CHAPTER FIVE
It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle or murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, ON AMERICAN WOMEN, 1838
The Single Career woman…that great mistake that feminism propagated may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.
—LIFE MAGAZINE, SPECIAL REPORT ON WOMEN, 1956
Girl gets off bus in Port Authority Terminal, goes into Bickford’s, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for Daddy. Life. Something.
—JACK KEROUAC, “A BEAT TOUR OF NEW YORK,” HOLIDAY MAGAZINE, 1959
I DO, I DO, I HAVE TO
I had a friend for a while when I was single who, between day jobs, worked as a performance artist. According to her self-produced catalogue notes, her art consisted of, or was “located” in, the re-creation of “aesthetic epochs,” as they were “parsed out in the locution, Decades.” That meant she continually redid her apartment according to themes such as “1922” and “1890.” The 1950s, however, represented her greatest triumph—a live-action tableau vivant starring a single girl, living alone in a single-girl apartment that is outfitted with the perquisites, the furniture and clothing, of married life.
“Jill,” as she was known within the installation, asked all visitors to leave their shoes at the door, directing them to period shoe racks that held all manner of appropriate footwear: bowling shoes, saddle shoes, impossible pumps, sensible shoes to look good beneath a gray flannel suit. If there were no shoes that fit, visitors walked in socks among the various pieces: the blond-wood Scandinavian couches and modular chairs, and the coffee tables—low and slatted or biomorphic—each stacked with amoebic ashtrays, old issues of Life and Look. A dwarfing hi-fi cabinet opened onto a tiny TV screen and turntable. The space was small, and because she’d made a breakfast nook and a sewing room and because there were filmy stockings everywhere on lines “drying,” visitors selected decorative pillows and hit the floor.
During the run of this “show,” Jill appeared in lima bean–green midriffs with striped pedal pushers. Or she’d whip open a door wearing mock Dior New Look tea dresses, squealing “hel—loow,” Annette Funicello trying on a mid-Atlantic accent. Most all of this annoyed her boyfriend, Jim, a writer who lived in the space with Jill, whose name, he liked to remind people, was really Ann. Jill would French-inhale her cigarette and squeeze his arm sympathetically. She understood. Here was a man who every day for months had been asked to impersonate a “beat poet, struggling,” when all he wanted to do was write or drink his coffee. But it was hard even for Jim to deny that life inside this made-up 1950s could be absurd and amusing. Jill served pancakes, fondue, and highballs all at once. And we all played a game she called Do the Dot. This required participants to gather around the ancient TV and stare expectantly at the tiny screen. Slowly the tiny white spot, the old TV warmup dot we’d all forgotten, would materialize at the center. It glowed there a minute, then expanded into a mess of bad reception. Everyone screamed for an encore and Jill would turn the TV on and off and then again—on and off—until she’d start to maniacally laugh and sometimes pretend to faint.
She’d get up, go on to the next activity, but the point, I always thought, had been made: Had she been a real fifties single, a bachelorette, alone, with all the perquisities of married life but no marriage, she might have gone crazy.
Simply stated, marriage in the 1950s was the absolute norm. In 1953, Look magazine rhapsodized: “Not since the age of Victoria has the idea of the happy home compelled such overt sentiment and general admiration…advertisements with their happy parents and rosy children in a setting of creature comforts and domestic bliss, the magazine covers with their warm scenes of family life…testify to the expectations with which men and women enter the blessed state.”
Young women earned great praise for their compliance with the prerequisites and demands of this blessed state. Especially considering—and everyone had to concede the point—that some had once led different lives, lived at least a little bit like “Jill.” As a 1952 Good Housekeeping guide to marital relations put it, “Having worked before marriage, or at least having been educated for some kind of intellectual work [the woman] finds herself in the lamentable position of being ‘just a housewife.’…In her disgruntlement, she can work as much damage on the lives of her husband and children and her own life—as if she were a career woman and, indeed, sometimes more!”
But as it was expressed in almost every publication, public-service announcement, newsreel, and classroom lecture, a Female Miracle had occurred, resulting in the birth of a new “unique femininity.” In reaction to the postwar man shortage, or to the pop–Freudian imperatives to “adjust,” many women had abandoned their drive to work in the world of men. Look editors, as if celebrating a new-model car, wrote: “Forget the big career…now she gracefully concedes the top jobs to men. The wondrous creature also marries younger than ever, bears more babies and looks and acts more feminine than the emancipated girl of the 20s and 30s…if she makes an old-fashioned choice and lovingly tends a garden and a bumper crop of children, she rates more loud Hosannas than ever before.”
Single life more than ever stood out as a social aberration, what an old family friend of mine calls “living polio. Not married, you were in the iron lung. Paralyzed.” And there was resolutely no excuse for it. One 1954 home-economics textbook spoke out harshly. “Except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and mentally defective, almost every girl has an opportunity to marry.” A popular female advice columnist seemed to feel even more strongly. “Every American girl must acquire for herself a husband and a home and children…any program for life in which the home is not the center of her living, is worse than death.”
Occasionally, a writer broke ranks and published a story with a title like “There’s No Right Time for a Girl to Marry” (the New York Times, 1952). But these were anomalies and served most often as dartboards for more conservative writers and for the corporate heads who felt moved now and then to speak out about the necessary place of the American female in the home. (The manufacture and sale of furnishings and cars had become huge business, and between 1950 and 1958 sales of major appliances alone would rise by 240 percent.)
