didn’t take note or find such discrimination unusual; the society was segregated, and most whites had never before worked with those then referred to as Negroes. (If white women worked in offices, black women were lucky to clean them at ten P.M.)
It’s one of the first things we learn during the average “Rosie” documentary, most made during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Jewish, Italian, and Irish workers recall the exhaustion and exhilaration. They all talk about loneliness. When we come at last to a black worker it’s clear that wartime single life was often lonelier than any white women might have imagined. One former black welder spoke in a 1972 documentary.
I had done all the requirements, the hours, but it was just the case they’d never put anybody in the more interesting welder jobs unless she was white…. three years of me watching—it seemed like hundreds of girls get in there before me…yeah, I finally got in. And they think I don’t know they paid me less than half [the salary] of the whites?…when it was leaving time, they always made me and the others wait until the white ones had left first. So we never talked…. I remember thinking one day, oh God, is this stupidity?…Here we were all alone pretty much. None of us, just from the faces you could see, was going home to very much…. It was a strange time, very tough, and I couldn’t get over that we couldn’t break it down a little, stick it out together.
They had at least this in common: Despite reports indicating that as many as 75 percent of all working women wished to keep their jobs after the war—black women, for example, had increased their presence in the clerical sector by five thousand jobs—Rosie and all her sisters were to become the century’s most exotic, briefly celebrated temps. At the time, they would never have believed it.
In May 1942 Business Week reported that airplane plants considered women 50 to 100 percent more efficient in wiring instrument panels than men, due to general carefulness and a greater attention to detail. The authors of this survey felt confident in stating that women could perform 80 percent of all war-industry jobs and all but 80 out of 937 jobs in civilian industry. Boeing Aircraft in Seattle utilized squads of superwomen for moving and lifting heavy loads. Sperry Gyroscope announced: “Women can and do work in every capacity possible.” Tough individualized women, reflections of this stunning assessment, began to appear in the popular culture. Wonder Woman, after Brenda Starr, was the most popular cartoon strip of the period, and movie serials—the cartoonish and cheaply made “B” movies—tracked exotic creatures such as Ruth Roman in Jungle Queen, Kay Aldridge as “Nyoka,” deeply embattled in the endless Perils of Nyoka, and Marguerite Chapman as Spy Smasher. For the first time since its introduction in 1923, the Equal Rights Amendment was voted three times to the Senate floor.
Throughout the war years, an unusual number of actresses worked playing single women in films. Olivia De Havilland and Ann Sothern played aircraft workers in Government Girl and Swing Shift Maisie. Lucille Ball played a rich girl turned defense plant worker in Meet the People. Lana Turner played an unlikely war correspondent in Somewhere I’ll Find You and an heiress turned WAC (the Women’s Army Corps) in Keep Your Powder Dry. Movie girls also contended with what had become a housing crisis. In The More the Merrier Jean Arthur shared an apartment with two men. In The Doughgirls Ann Sheridan pretended to be married so that she could keep a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Ginger Rogers starred in Tender Comrade, as one of several women who chip in to share and fix up a large house. And they get along beautifully, with no trace of the competition and bitchiness of Stage Door (1937), in which some of the above-mentioned stars lived in a boardinghouse for actresses, battling one another for auditions, dates with producers, and walk-on parts.
But as early as 1942, a campaign was under way to prepare the workplace for men by planning—and I paraphrase an actual headline—how to get rid of the women. A Time story complained that women flirted at work and, as evidence, reported that Douglas Aircraft had been forced to close its Santa Monica bomb shelter due to “lovemaking” during the lunch break. It seemed that women wore transparent blouses and “peekaboo” sweaters that distracted men.
