CHAPTER SIX
I used to pick out the people who lived alone—on the subway, the street. Every time they had these glassy eyes, like nothing’s living in ’em. Dead.
—NATALIE WOOD TO STEVE MCQUEEN, LOVE WITH THE PROPER STRANGER, 1963
Whatever your age, your single state is nothing to be ashamed of. Let the girls who marry at 18 or 20 defend their position. They’re the ones who are missing out.
—REBECCA E. GREER, WHY ISN’T A NICE GIRL LIKE YOU MARRIED? 1969
We have a message for the men here today: FUCK OFF FUCK YOU. You have caused enough grief humiliation for centuries…Leave your lie-wives and girlie-friends. Give us back the names we came with. Go!
—A BROCHURE I FOUND IN A PARK, SPRING 1970
THE SECOND COMING OF THE SINGLE GIRL
Images of the 1960s have been so long in circulation that someone born in 1984 could easily assemble his or her own timeline or montage: JFK and Jackie; the Zapruder film; Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; Vietnam (with asides for the Beatles, the Apollo missions, LSD), and, depending on one’s mood that day, conclude with Woodstock and microminis, or Kent State and My Lai.
In most schematics, single womanhood as a significant phenomenon does not make the charts alongside the antiwar crusade or the blossoming of the counterculture. It bubbled along throughout the sixties as a bright and sexy trend, a magazine story or pictorial that could also be played as maudlin or scary. As a serious, permanent social fact, it would emerge with the women’s movement of the early 1970s. And the early women’s movement was the last and, as many, many frightened people viewed it, the least serious of the uprisings. Who was being hurt, exactly? Was the phrase “white middle-class woman” next to the word “oppressed” an oxymoron?
One “then girl” explained: “Nobody took you seriously if you were married and presumed to be a housewife—you were just another married speck. What were your problems—and who cared? If you were single, even if you were wearing bright yellow vinyl boots like I was, you were still just a girl who was going to become a housewife. No great tragedy…. As someone who might have a complicated political or social situation—forget it. You were invisible.”
By the mid-1970s, however, single women would emerge as among the most economically and socially significant of all the onetime shadow population groups. Being single, like being openly gay, would finally lose any lingering taint of ugly character weakness, any hint of pathology, and come to seem an entirely viable way to live—what someone back in 1925 had first called a “lifestyle.”
Traces of this new single appear as if on cue in 1960. First, the 1960 census reported that 9.3 million households, about 18 out of every 100, were headed by solo women. (And the dramatic rise—more than a million since 1950—was genuine; it did not reflect the fact that there were simply more households overall.) More women, it seemed, earned their own money, and because there was more readily available housing, they did not have to live with relatives if they chose not to. True, most of these women were safely identified as widows, but close to 2 million were divorcées, 900,000 were separated from their husbands, and most shocking of all, 1.4 million of these women had never wed. “Who Needs a Man Around the House?” asked the New York Mirror Magazinein spring 1960. Beneath the enormous headline we see a Grace Kelly blonde, stretching as she gets out of bed wearing a negligé. We next see her pictured seated serenely with coffee and newspaper, and in another frame she is casually repairing a broken cabinet all by herself. It’s threatening, but for safety’s sake, a cat has been included in one photo and a caption reassures readers that she used this pet as an “outlet” for expressing affection.
By the early sixties, marriage as a national ideal, an enforceable teenaged daydream, had lost some of its hypnotic force. The number of divorces nationwide had doubled in the ten years since 1952. Thousands of housewives, already identified as “miserable” and “suffering,” were sending rescue notes to magazines, begging advice. Ladies’ Home Journal launched the famed, long-running feature “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” The Feminine Mystique came out in 1963. “Togetherness,” that byword of 1950s normalcy, began to sound ominous. Among the most popular films of 1962 was Days of Wine and Roses, starring Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as a couple free-falling into mutually supportive alcoholism. The film seems microscopically focused on alcohol abuse, complete with a Twelve Step savior who appears at the end, to explain Important Facts about The Issue. But it may also be seen as a portrait of midcentury marriage as claustrophobic nightmare—“togetherness” as the theme for a monster movie. Here, in a small apartment, live a devoted modern couple who have dutifully excluded their closest relatives. In their isolation, their willingness to get or do anything for each other without question, they slowly poison each other.