It all sounds a bit crazy, I have to say, almost science-fictional. But the rhetoric is backed up by numbers. By 1951, almost 60 percent of all American women were married—one in three of them having wed by age nineteen. By 1957, 14 million girls were engaged at age seventeen and many more were married by age twenty, and most of them were mothers at twenty-one. In 1958, 97 out of every 1,000 girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen gave birth. Betty Friedan would later estimate that the U.S. birthrate in the mid-1950s had come close to overtaking India’s.
I interviewed one woman, a pediatrician, married at twenty in 1956, divorced in 1968 with four kids. She laughed, then deeply sighed as she recalled “the marriage-attack-from-Mars years.”
If I tried honestly to describe it, I’m not sure my own four girls would believe it. One example, in high school, if you did not have a date for a Saturday night, that meant you stayed in, hiding out, and swearing your younger siblings to silence. And I mean you were HIDING. In your room, with the lights off, in the event a boy you knew passed in a car and saw your light on. That meant they would KNOW you were in without a date…. College years, it was all right to date around for a year or so…[but] if you weren’t set by junior year, and there was another group of new freshmen coming, oh, that meant your life was slipping away…. Land[ing] a guy seemed like the only possible way you were going to survive economically…
It is hard to read a magazine or watch a movie from that time and imagine any woman living in peace by herself. Everyone in the culture seemed programmed to harangue her. The Saturday Evening Post warned in 1952, “It’s harder than ever to snare a husband!” Unless, of course, one made sacrifices, for example, abandoning school. The writer, Rufus Jarman, speculated that the dreaded war brides, all 113,000 of them, had moved in on American women because too many of “these American dynamos had those three letters of doom—Ph.D., doctor—in front of their names.” To the GIs, the American single had shown “superior airs” and no instinctive gifts for housekeeping. But now, he noted, “most girls who are doing postgraduate work for various high-flown careers would drop their studies and get married in a minute if the right man came along.”
Some limited exceptions were made for artistic types—dancers, actresses, fashion designers—and it further helped if one resembled Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn. Later in the decade, exemptions passed to younger celebrities who had a tough kind of girl/boy quality—Shirley MacLaine (married, though her husband lived full-time in Japan) and Françoise Sagan, who, at twenty-one, had published a wild unapologetic mistressy novel called Bonjour Tristesse. Françoise instantly became an object of fascination to men and women both, who loved her short hair and red sports car and her way with a cigarette. Then, of course, she was French, barely spoke English, and the French, as one commentator wrote, were born “astray.”
But even here, in provincial married America, all sorts of girls went astray. Even if they did so very briefly.
DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE
The roots of the 1950s marriage mania reached back into the postwar culture: the GI Bill, which made low-income housing and other benefits available to veterans who married; the restrictions these same GI privileges imposed on women (fewer college openings; fewer jobs), and then all that pseudo-Freudian dogma demanding that real women seek out their male halves. But there were thousands who, setting aside domestic destiny, graduated or just left home with something else in mind besides a wedding. Stashing their marriage prospects into imaginary safety deposit boxes, middle-class girls traveled to Europe. Traces of these temporary runaways can be found in fifties films such as An American in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Funny Face, Marjorie Morningstar, in some of the Gidget movies, and, most memorably, in Breathless, in the form of Jean Seberg’s morally ambiguous girl/boy reporter.
Others left home for New York and jobs in theater, dance, publishing, or just to cut themselves off from suffocating fiancés, dull jobs, or like Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, lives so desperate and dreary one can only guess at the details.
Starting in about 1953, at the height of “togetherness”*—a magazine-inspired concept advocating the total centrality of nuclear-family life—there seemed to be a rise in the number of single young women settling in New York City. The intensity with which reporters tracked this alleged rise, interviewing employment agents, Realtors, or clerks at all-girl hotels, demonstrates how terrorizing the single female was as mere concept.
“It was still such a radical notion,” says one my subjects, Simone, now sixty-six.
In fact, to get away was like testifying before a miniature version of the HUAC committee: Were we now and had we ever been inclined to hurt ourselves by deliberately ruining ourselves?…Leaving home was supposed to be very, very dangerous…. But we were girls who were not ready for the Donna Reed life. Poor Donna Reed! Even she wasn’t Donna Reed! She was an Oscar winner!…At home, everyone, in that J. D. Salinger sense, was required to put up a false phony self and it just got so tiring…. So you confronted your parents, and they acted as if you’d just announced you’d become a Communist or a Nazi and a slut. But your bags were packed. Like a spy, you had the details worked out in advance. Now, you had to hold your ground under interrogation.
Many editors, professors, and psychiatric professionals fixated on this “lone female” escapee, studying her like a lab animal who’d been wired to do one thing and was now atypically doing something else. In the press there was the formal bow, or military salute, made to the good-sport all-American wife out in the ’burbs. But the real fascination was with these city types—the astonishing 34 percent who, by 1954, had made it to age twenty-four without marrying. She or “it” was debated, as an entity, in every publication from the Reader’s Digest to the Atlantic Monthly. Sometimes she appeared as a caricature—a dazed-looking girl, hitchhiking, a bridal gown in one hand and a suitcase in the other (no one picks her up), or a young woman watering plants on a sooty fire escape juxtaposed with a woman, in sun hat, cutting flowers in a large country garden. Humorists created bestiaries of lone-girl types, for example, the “Can’t-Help-It-Drabbie,” “The Mammary-Deprived,” “The Marginal Wallflower,” the “Office Matron,” “the Premature Auntie Griselda,” “the Thespian Manqué.”
The Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality, published in 1953, shocked readers as much as had the original male report several years before—and seems to have fed fears about these amorphous but threatening gangs of female strays. (One of Kinsey’s troubling statistics: More than half of all college-educated women, plus 20 percent of noncollege girls, had engaged in at least one same-sex erotic experience. If that was true, what was likely to occur in “pervert’s-ville” New York City?) Post-Kinsey, the language used to urge girls back into domesticity, into marriage (as if all that many had actually left!) turned apocalyptic.
For a while, in 1954 and ’55, writers bypassed the gray and rainy adjectives common to sad-spinster stories and rushed on toward the nuclear arsenal: “Atomic Red Alert for Romance!” “From Here to Oblivion—Marry Now or Marry Never!” “Snag Your Space of Shelter, Girls, Before You’re Crowded Out!”
Despite a birthrate like a third world country’s—and despite the fact that more eighteen-year-old girls got married some years than went to the prom—the perception spread that Young White Single Females had to be reined in. In the form of the helpful how-to “service” story, magazines revived one of the world’s older single propositions: to move single women in herds from dry areas (Washington, D.C., ranked worst overall; New York and Boston ran close seconds) to places where men were plentiful. In pieces that included maps, arrows, and literal directions, editors set out to pinpoint where on earth men were most heavily clustered.
Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in general: Where the Boys Are.
According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded…in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women…for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”
In “Memo to the Girls,” Look undertook “a massive man-hunt missive,” noting, “there is a surplus of bachelors…but husband hunters should know where to look.” The winning locales were the same as those cited elsewhere, as if a consortium of media and governmental bureaus had conspired in a campaign to reinaugurate the mail-order bride.
Life editors found two bachelor girls who’d moved themselves to Caspar, Wyoming, then had them, for the benefit of the photographers, throw an impromptu bachelor-girl party. Panel by panel, we follow the action: The girls make last-minute “on-the-spot” calls to boys. The girls prepare the beverages and then, the triumphal sequence, “the boys respond to the call.” Twelve men, big hefty guys, thirtyish and single, have all crowded into their living room. The caption read: “They bagged twelve!” But “bagging” out in Caspar didn’t require throwing a “do.” We also see the “lucky” Barbara Mills receive a “quadruple escort” just by walking through the business district. It was noted that had she lived in Montana, the number of escorts might have been up around nine.
GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE
As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956 Mademoiselle published a remarkably progressive piece, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” intended to highlight the views of young women who’d gone off on their own and were loving it. But the most shocking, radical aspect of the “Ambition” story was the response it provoked—both in letters and in stories published in other magazines.
“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly way.” Another outraged wife said, “These girls come back from a day in the outside world with something to talk about and what is that? Men. She’s been out all day with men. Other women’s husbands…. [she] is a threat to every self and family-centered homebody.” Another said that she’d “be content to liquidate [this] army of competitors who have forgotten the true functions, duties and gracious giving pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself. There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour…. It is against order and I really think humanity.”
Training young women to capture husbands now underwent a vast CinemaScopic fifties-era renaissance.
In 1955 alone there were more than three hundred promarriage, antisingular tomes. From one foreword: “It would seem that some have come to view marriage in its current state as…disappointing for women, and especially those who have taken the higher degree.” As if it was 1910, the author concluded: “The lure of the city and its many pleasures will make of many potentially fine and worthy wives unnatural defeated spinsters…sick and lonely women.”
As always, commentators dragged the discussion back to education and the eternal topic—“what should we teach our women?” One home-economics professor from a college in Virginia wrote in the Reader’s Digest: “Unless there is a direct application to the home, or the conflicts and issues that will confront her in the home, in [dealing with] her husband or children, it is not valid education; it is unfair to the girl and confusing.”
One 1956 home-ec textbook provided a quick-study list of thirty-five tasks to perform before a husband returned from “his labors.” Here’s a small sampling of what the fifties singles studied:
1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal—on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most are men are hungry when they come home!
2. Minimize the noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Have them properly dressed to give their greetings.
3. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow…speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
Whatever her interests, the single girl picked up a magazine, went to the movies—got into a conversation with just about anyone—and heard about what single girls had heard about since 1860: how to catch a man and make him stay. For example, a February 1952 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal provided a “quick inventory for bachelor girls”: “What about your…hair, complexion, clothes? Are you a good talker, dancer, listener? Do you have a sense of humor? Hobby? Outside interests?…If anything is lacking you must go to the hairdresser, psychiatrist, whatever is needed. Only then are you prepared to face the world.”
These articles and books prescribed ways to achieve a kind of robotic period perfection, “a rigorous ideal that is…to be desired by any woman who cares about her future.” But in fact the physical attributes of 1950s “perfection” were intensely difficult to attain. The dictates of the female ideal were repeated and reprinted as if they were a paper doll’s mantra: “I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, 122 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, a 251/2-inch waist, 34-inch bust, and 36-inch hips.” Famed anthropologist and frequent commentator Margaret Mead found it startling—and not necessarily “good”—that the average 1956 girl was fifteen pounds lighter than her counterpart thirty years before.