Other publications quickly leapt on the story. There was an excessive powdering of the nose on company time. Absenteeism due to menstrual periods or constipation or both. Rampant gossip. Business Week, once so enthusiastic about this addition to the workforce, reported in 1943 that single women had been caught “soliciting” for extra cash, although it was unclear where the alleged munitions-plant prostitution had occurred. WACs were the target of endless jokes and nasty cartoons. Suddenly everyone knew the acronym “PWOP” (pregnant without permission). The subject of their underwear, specifically, what color it was, became a conversational topic. There were more than 300,000 WACs, and not a week passed without some newly invented scandal, very often involving suspected mass lesbianism. As if to purge the last impression, a 1944 Tangee lipstick ad showed photos of seven uniformed women and this declaration: “We are still the weaker sex. It’s still up to us to appear as alluring and lovely as possible.”
The New York Times Magazine apparently agreed. In 1943 it ran a piece called “What About Women After the War?” The question was answered, primarily, by a female personnel manager who adopted the tone of an advice columnist. “Different women want different things,” she wrote. “I think most of them—whether they admit it or not—want only to marry, have a home and a man to do their worrying (and sometimes their thinking) for them.”
The Labor Review for September 1945 casually reported that the Department of Labor was now “laying down recommendations on separation of women from wartime jobs” and the “ways and means [to] cushion the effects of transition.” The “transition” wasn’t smooth; it was brutal. Several states reinstated old restrictions that forbade women from lifting more than twenty-five pounds in the workplace, to cite one of many examples, or hired only “first-class” mechanics, when most women rated only third-class status. Unions reinforced seniority clauses, and the GI Bill would give veterans preference in all government hiring; the civil service accepted applications only from veterans.
A little less than a year later, women had lost well over a million factory jobs, half a million clerical positions, 300,000 jobs in commercial service, and 100,000 in sales. Women’s share of all jobs had dropped from 36 to 28 percent. Married women who could not coordinate the demands of child care and household work, women who were chronically late or exhausted, became “voluntary withdrawals”—whether they wanted to leave their jobs or not; single women rated no such sacrificial titles. They were fired. Women who remained in the expanded postwar workforce—about 17 million, more than half of them single—found themselves seemingly quarantined within a tiny range of jobs. During the first quarter of 1946, writes historian Susan Hartmann, “government employment agencies placed 40 percent of female applicants in household and other service jobs, 13 to 15 percent in semiskilled positions, and less than 5 percent in professional managerial or skilled work. In June of that year, 70 percent of jobs open to women paid less than .65 an hour.”
A 1946 survey of former WACs revealed that less than half of those employed had been able to find work that in any way related to their extensive wartime training.
Of course they had not really been expected to. In 1944, one radio executive had publicly predicted, “For nearly every man returning to his former job, there will be a woman returning to her former (or future) occupation—caring for the home.” The chairman of the board of the National Association of Manufacturers urged women to leave “for the sake of their homes as well as the labor situation.” The president of TWA reiterated what was fast becoming common knowledge: Most women in business had been there only temporarily. “They intended, and rightfully, to return home after the war or marry and make new homes.”
HOMESICK
Immediately be for the war, marriage had undergone a mass revival due to the Selective Service Act, the 1940 draft law that raised bridal terror to new levels of intensity. (Will he come back, and if not, will I ever meet anyone else?) Among these rushed unions, there were many casualties—prewar, the divorce rate stood at 2 per 1,000 and by 1946 it had doubled. But many of these instant early weddings had been more like extended blind dates and the divorces that followed were as predictable and as unavoidable as schoolyard breakups. At war’s end, marriage was still an essential and blessed institution. Whatever else you’d done—worked, begun to smoke, learned to drive—the next obvious and necessary step into adulthood was to wed.
“What else was this stupid war fought for?” asked an “engaged girl” in Mademoiselle magazine in 1945.
In a national poll conducted two years before, young women were asked to choose between three distinct life options: (1) home and husband, (2) the hard-to-imagine career/marriage combination, and (3) the single career woman. Three quarters of the participants answered “home and husband,” while 18 percent sought having both the man and the job. Only one in nine envisioned an independent life and a career as opposed to a job.