By far the most controversial element of an evolving single consciousness was the introduction in 1960 of the Pill. All over the country, college-aged girls, “nice” girls from “fine” schools, began taking it en masse and saying radical things about sex—or so it seemed to a population unaccustomed to this open public discussion. More alarming still, they sounded very blasé about the things they said. These young women “assume that [sex] is a possible and probable part of a single girl’s experience,” wrote young reporter Gloria Steinem in Esquire in 1962. As one graduate student told her, “Lovemaking can be good outside marriage and bad in marriage just as easily as the other way around. Sex is neutral, like money. It’s the way you use it that counts.” One national magazine polled four hundred college students on “chastity.” The findings: Nearly “all respondents…virginal or no more…said…sexual behavior is something you have to decide by yourself.”
Many young college women used their training in logic to support this newly constructed morality. One of Steinem’s subjects had affairs out of marriage because, in her considered view, women were meant for lots of sex. As she reasoned, females were the only mammals capable of orgasm during times they were unable to conceive, therefore orgasm must have served some other purpose, namely pleasure. Another argued: “I’m not preaching against the institution of marriage by having affairs beforehand and I’m not going to produce illegitimate children for society to take care of. People who have no share in the consequences should have no share in the decision.” A companion of hers solemnly concluded, “With one hundred percent birth control you are not running the risk of hurting anyone by your behavior and therefore it is not immoral.” Others were more practical: “If I’d known, I might have postponed my wedding and had pre-marital relations instead.” (One campus student board declared that by 1984 “women will be 100% unchaste.”)
Within two years of its introduction, at least 750,000 American women were on the Pill and an estimated 500 more began taking it every day. The Complete Book of Birth Control, published by the Planned Parenthood Federation, reported on who they were and went on at some length. I quote it briefly: “More education and better income…tend to shift the responsibility for birth control to the wife. Informal studies indicate the same shift among unmarried girls.” Unlike the diaphragm, the Pill could be prescribed for a number of nonsexual causes—menstrual irregularities, control of ovarian cysts—and thus there were convenient excuses for anyone to take it.
Gloria Steinem, starting here to sound like Gloria Steinem, wrote that “the development of a new autonomous girl is important and in numbers quite new…. She expects to find her identity neither totally without mennor totally through them…She has work she wants to do and she can…marry later than average, and have affairs if she wishes, but she can also marry without giving up her work.”
This new female “type”—still, of course, years from reality—so excited authors and sociologists that they began to examine the possible specimen right away. What many saw was a normal girl, a future wife who had, amidst this onrush of divorce, become cynical, a wary spectator at what Phyllis Rosenteur in The Single Woman (1961) called the “quickie in-and-out affairs that often masquerade these days as marriage.” She called her the “intuitive woman” and charted her development in this way:
Out of childhood, into adolescence, a girl begins observing for herself, and what she sees and hears and feels runs counter to conditioning. Many become confused and, more than that, suspicious…. Nothing is accepted as blindly as before and some may even actively rebel against some of the rules. Others merely back away from both the “normal” path to marriage and the ranter’s route to stormy singleness; in some private corner of themselves, they plot an independent course, and then pursue it just as silently as people will permit.
The following year, researchers at Stanford announced that women with deep insight into established male/female roles were less likely to make an early “uninformed” marriage. Science Digest reported that a University of Michigan study of twenty-five hundred singles had found unwed women to be happier overall than their male counterparts—no matter the persistent belief that men idealized their bachelor years and left them reluctantly. With the exception of divorced women, who were uniquely stigmatized, researchers concluded, “the single woman who lives alone…[was] not usually a frustrated old maid. And among those who live alone, women are not the weaker sex. Generally, single women…experience less discomfort than single men…. They are more active in the working through of the problems they face and appear stronger than single men in meeting the challenge of their position.”
Helen Gurley Brown, newly appointed editor of a revivified Cosmopolitan, hated that language—“discomfort,” the “challenge” of one’s sadly “compromised” position, or the word frustrated as it applied to anyone single. She had just married for the first time at thirty-seven. And, using her own slang (“mouseburger,” for example, meant a quiet, spinsterish girl) and dousing it with exclamation points, she’d published the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Here we meet a new variation of the single girl, this one a tornado of competence—pretty, slim, but also smart, “up” on the news, well-read, and given to sewing and cooking while at the same time cramming in some art history or Russian literature. She worked hard at a job in the arts and lived by herself in a sleek, sexy apartment. She was enormously popular but seemingly choosy, selective; very hard to get.