New products appeared to assist in her transformation, most dramatically, hair dye that one could use safely at home without burning the scalp or turning hair purple (both incidents documented in a 1922 diary). Shirley Polykoff, a female advertising executive who, along with Estée Lauder and PR magnate Eleanor Lambert, were the professional “exceptions” to every rule, brought hair dye into the average bathroom or, for many single girls, into the kitchen sink. Her idea was to convince women that by changing their hair color they could change themselves. Wives would become more interesting to their husbands. Single women, suddenly more assertive and more feminine, would attract more men. As one promotional piece explained this proposed alchemy:
By changing the color and hue of your hair, you can change your entire way of being. It frees you to behave and act in ways you would never have dreamed possible when you were your former self…. And you can do it in secret. People will notice you and think, “She seems different.” “And her hair!” “How did she get it to look so lovely?” “Is it a wig?” “Is it dyed?”
Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”
Playboy magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented with three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.
The only instructions: “Make one blond. Make one a brunette. And make one a redhead. It doesn’t matter which.” In the Playboy schematic, what mattered was mammary glands—bosoms, bazooms, jugs; only class-A breasts could really alter the average woman. Although, even then, she’d be a joke. One popular Playboy cartoon at that time was, in fact, called The Bosom. Here was the story of a woman who measured 43-22-36. In each issue, the Bosom tried, despite mighty gravitational pull, to walk down the street.
Because so many people thought and often talked about blondness and breasts, even the most highly educated single found herself forced to consider the merits of Clairol and falsies or, more bluntly put, peroxide and “stuffing.” And she confronted an onslaught of beauty advertising—campaigns and strategies way beyond hair dye—that would have made a devoted flapper faint. In its 1956 issue on the American Woman, Life took great glee in itemizing the tricks and tools of the chase. That year alone American women had spent $1.3 billion on cosmetics and toiletries, $660 million on beauty treatments; $400 million on soap and electric grooming devices; $65 million on “reducing.” And that leaves out of the calculations all the clothes that were purchased to allure what Playboy called “the female’s permanent cash box. The hapless soon-to-be-broke American male.”
If some single women were repelled by this competition, others were matter-of-fact. Wrote one woman in the Life extravaganza: “If the race is to continue, we like to provide a second parent. So we go about the serious business of finding husbands in a serious manner, which allows no time for small luxuries like mercy toward competitors. Nature turns red in tooth and claw, every method is fair and rivals get no quarter.”
To say the least, this materialistic—and carnivorous—vision of the single world was disturbing. Columnist Anita Colby, a single working woman herself, wrote in 1956, “Emotionally we single women are at the greatest disadvantage of all women…we face a frightening world by ourselves…. Our enemies are loneliness and insecurity. Anxiety is a familiar houseguest.” But she had some encouragement to add. “Don’t go around feeling unfulfilled, jealous of your married friends, looking at every man you meet as ‘game.’…You have a life of your own.”
As early as 1957, there were 11.5 million single women over eighteen in the United States, compared with 14.5 million single males. Not all of them were updated Eve Ardens—self-deprecating, not quite beautiful, resigned to it—nor were they pathetic Miss Lonelyhearts, the name, in fact, of a character in the 1954 Hitchcock film Rear Window. In this, a bored wheelchair-bound photographer casually watches, and names, his neighbors, following a whole courtyard of minidramas and intrigue, including of course one nasty murder. Miss Lonelyhearts, in a subplot of a subplot, is a single woman who appears in a lone window frame, pacing in boredom. At one point she pretends to throw a dinner party for two when she is all by herself. Another time she brings home a man who attacks her. She breaks down. She takes too many pills. But the average young woman, if she lived alone, was not necessarily “playing dinner” or playing with bottles of mil-town.
She was happily “astray.” Or at least surviving nicely. And she wrote home to say as much on expensive stationery that had on it the word “Miss.” One 1957 Science Digest survey of 6,750 single women, age twenty-five to fifty, reported, “We now seem to be in a nation with a certain group of females who do not look forward to getting married…. they keenly desire other experiences outside the normative marital pattern. They may not always understand why they feel as they seem to. Yet they nonetheless do.”
From another report, written at the University of Michigan: “Whatever secrets they’re not telling…we can now safely say that for certain of these girls, the search for a mate may take an entirely unpredictable path. They are waiting. Even if this, from any reasoned point of view, allows their options to give way.”
One popular holding pattern was to take up residency inside a parent-approved, high-rise nunnery. The YWCA offered small rooms for rent, these regarded as a bit déclassé, and even less glamorous were the barebones old-style boardinghouses. Most nervous first-time émigrés fantasized about the exclusive all-girls hotels on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, specifically the Barbizon, a serene Italianate landmark on Sixty-third Street that was to rooming houses what Smith and Wellesley were to colleges. As the familiar ads read, “Some of the world’s most successful women”—and that included Grace Kelly and Gene Tierney—“have been Barbizon Girls.”
The copywriters left out an essential word: briefly.
A nineteen-year-old resident explained to one of the many afternoon papers, for one of the many “Barbizon Life” stories: “It is the place where you go when you leave something—college; your immediate family; your old life. And for that it’s perfect—as long as you don’t stay too long.” (The oldest resident, usually juxtaposed in photos with a young freckled preppy type, was in her eighties. She was famous for playing the house pipe organ at the afternoon teas.)
In 1958 Gael Greene, then of the New York Post, wrote an extensive ten-part series devoted to her twenty-three-year-old life at the Barbizon, attempting to do for the high-rise residence hotels what Dorothy Richardson had done for shabby lodging quarters fifty years earlier. Like so many other recent graduates, Greene had come to the city “seeking something indefinable—something to do. A rent-paying job, romance, the alchemy that will transform an ordinary girl into an extraordinary woman.”