There was, however, a problem, and that was the verifiable man shortage. It was drastically bad form to say so, but 250,000 men had died overseas, and—this part could be said—thousands had returned with foreign brides. Those who returned solo seemed “resistant” or “reluctant” to wed, or, more to the point, a little scared of the American women they’d found at home. A former correspondent for Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper read throughout the Allied universe, told The New York Times Magazine in March 1946: “Being nice is almost a lost art among American women…. After three months in the land of challenging females, I feel that I should go back to France!” That same year Harper’s reported, “Many American war veterans are bearing some unexpected rehabilitation difficulties in coming home to what used to be a pleasantly pliable and even appealingly incompetent little woman and finding a masterful creature recognizing no limit to her own endurance.”
That is to say, she’d had a job, she’d lived alone or with a group of other working women and had somehow mislaid her supply of charming helplessness.
One World War II veteran I interviewed recalled:
When we came back from the war, yes, my God, there was a sense that [even] if we’d changed, we hadn’t expected women to change…. There were lots of women everywhere, very breezy, confident. It was…a little shocking at first, but not really a bad thing. I remember being on a subway and this woman just sitting down next to me and starting a conversation, and all I remember thinking is, she’s not even going here for a pickup, she was chatting. Women didn’t do things like that before…. Now they were different, more of a presence.
He might have added that there were just more of them. As actor Glenn Ford spat at Rita Hayworth in Gilda (1946): “Ha!…There’re more women out there than there are insects!”
Cursory reports from the Census Bureau confirmed that women had become the majority sex in the United States. Obviously there’d been war losses. But medical data was also starting to show that men had a higher susceptibility to disease and infection and that women in general had stronger immune systems.
In the spring of 1948 The New York Times Magazine devoted a cover to the news that women were “The Stronger Sex.” They had stronger hearts. They faced far fewer bar brawls, stressful commutes, industrial accidents, et cetera, but the news still was not good. Because of their newly discovered strength, women were more likely than ever to end up alone—widowed and unable to beat out the competition for a replacement—a condition that was made to sound far worse than that of all the many men who would simply be dead. (The piece led with an illustration showing buxom ladies with butterfly nets desperate to catch their weak, elusive prey.) The Times had in ways been covering this story since late 1945, when it first reported that because of war losses, population shifts, and female longevity, 750,000 women would most likely have to live without husbands. Three years later it was time to assess damages and ask the important questions: What was going to happen to all these women? What would it mean for society if there was suddenly a permanent single class? Would government, at the local or federal level, in some way be responsible for their welfare, and how would such women fare emotionally?
Everyone at least had an answer for that last one: very poorly.
This conclusion was rooted in a kind of pop-Freudian mandate that had evolved during the war. According to the tenets of this new “understanding,” modern woman was no longer merely frigid or heartless; she was a full-scale neurotic. In Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), a bible of sex-role hysteria, authors Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg labeled the twentieth century a time of “epidemic neurosis” and characterized women as its most appalling victims. Theirs was an existential crisis, for they had lost their essential identity and purpose. That is to say, females had been torn from their place in the home, metaphorically removed from the hearth. As the two doctors explained in both the book and in a series of stern filmed lectures:
Thousands of women became deeply and genuinely uncertain about whatever they undertook. More and more conscious of themselves as “drags” upon their husbands in the competitive struggle for place and prestige, frustrated at the inner core of their beings, they proceeded to react in a number of ways—as male-emulating careerists, as overdoting, restrictive or rejecting mothers, or as a combination of career women and women suspiciously placing too much stress in one way or the other on the natural maternal function. In short, they became neurotics.
And those were the healthy married ones. The mid-twentieth-century single woman presented a scarier case. As the authors saw it, the country had already faced down the feminists, bohemian nuts, and, worst of all in retrospect, the suffragettes, whose “ferocity…led to property destruction on a large scale; damages ran into the millions. The government seemed powerless to deal intelligently with the situation. Women had truly gone berserk.” And now came the lost woman, plagued by a “bundle of anxieties” all of which were grotesquely heightened in the unwed woman. “If she hasn’t a husband and is seeking one she is fully aware that others of her kind have the same primal purpose…. She cannot help but observe[women] scattered about profusely…stenographers, secretaries, hat-check girls, models, fashion designers or female riveters…they are no longer secluded, hidden away, but out hunting, as it were, in packs.”