As Helen Brown says of her own single days, “The phone just rang incessantly. It was terribly annoying if you were trying to get something done. There were nights, I tell you, when I just carried the phone over and put it into the freezer.”
She’ll go on to tell you of the radical impact she made with this vision of a single aristocrat. (“It was the first time anyone suggested that being single was not the same thing as having a social disease!!”) But even though this girl “lived by her wits…sharpened…honed…coping with people trying to marry her off,” she was still an elaborately decked-out slab of bait. Brown devoted whole chapters to mascara, clothing, and bizarre seductive technique (“any unusual jewelry is a come on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look too Ubangi!”). Just as nineteenth-century girls had been encouraged into smashes, their affectionate behavior good practice for the marital arts, so this new single girl was honing herself to be a unique modern wife or, in the spirit of Helen Brown, a delectable, frothy, and fabulous wife!
Still, all silliness aside, Brown was advocating a time-out for self-improvement before marriage. Gloria Steinem’s autonomous girl calmly went out, or so it was said, and had sex. And the vision of all those cabinet-repairing amazon divorcées! Put together, the new sixties singles began to sound slightly alarming.
Esquire in particular became obsessed with a female uprising. There were long essays on ball-busting new types, for example, the “American Witch,” a spoiled, selfish bitch who deliberately failed to share male enthusiasm for football and did not leap at commands for food. One parable told of a distant time when little Caroline Kennedy, grown and now president, oversaw a program that allowed every American woman to grow a penis. Men, psychological eunuchs, took refuge in bars.
Others objected along more familiar lines. Author Pearl Buck, returning to the States after years abroad, wrote that of all changes “the new ethics of sex” was most amazing, “so abrupt, so far reaching that we are all dazed by it.” But she believed that an insufficient few had stopped to consider the consequences—the many unwanted children that would still, even with the new “technology,” result in “rows and rows of tiny unattended cribs.”
Several professors from universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Tufts foresaw in these loosened sexual constraints a dissolving national morality. If women, like men, could engage in whatever sexual practice they chose, when they chose, in short, without any external controls, they were more likely to develop a reckless spontaneity in other of their actions. From a letter to the New York Times: “Women, like some men, now find it fashionable to behave and conduct themselves in whatever way they choose, in consideration only of their own feelings. Too bad if there are children.” To quote one Harvard psychologist, “This sudden emphasis on individual choice, a morality of one, is…dangerous.”
Occasionally one heard a measured voice. Sylvia Porter, in her New York Post column, “Your Dollar,” took on the new female single as a social development that required a practical, not moralistic, response. She called on manufacturers to package smaller meals and scale products down to suit the family of one. The housing industry, she believed, would need “to develop centrally located…inexpensive, small apartments.” As she reported, “According to a census spokesman…there will be more and more [single women] as the years go on.”
In fairness, one professor who’d expressed concern about a relative female morality also urged caution in too quickly judging women. Considering female freedom, he had found at least one “salutary” side effect. “A woman free to find fulfillment in marriage and work” was far more likely to “be self-motivated. Autonomous…This is the kind of woman who makes the ideal teacher.”
It was, after all, still 1962 or 1963. Most of the single women inspiring such terrorized discourse were still in fact teachers, secretaries, or something else safely within the canon of female careers. A 1960s board game for girls, “What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls,” laid out the possibilities. Along with teacher and secretary one could work toward “stewardess,” “model,” “nurse,” trying to avoid two old-maid-ish cards known as the Duds, either a fat middle-aged actress with runny makeup or else an unmistakable spinster.
Interestingly, the spinster as a type had floated back into the national discourse, this time as the subject of an obituary. So many millions of girls automatically married that the society for some time had lacked traditional spinsters. But lamenting the lost spinster—that toothless, brutally bunned stick in black—was actually a handy way of denouncing the new single. In cartoon panels and staged photos, our suddenly beloved spinster was juxtaposed not with the baby housewife who had replaced her, but with a Pill-taking stew or a wealthy single babe, a socialite with décolletage stretching down to her navel. In 1963 The New York Times Magazine ran a spinster eulogy that refined the identity of the primary “spinster killer,” who was none of the above—not the baby bride, the pill-taking girl, or the rapacious socialite. She was, rather, the average unmarried working girl who could easily beome any one of the above. She applied cosmetics, hair dye, and as one caption put it, “overnight, she’s a new girl, with a new look, a new personality, a new life.” Whatever direction it took, she was very unlikely to end up a traditional and suddenly beloved auntie spinster.