What she found at her first destination, the glamorous Barbizon, was an overheated planet of lonely women, spinning in an orbit that paralleled that of the city but did not overlap. As she wrote,
…a phone that does not ring. Tears of Homesickness. Gentle smiles of resignation…these are the marks—worn bravely and bravely concealed—by girls and young women alone. There are thousands in every corner of every city. They have no one habitat. Many live in cells—at the “exclusive Barbizon Hotel for Women,” at the Salvation Army’s Evangeline House, at the YWCA. I have lived among them. Each cell is an island. Each island is surrounded by depths of fear:
Fear of Failure
Fear of Spinsterhood
Fear of Sexual assault in a Subway station
And those unknown, inexplicable fears that dull the complexion and glaze the eye.
The day Greene arrives, one floor mate warns, “It’s not easy to make friends. Don’t think you’re going to meet just hundreds of boys or that you’ll meet the One.”
She doesn’t. She doesn’t really meet anyone, except Oscar the famous doorman, who gets her name wrong. She goes out for lone walks and contents herself with small gestures such as buying and polishing an improbably shiny red apple. She sits on her bed and brushes her hair or writes a letter. Her actions are in some form repeated in every small room around her, except in those where a drunken girl is crying or smashing glass objects. To escape the sound (they’ve learned from experience that going in results in one-sided four-hour conversations), residents leave the floor and wander off to do what Barbizon girls do when they haven’t scored a date on a Saturday night. They sit in a room filled with young women wearing nightgowns and watch television. Sometimes, after stations have gone off the air, Barbizon girls, Gael Greene among them, watch the network’s test pattern.
PLAYING IT SINGLE
On television during the mid-to late 1950s, single women showed up in the familiar guises. They were older widows saddened or made sarcastic by life; busybody aunts, maids, older sisters, teachers, or mistress-of-ceremonies types who sang and introduced guests or “gave testimonials,” meaning they held and caressed the sponsor’s product and spoke about it for up to a full five minutes. On commercials, single women were either invisible or ethereal, creatures disconnected from physical life. They never appeared in their apartments or houses or in their offices. We never saw their front steps, their kitchens, their cats. They were pictured only in fantasy scenarios—standing next to Chevrolets and gesturing, waving from magically flying Chevrolets, and dressed most often in evening gowns. The single woman had no place in a domestic scheme, unless she was a spinsterly grandmother or one of those ascendant female consumers, the teenager.
The single woman in 1950s television lived on the sitcom. Here, she almost always played a grown woman who behaved like a perky superannuated teenager. She lived at home, usually with a widowed parent, held a clerical job, and either matchmade crazily for everyone in the cast or became the subject of matchmaking by everyone in the cast. Consider three prime-time examples:
· My Little Margie. A precursor to Gidget, minus the surfing element and smirky cuteness. Margie, played by Gale Storm, whose name promised something slightly more dramatic, lives with her widowed father; although she is supposed to be twenty-one, she seems at times to be about twenty-seven and at others thirty-five. The plotlines can be reduced to two conflicts. First, Daddy can’t control his overgrown baby as much as he’d like, and, second, Margie can’t control Daddy. She doesn’t like his girlfriends and often tries deliberately to spoil his dates. Gidget with a Freudian undertow.
· Private Secretary. Here we meet single girl Susie McNamera, the top secretary to important talent agent Peter Sands. Naturally, Susie is in love with Peter but not fully aware of it as she organizes every facet of his existence, including the arrangement of his paper clips and assessing the merits, so sadly few, of his dates. Eventually, she realizes that she wants to marry Peter and plots with the receptionist to change her image. No one, including a resident expert at the Museum of TV and Radio, is too sure what happened next because the show went off the air suddenly.
· Meet Millie. Secretary Millie Bronson lives with her widowed mother, whose job in life is finding Millie a suitable husband. Millie has a boyfriend, Johnny, who is the boss’s son. But knowing what comes of such class-crossing arrangements, Mom is ever on the lookout, and so is the requisite house beatnik, Alfred Prinzmetal, an artist who does nothing but comment, often to Millie, whom he has deemed worthy of his erudition. This was one of the first shows to establish a principle that would long exist on TV if rarely in life: Everyone loves the single girl. She is the adorable needy human equivalent of a stray pet others want to domesticate.
In fifties films, the single woman turns up most often as a recognizable spinster (Kim Novak in Picnic; The Rainmaker with Katharine Hepburn) or as the exceptional quirky character, in the upper-class division Katharine Hepburn (Desk Set; Pat and Mike), and in the working-class, Judy Holliday. In It Should Happen to You, she’s a girl—a “goil”—who becomes famous by advertising herself on a billboard; in Bells Are Ringing, she works for an answering service, playing a special part for all her clients.
But rarely is the spinster, the shy single sister, the center of the action. As in literature, the spinster serves to better set off the lustrous qualities of the married, engaged, or just physically beautiful star. Either that, or she’s a witch (Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle) or a monstrous bitch (Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar or just about anything else).