These edicts had to be viewed in their proper Freudian context. As explained in numerous books but most forcefully in Modern Woman, all women had a biological and social imperative to mate, then to reproduce. Throughout her life, in other words, a woman was really no more than half of a human unit, who alone could not evolve and maintain her own superego. As a “half,” she would not ever be able to make up her own mind—a primary trait of many fifties TV heroines. And never would she possess a fully formed conscience. Only a man could provide the already unsteady, unmoored modern woman with moral balance.
Of course women did not walk through life upset because their “primordial rhythms” had “broken,” nor did they believe—not really—that they inherently lacked some essential mental component. But many beleaguered single women believed they now had not only a personal but a societal obligation to find a man. This led to an epic outburst of tension—at least as it was reported in magazines—and especially between friends who had come to share the same (nagging, anxious) suspicion: Wasn’t every woman a potential “other”?
Many books appeared to help her in battle—“finding,” “attacking,” “getting,” “securing,” “safeguarding.” Reading about single life circa 1948 is like browsing through a collection of busy war strategies that alternate with wordy, scolding conduct guides. A great example of the latter genre is Anything but Love by Elizabeth Hawes (1948), a thick book that was to serve as “a complete digest of the rules for feminine behavior from birth to death, given out here in print, but also put forth by the author…over the air…in popular magazines and on film…[advice] seen and listened to monthly by some 340,000,000 American women.”
A few of her dictates, all eerily reminiscent of the nineteenth century:
All girls want to be whistle-worthy, and that raises what is…the biggest worry in your life: Does he see you as pretty?…One of the miracles which mass production has wrought is that every single American girl can be seen as pretty. Our ugly ducklings can be turned into beautiful swans.
The main purpose of girls getting jobs is to meet men they may subsequently marry. A girl may continue to hold a job and earn her living in whole or part to age 23. Thereafter, only if she has become a successful star of stage and screen.
Occasionally something appeared that single female life as pitiable, it went without saying, but manageable for a reasonable amount of time. Jean Van Ever, in 1949, published How to Be Happy While Single, a practical guide to living life alone before marriage. As she wrote: “Meal planning, marketing, vacuuming, and the wear and tear of housekeeping…these skills are worth the struggle to master, so, while you have the chance, practice up. Even if you have a job and you are tired at the end of the day. Practice.”
But increasingly the “authorities”—and they were everywhere—didn’t bother with the particulars of single life (the hunt, the frustration, the outfit changes). They cut to the point and the point was to marry. To reproduce. And, of course, to consume. In 1947 the Daughters of the American Revolution released a statement that echoed those issued by far less conservative organizations: “The social order must now reassert itself. That is our job. That is our purpose. Those who follow their own paths, no matter how worthy, those who do not participate in the reconstruction of the society, to marry, to bear American children, must be labeled ‘Selfish.’”
In 1948 the U.S. Women’s Bureau held a conference to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, calling it “The American Woman, Her Changing Role: Worker, Homemaker, Citizen.” The keynote speaker was Harry Truman, who changed the order of the roles in the title; “homemaker” went first and “worker” last. It had been psychological doctrine. Now it was an executive order.
THE AGE OF ANXIETY
Despite the at times surreal amount of cheerleading for marriage, for home and “womanhood,” the divorce rate was actually rising.
It had become much easier to accurately count the number of divorces nationwide. Before the era of Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and primitive computerized records, the actual number of failed marriages remained hazy. A 1995 edition of the Monthly Vital Statistics Report explained that after the war—well beyond the initial 1946 surge—there was a steady rise in the divorce rate. Ultimately, between 1946 and 1950, the number of divorces and annulments would total 4,020,000.