I’M FEMALE, FLY ME
According to the Labor Department, single women in the sixties worked in greatest numbers as secretaries, titles that after several years might be renegotiated, fluffed up, and rechristened “assistants to.” That is, if the girl in question remained a girl and didn’t marry. There was still a deep mistrust of the married working woman, who would, wrote one insurance-company employee in Glamour, “naturally get herself pregnant at the first opportunity and abandon her precious files one afternoon, just like that.” (United Airlines enforced what were perhaps the most blatant restrictions. Until 1969, all stewardesses had to be provably single; if they married, they “retired.”)
But the finest of the young career breed—the white, the virginal, the unwed—were often canonized in Look and Life spreads, as they had been twenty years before. The jobs, or the companies at least, had cachet—CBS, the UN, Christian Dior. The girls, however, still took shorthand.
As Life exclaimed in 1962, “Glamor, Excitement, and Romance and the Chance to Serve the Country—How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl and Work in Washington!” And there she was—Nancy Becker of Columbia, Missouri, at her desk, chin at rest on manicured hands, her pearls, her pencils precisely arrayed, her eyes “full of stardust.” She worked, filing, for the Justice Department. On the following pages young women with similar jobs were seen at Georgetown dinner parties, playing touch football (just like the Kennedys!), and shopping for antique rocking chairs. “It’s the perfect opportunity and so honorable to be here,” said a twenty-three-year-old interviewed for the piece. “But I think we most all agree, most of us are going to be marrying and seeing where that takes us, even if that’s Kansas.” They’d always have Washington.
In New York City the working girls weren’t so sure. In a 1961 Mademoiselle piece, “The Great Reprieve,” young Joan Didion wrote of Manhattan as an Emerald City that held out to its most tentative residents
this special promise—of something remarkable and lively just around the corner…. They do a lot of things but girls who cometo New York are above all uncommitted. They seem to be girls who want to prolong the period when they can experiment, mess around, make mistakes. In New York, there is no genteel pressure for them to marry, to go two-by-two…. New York is full of people on this kind of leave of absence.
By 1963, the year The Feminine Mystique crash-landed, many reported “feeling bugged,” bothered about “all the intense spying to see what I am up to,” to quote an airline ticketing agent in Glamour. “I expect to look up and see my brother standing there, 600 miles from home, just dropping by to examine my ring finger.” One of Didion’s subjects refused any longer “to parry delicate questions about my plans.” They had left home, gone off, transformed themselves. They were trying.
“It was an outrageous dare,” says “Sally-Jo,” age now “fifty-plus.”
I remember getting off the bus from Wisconsin. It was in 1964. Beatles time. And I was waiting for my luggage—I’d brought a big round hatbox and a big suitcase-sized makeup kit—and I was standing right by the exhaust pipe. I remember feeling dizzy and thinking—Yes! This is it! I inhaled deeply. That’s how thrilled I was!…Asphyxiated, wandering off to find a subway, not a clue where I was going, holding a freaking hatbox.
Just as they had in the fifties, and in the thirties, and in the time of the Bowery gal, officials likened these “girls” to unwanted immigrants. It was as if the shirtwaisted shop girl had reemerged in Marimekko separates, gotten drunk at lunch, and been spied on her break doing the Watusi. No one knew what to do about her or it or them: gangs of fully developed females who’d finished at school and now seemed to be on quixotic scholarships of their own design. An excerpt from a 1964 inquiry published in the Sunday New York World Telegram:
Every day they come. They come from Oregon and Iowa, from Utah and Illinois, from Ohio and California. The come from small towns and medium-sized cities…from colleges and communities where they were important, special, secure. They come to a city that is dirty and difficult and massively indifferent to them. A city that will charge them outrageous rents and pay them shamefully small salaries at first…it is a city bursting with thousands who are equally talented and gifted. Who are they? These women ignoring the fears of parents, the advice of friends, the gloomy prediction of city planners?…How many will there be this week and the next? How many will there be in five years?