If a film had a single woman at the center, then the central question concerned sex and, specifically, whether or not she had any before marriage. One of the most popular films of the late fifties, Marjorie Morningstar, was based on a lengthy Herman Wouk novel set in the 1930s that told in excruciatingly minute detail the whole story of an aspiring actress from a traditional Jewish family that migrated “up” from the Bronx to Manhattan. Marjorie, part princess, part bohemian, struggles with everything—her mother’s prudish interference in her career and snobbish views of boyfriends; the embarrassment and love she feels for her lower-class Jewish relatives; and then the boyfriends themselves, who are so numerous and detailed they need their own book.
But the movie reduces all conflicts to sex. And so it is centered on the novel’s key story—the epic tale of Marjorie and songwriter/intellectual poseur Noel Airman. The film, starring Gene Kelly and Natalie Wood, streamlines the years-long affair—separations, rapprochements, Noel’s impossible drunkenness and cruelty—and in the end marries Marjorie off to the wrong person, which is to miss the whole point. But who cares? It tortures with that core question: Does Marjorie ever break free of her strict Jewish upbringing and sleep with Noel?
In Franny and Zooey, the J. D. Salinger novella, the entire narrative is propelled by Franny Glass’s faint in a restaurant and long, depressed recovery on the living room couch. She claims to have had a religious experience (a common enough occurrence in the Glass family), though young female readers were desperate to know if she was pregnant.
I think it’s been fairly well established that she was. And in the book, yes, Marjorie slept with Noel after months of tortuous concerns about frigidity. In the film, though, as in any fifties film, it’s hard to say. Any discussion of sex, any hint of two people possibly having had sex, was so oblique that the only way to really know was to go back to Peyton Place and From Here to Eternity and read them again. For many young women of the time, that constituted “close” reading.
Sex, and life generally, was even more tortured for the fifties widow. Jane Wyman plays a blind widow who must somehow “go out and meet new people” in Magnificent Obsession, then moves on to playing a lonely widow in All That Heaven Allows. She is only in her forties, but her two grown children believe that Mother must now stay at home, mourning her loss. She tries, then slowly does the unexpected: falls in love with her young gardener, Rock Hudson, who takes her out driving and—very unusual for someone of her social standing—to lobster parties at the beach shacks of bohemian friends. She returns home to lectures on how she is maladjusted and possibly insane. In consultation with members of the family’s country club, the children arrange a match for Mother with a respectable doctor. When she turns them down, they drive the gardener away in retaliation and disgust. Then, to make it up to her—to give her something warm and new in her life—they present her with her first TV. That will keep the old girl company! She sits there staring at it, unable to turn it on, her reflection staring back, a lone face trapped in a box. But then she’s up! Breaking with all form, tradition, her entire life, she races out to find her gardener before it is too late.
Of course the most famous single-girl film franchise of the era belonged to Doris Day, as she played a series of working girls with nice apartments, wise-cracking maids, and careers in demanding but still feminine areas, usually interior decorating. She was always well dressed, articulate, and unusually happy with herself. Until someone started teasing her about her love life. Usually this came down to the question of whether she was a virgin. It’s clear that the accusation bothers her—she probably was a virgin—but it’s not something that, until now, she’s felt badly about. To achieve the kinds of things she has achieved, she’s had to live a disciplined life, looking after herself, part of which meant keeping in mind society’s vicious sexual double standard. For the time period, this attitude seems less prudish and warping than it does practical. (For of course if she had not been a virgin, she’d have had hell to pay for that, as well.)
Unfortunately the issue would in short time make a joke of Doris Day. As comedies began their descent into so-called sophisticated sex romps, the Day/virginity factor became a repetitive gag. (As one producer famously quipped, “I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin.”) She came to seem righteously wholesome. Dull. A too-chatty full-figured gal snobbish critic Dwight MacDonald once described as “bovine.”
But the best of the Day characters were stalwart about sex for a reason. They understood how easily it could be misinterpreted and used against a single woman. In Minor Characters, a 1983 memoir of 1950s Manhattan, Joyce Johnson wrote: “The crime of sex was like guilt by association—not visible to the eye of the outsider, but an act that could be easily conjectured. Consequences could make it manifest…. In the 1950s, sex—if you achieved it—was a serious and anxious act.”
CROSS YOUR LEGS. DO NOT UNCROSS UNTIL WED.
By 1957, sex seemed to be everywhere—in magazines, novels, in the movies—and if you were single and living in the city, there was a sense that it might soon arrive in your very own apartment. The Saturday Evening Post was not alone in declaring, “There are new considerations a girl living alone must take into account.”
In all the many etiquette guides, sex had been little more than a shadow presence, an issue alluded to but not directly addressed. Most of these how-to-live guides covered general comportment—how a woman should walk down or cross the street without seeming too “available”; how she should remove an apartment key from her purse, and how, if there was no doorman, one stood there seeming respectable while opening a door, on a city street, all alone. One could further study how to walk down the apartment hallway when putting out garbage; how to stand or sit while talking on the phone, including, in one book, some pointers on gracefully twirling the cord.
Sex, however, rated few paragraphs. Because allegedly there was no sex. Guides were there to help young women better avoid even the hint. A small sampling of postdate evasions from two books, circa 1953:
—(To be said just before reaching home, while yawning). “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to get up so early—six A.M.! (checks watch) How did it get to be so late? I wish I could ask you up, but perhaps another time. I’ve had such a nice evening. Goodnight.” (Girl then very quickly races up steps to house or out of taxi cab. She waves.)
—(To be said as she opens her apartment door and sees a suitcase, a prop she planted earlier). “Oh my, look! Ssshhh! She’s here! My roommate! She’s a stew! She just flew in from Japan. Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. We’ll have to take a rain check on that nightcap, I think.”