Magazines, newspapers, dime novels, even newsreels were quick to jump on the rising divorce story. One anonymous woman interviewed for Harper’s Bazaar in 1946 wrote, “It seems like everyone is getting divorced and, yes, that does scare a lot of women, including me on occasion…[but] I think what it comes down to is keeping up an interest in all areas of your marriage. Even if you are dishwater tired.”
But if a woman happened to be dishwater tired, how was she to recognize what the Reader’s Digest called “separation signs”? And what was she to make of the sudden presence of so many obvious divorcées?
Suddenly, in good communities, in any community across America, there were newly divorced women seen committing basic acts of daily life—smoking, retrieving the newspaper or mail, putting out trash, shopping, chasing kids. Divorcées had always seemed a little tarnished and sad, but in a certifiable man crisis they took on new characteristics. They were now directly threatening. Sexual. (As the divorce rate began its brief but dramatic decline during the monogamous fifties, the divorcée portrait—floozy blonde; blinds down at 2 P.M.—would become more of a gross sexual parody.)
Alice Hoffman gives a superb recounting of divorcée paranoia in Seventh Heaven, a novel set in the early 1960s on suburban Long Island. At the start we meet several housewives attempting to place a new neighbor. Finally, after much speculation, they come to what must be “the only explanation,” even though none can “bring themselves to say the word divorced out loud…. [But] the word was there, it had entered their vocabularies and now hung above them, a cloud over their coffee cups…they were all so completely married, and they were in it together…. And yet there it was, across the street, a hand without a ring holding a Windex bottle.”
The married women swing into defensive action, and “by the end of October, every mother of every child…knew that Nora was divorced….Billy [her son] was never invited over to anyone’s house after school…she herself hadn’t been told about the monthly PTA meetings. No one mentioned the Columbus Day Bake Sale.”
Hearing about it, Nora stays up all night making a cake, a handcrafted candy-dotted castle, pink and voluptuous, a real Jayne Mansfield of a cake. No one goes near it.
In 1949 one society matron confessed to the New York Times, “I do not invite unattached women because it seems to me—I don’t like to say this—but you know, Perry and I are so happy and these unattached women just envy the beautiful happiness we have…. They sit there, it doesn’t matter where you put them…. they are so sad and distracted, that they have nothing of this. Frankly, it bothers me to be surrounded by such hungry devouring eyes.”
And occasionally we witnessed the angry single sniper in action. In A Letter to Three Wives (1949), morbid suspicion of the other, experienced woman animates the entire film.
The story is this: Three wives each receive a letter from the town vamp, socialite Addie Ross. The letters inform them that Addie has stolen one of their husbands and plans to leave town with him that very day; one of them, in other words, is in for a nasty surprise at dinner. We never meet Addie; she speaks off camera in an alluring faraway voice, the siren song of the willowy bitch. The three women spend the day together, each dropping off into long spells of contemplation. How has her marriage, and how has she, been disappointing? The mood is thick with apprehension, ill ease, and finally paranoia until the moment we know. As it turns out, they all are safe. One husband had planned to leave with Addie but changed his mind. All is well and Addie and her giggly voice recede, though it’s clear she’s had a wonderful time torturing these three to the very core of their feminine souls.
Still, women were interested in reading and watching films about women in situations other than domestic panic. Some of the period’s most popular films concern women who had jobs, and not only the Mildred Pierce psycho-careerists who haunted “women’s films.” Claudette Colbert played a haughty novelist in Without Reservations; Ginger Rogers played a tough editor in Lady in the Dark; in Laura Gene Tierney was a graphic designer, and Rosalind Russell in Take a Letter Darling had a male secretary (who eventually accused her of anti-womanhood as if it counted as an un-American activity). Most delightful was Bette Davis in June Bride, playing a top magazine queen who’s got a bum but loveable writer fiancé in her past. During the course of one horrific wedding shoot, she’s tossed back together with him and, ultimately, has to choose: power, top job perks, great apartment, or a loving if irresponsible man from the past.