—(To be said if the man was already inside, drinking that nightcap). “Well, I do have to get up awfully early.” If that didn’t work, “I wish I could offer a refill, but (blinks, squints) I’m getting a migraine.” In desperation: “My mother is here from Cincinnati. She’ll be back any minute and so…” Sometimes a roommate might magically appear, or a neighbor who needed (female) help with “a very personal and very upsetting emergency!”
But it got harder to delete sex as a presence in one’s living room and, generally speaking, in one’s life. As one twenty-five-year-old told a Sunday newspaper supplement in 1957:
I was involved in a…conversation with an unfamiliar young man…and I mentioned that I’d just moved out of my parents’ home into an apartment of my own in Greenwich Village. The young man’s ears perked up, his eyes took on a new gleam, his smile grew enterprising and his manner insinuating. “Oh-h-h, so you live alone, do you? And in the Village!?” I realized I’d apparently taken not a new address, but a new address that gave me a whole new character…. I could just see him at my place. We mix up some drinks and…so much for the conversation. You can imagine the rest.
Let’s go back to that man, circa 1953, having his nightcap and listening to excuses in the living room. Here’s how a 1958 guide updated the situation.
From the moment he entered, he leapt to certain conclusions…the curtains are closed and there is alcohol out and on display. The girl has an obvious familiarity with mixing drinks. Note and note well: The way a woman handles…the liquor question is essential because men, except for an unusually sensitive minority, immediately assume that if a girl lives alone she is worldly and, especially if she drinks, she must certainly hope to use her freedom as fully as possible.
Many advice columnists counseled meeting men elsewhere—blocks, entire districts, away from one’s apartment. One 1958 guide, Today’s Manners: Footloose and Fancy Free, was devoted to this idea, providing many specific suggestions on how to manage oneself while entertaining in public. For example, if a single woman invited friends out for dinner, she would designate an escort for herself, first “making it clear to the management that she was the host, that she would sign the check, but that ‘an escort’ would handle the actual transaction.” If there was no available escort, a man at the table could be “discreetly called upon to do the honors.”
If the plans called for her to arrive at the appointed place alone, there were comparable instructions. According to Footloose and Fancy Free, “If a woman arranges to meet a man in a central spot, a hotel or a restaurant, for example…[and] she is the first to arrive…she should ask to be seated at a table. It is perfectly alright to order a cocktail or coffee while waiting…the man pays for it when he arrives.”
But life was rarely that simple. Men came over. They often invited themselves or just showed up. And as much as no one wished to acknowledge the idea, men stayed over.
“My kids have the idea that nobody before 1960 had recreational sex,” said Martha, a secretary turned travel agent, now sixty-four. “Oh, you tried harder in those days to push it back. You went to theater and made excuses after, tried not to have him see you home, or he came in and you tried to cut it off and it was so awkward…. Eventually, though, you’re twenty-three, you’re not married, and you’re human. As they say, do the math.”
Part of the math involves a consideration of the unpublicized figures. Between 1944 and 1955 there was an 80 percent increase in the number of white babies put up for adoption and an unspecified but noted rise in what were known as “homes for wayward girls,” especially on the East Coast. While it’s impossible to calculate the number of illegal abortions performed, coroner’s and doctor’s reports indicate that between eight hundred and one thousand women died each year from these procedures.
Other signs of sex in the culture were harder to miss. By the late fifties there was an increasingly visible sexual demimonde. As one New York Tribune columnist described it: “Movie stars who are idolized by millions jump in and out of bed on the front pages of daily newspapers. Celebrities and socialites return from trips to the Caribbean with ‘traveling companions.’ A celebrated romance finally culminates in a wedding and five months later a ‘premature’ 11-pound baby is born.” And less celebrated young women became the subjects of stories typically entitled (this from the Daily News): “Bachelor Girls: Their Lives and Loves.”
The bachelor girls in question were usually models or Rockettes; starlets, including Tina Louise; debutantes; the serious young career women “who work in the budding communications field;” and sometimes shockingly “open” rising stars. Like “Queen of the Bachelor Girls” Kim Novak. In two columns, she was pictured with four different men, including one South American dictator and a “Negro” entertainer (Sammy Davis, Jr.). She was also pictured all alone, sitting back in a chair, eyes closed, her bare feet up so that a reader had to remark both at her casual mien and her flaming red pedicure.
Bachelor girls like Kim, it was solemnly reported, “play by their own rules.”
For example, good for three columns, they dated married men. “Sure, I mean, course we do,” one BG told an eager reporter. “If only for the convenience! They don’t stay. They don’t make a fuss. In some ways it’s the ideal date.” One “Swedish girl” interviewed for the husbands series told the News that “other girls laugh at me because I don’t understand why they would go with a husband. They can’t see that it is a problem.” The Americans defended themselves. They were not immoral but “regular” women “making the most of a difficult situation”—not meeting the right men, perhaps not yet ready to—and, as another put it, “We are not evil. We are tired of sitting home on the weekends…. What does it mean to be immoral? We are just living the lives we have and we happen not to have husbands…. I do not think that for this reason we are going to hell.”
Surprisingly, the author of one 1959 story sided with them. Sort of. “Today in the midst of the rootless, unmarried groups that gravitate to a large city, a girl finds that it is often ‘square’ to be good. Besides, she herself isn’t quite sure anymore what is good and bad, and neither is anyone else…. there is not a dropping off of morality. Just a shift in emphasis.”
Others disagreed entirely. In 1959, the Juvenile Aid Bureau, a social agency that had previously dealt largely with runaways, was charged with “easing the flow of incoming girls to New York City.” As one bureau official explained, “We spot a girl getting off a bus or a train and wandering the streets. We question her.” Under an obscure piece of municipal legislation called “the Girl Terms Act,” they could further “hold her until her family can be queried. If there is no family, or, as is often the case, the family does not want the juvenile back, and if the girl has no immediate relations in New York to claim her, we will send her back to the point of embarkation on her ticket.” In 1959 the JAB reported returning 350-plus suspicious-looking girls (that meant oddly dressed girls, slutty-looking girls; those too young and those not white).
Everyone acknowledged that most of these girls would find their way back in. At best they’d get clerical jobs they’d quickly lose, becoming rootless “wandering types.” Or they’d become prostitutes and drug addicts. Worse, they might become bohemians.
ON THE BEAT
The Beat generation is one of those mythical twentieth-century constructs that we associate with a loose conglomerate of crazy brilliant men. Jack Kerouac and his male muse, Neal Cassady; Allen Ginsberg, of course, and William Burroughs—and all the lesser luminaries who floated into and out of their lives, novels, and poems from their days at Columbia University, circa 1945 through the 1960s. But floating around in the background, handing out invitations to poetry readings, discussing art and writing, were a lot of intriguing young women—Hettie Cohen Jones, Joyce Glassman Johnson, Elise Cowen, and poet Diane diPrima, among many uncelebrated others.
These never quite became household names, but many of the onetime Beat girls went on to become writers and artists, just like the men. And some turned out to be chroniclers. It’s these women who later wrote the best memoirs of Beat life in New York City and San Francisco. And as much as these stories and the memoirs—How I Became Hettie Jones; Minor Characters; Beat Girl—re-create the joy ride of Beat life, they are also historical documents of what it was to be young and single in the 1950s and to have blatantly ignored the rules. Many, like Joyce Johnson, began life as middle-class girls, from “decent” families who lived in Upper West Side apartments that had grand pianos, shelves filled with the “great” books, and well-kept furniture. In Minor Characters,her 1983 memoir, Johnson writes better than anyone, ever, about the female double life, the one that started for her at age thirteen, with furtive trips into the Village, and continued as she moved out of her parents’ house at twenty-one, radically taking her own place.
“Everyone knew in the 1950s why a girl from a nice family left home,” she writes. “The meaning of her theft of herself from her parents was clear to all—as well as what she’d be up to in that room of her own…On 116th Street, the superintendent knew it…. He spread the word among neighbors that the Glassmans’ daughter was ‘bad.’ His imagination rendered me pregnant.”
Actually, what she did was to live there (and in many other places), to hang around with important male artists who spoke mostly to each other, and to work. She supported her boyfriend, Jack Kerouac, when he was around, as well as anyone else currently in the Jack entourage. It’s what the girls did. Every morning, long before the men were up, with their hangovers and artistic visions, supportive Beat girls left the confines of the Village, took a train, and, as Johnson writes, “emerg[ed] into the daylight at Fiftieth Street [where] I’d feel I’d been swept up into an enormous secretarial army advancing inexorably upon Madison Avenue…as part of this army, I typed, read manuscripts, answered the phone, ate egg-salad sandwiches in the downstairs luncheonette (I’d learned very quickly how to locate the cheapest item on a menu).”
Her own books and stories were published, although no one, including her, made much about it. The Beat girls who became famous did so for extreme and daring acts, like Elise Cowen’s. Joyce’s beloved and dearest friend, she threw herself through her parents’ living room window, a suicide at twenty-eight.
At about the same time, Rona Jaffe published her best-selling novel The Best of Everything, the classic three-girls-come-to-the-city story, and forerunner of the Jackie Susann blockbusters. Her mother grieved. It was 1958, and a career put such a damper on a possible marriage! Then the book was turned into a film with Hope Lange as the aspiring editor and model Suzy Parker as the second of her roommates; Joan Crawford even put in an appearance as the bitch spinster boss who keeps them overtime at the keyboards. It was a huge hit. But “poor Rona!” as a family friend said to her mother. “With the film sale…all that money, now she’ll never get married.”
A popular magazine feature during these years—adapted as a late newsreel short subject—was the photo essay I think of as “Girl Comes to the City.” Panel by panel, we watch the new girl arrive and get settled. She meets her roommates, gets a job, fights for a stool at the pushy luncheonette counter, and accepts that she will not find a seat on the subway. These features always included a shot of the girl in a bathrobe, hair twisted up in a towel, as she prepared for a date. No one has ever looked so excited while painting her toenails.
In other shots of her at a desk, or stopped on the street, waiting to cross, she looks sad. Months have passed and she’s learned a few things—about married men, wolves, loneliness—and she wonders perhaps if she shouldn’t just pick herself up and go home. Then the last panel. Girl in the tiny shared living room, staring out at the skyline or, more realistically, at fire escapes and squat brown water tanks. The scene is so hypnotic that she has the essential epiphany: There is so much here to see and to learn that to return home, where she’s seen and learned all there is to know, would be a kind of death.
I’m sure some looked at these pictorials and saw a titillating but pointless risk. Others saw a travel poster on which a special message had been engraved for them in invisible ink. It said, “Come join us!”