They surrender, all, but with seconds to go before the closing credits, a holdout that is less a suspense tactic than a means for allowing female viewers two full hours of screen time to watch funny, smart-ass women brilliantly run the show. (A similar device operates in some of the era’s most popular radio soap operas, for example, Portia Faces Life and The Romance of Helen Trent, each primarily about love relationships, the stuff of female life, but as experienced by, respectively, a lawyer and a Hollywood designer.)
This same kind of “holdout” was at the core of the bobby-soxer phenomenon. There were other elements, of course, namely, advertisers thrilled to have unearthed an independent peer group (pubescent girls) that ran a slice of underground economy (baby-sitting). Bobby-soxing further gave to Shirley Temple a mature but still cute persona to inhabit before retiring. But most important, to be a late-forties bobby-soxer was to be a young woman between girl and wife. Soon enough she’d emerge from the protective cocoon of rumpled jeans, saddle shoes, and daddy’s shirts. Soon she’d begin her husband hunt in earnest. But just for the moment she was off the market.
Once-upon-a-time single women might have urged her to stay there, or at least not to rush.
In 1949 the New York Times interviewed female members of the college class of 1934 to see how their lives had played out during the Depression and World War II. Of the entire class, 82 percent were still married and only 12 percent worked “outside the home…the predominant experience of the class of 1934 was as housewife.” We also learn that almost 90 percent had children, and that as of 1949 many of these kids were not yet in school. The story moves along to its point: “A strong note of betrayal runs through…the study. These women entered public life in a flush of post-suffrage optimism. They belonged to a generation of women which stressed and exalted in the importance of jobs for women.” Real jobs. Not the kinds of jobs they ultimately found going through the “Jobs-Female” section of the classifieds. Some of them “understood the employment realities.” Others were bitter, like the interviewee who concluded that her life had been worsened by having to work in a “lesser position.”
But it would be far worse—and there was a consensus among the women interviewed—to go through life singly. To be single was to “experience the feeling of contamination,” as one expert put it in Ladies’ Home Journal, or as Time somewhat awkwardly described the single state in 1950: “pin-stuck with a cramp of isolation.”
Of course there is a women’s film that deals specifically with issues of singular contamination and isolation. It’s called, appropriately, Autumn Leaves (1956), and stars Joan Crawford, as a spinster who marries a man she does not really know in order to improve a life spent inside her L.A. bungalow, where she types manuscripts with maniacal speed and efficiency. As it turns out, her husband, a younger man, is plainly maniacal—a kleptomaniac, a pathological liar, prone to crying and “shrieking like a woman,” until Joan has no choice but to “put him away.” At the home, he receives electroshock treatment, a procedure usually associated with snarly, uncooperative women. Joan, soon after, receives a jolt of her own. Seated on the edge of a straight-backed chair, hands mangling her purse, she confronts the psychiatrist, the authority figure who had replaced the preacher as the man who brings the bad news.
The diagnosis: As a late-marrying spinster, she does not represent to her husband an actual wife. Rather, she represents “neurotic need.” If she had children or seemed at all a sexual creature, she might have been a mother figure; as it is she is more of an “aunt.” It is clear that he will have to leave her because she is, in her tainted spinsterish way, as sick as he is. Still, there is some twisted hope for them both. The wounded man and his neurotic need walk together across the hospital grounds. He pauses at a point to examine her hand, which is bandaged. Once, before his commitment, as she lay sobbing on the ground, he dropped the typewriter onto her wrist, making it impossible for her to earn a living. In so doing, he had graphically demonstrated his desire to be a man. A starting point.
Anyway, at least, they were married. And nothing would have more social significance in the 1950s.
Sociologist David Reisman, author of The Lonely Crowd (1950), once remarked that in the nineteenth century the failure to marry was considered a “social disadvantage and sometimes a personal tragedy.” In the 1950s, however, it would become “a quasi-perversion.”