One soothing remedy from the past was to count them. According to New York’s YWCA, there were about 100,000 more in 1964 than there had been the year before and an employment agency specializing in the now popular “communications” jobs (advertising, TV, magazines) reported its “applicants from out of town going up, up, up—8 percent more this year [1964] than last.” There were 350,000 total, reports read. One heard that 25,000 were hiding out in the Village, 300 of them appearing semiweekly in Babe’s Beauty Shop and close to 400 working or volunteering in museums. Odd random surveys, to cite one, revealed that 500 girls interviewed on the subways had once been Girl Scouts, though most—93 percent—did not think their scouting skills helped much in their lives as city girls. And it seemed they now wanted jobs that demanded more than a proven ability to whip through “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-semicolon.” Glamour in its 1963 “Happiness Index,” reported, “Happiness is an $8 raise; the boss’s compliment; not having to shave your legs.” A contemporary issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaimed: “The girl who comes to New York is no longer just the young actress or ballet dancer yearning for a chance…Madison Ave. has replaced Broadway as the street of dreams…the new girl is more likely to see herself writing sparkling copy or holding a clipboard for a television producer.”
By the mid-sixties, young single women had begun to appear in ads and fashion spreads as busy TV-set assistants, lone car drivers, career girls holding blueprints with pencils tucked behind their ears. Although these were models, human props, it’s hard to imagine anything like it—discernible professional tracings—even five years before. Lone girls were also shown doing unlikely things. (One 1965 Goodyear ad showed a woman in standard sensible dress changing a tire. Read the caption: “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.”) Even tampon ads featured actual photos of young singles with names like Deborah or Patty. Dressed crisply in white, they were “stepping out” on their own. Tampax, say what you will, was another sign of their “independence!”
There were also certifiable single working girls on TV—Marlo Thomas as That Girl in her yellow-striped chain-belted minis; Honey West, girl detective—as well as clever dare-taking teenagers (Patty Duke; Sally Field) and magical creatures beyond male control as on Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and the little-remembered My Living Doll, in which Julie Newmar, prior to Catwomanhood, played a beautiful robot who goes her own way. Real life provided even more exotic singular oddities (Joan Baez,* Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand, Renata Adler, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda, Anna Karina, Suzanne Farrell, Twiggy). Even the singles featured in the long newspaper stories (“Why?” “For how long?” “What about those babies?”) seemed more stylish, daring, and accomplished. One World Telegram Sunday section, circa 1965, featured young, pretty, and, for a change, serious professionals. They interviewed a twenty-five-year-old woman who designed furniture. Another worked at Mademoiselle and also freelanced for a magazine called In: A Guide to the Swinging Single New York. There were real estate brokers. Broadway production assistants. Former civil rights workers hoping to get involved in politics.
Of course at least one among the young professionals questioned it all. Here that was a thirty-two-year-old advertising account executive who, pictured chewing a pencil, admitted, “I want a career, but I don’t want to be the kind of woman men talk about as career women. I’d like to keep at least a few shreds of my femininity.”
Single-girl stories always included such confessions, worries, or an authorial caveat, as if it was the writer’s responsibility to list all contraindications for this radical trial drug called independence. Most of the pieces concluded with a haunted question: “Even now, in black moments, they ask, ‘What am I doing here?’” or “Why should I stay? Who’d notice that I was gone?” “What if there is no one here for me?” or “Is this…it?” But there were also breakthroughs. Entrée to a key social circle. A new man. Better, several men. And there were always the women who—damn it all!—went out and battled to become the serious “girl” who did not type. (Typical tale: As late as 1968, famed NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was told by a potential employer, a friend, “Nina, you know we have our girl already.” Nina, successfully, went and became the Girl somewhere else.)
Even the average single woman now had, as the Reader’s Digest said, “a shot at life previously unimagined. Today’s plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did—trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all these places they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde.”
They also had a bit of fun. Many became expert at blowing off whole afternoons at foreign films or in Lord & Taylor’s. And gradually, whether they liked the idea or not, young single women began to go out in mixed groups. When asked where they were going, no one said, “On a date.” The new reply was “Just out.”
THE SINGLE STRIP
The “swinging” singles scene began with a simple and unglamorous realization: Young people were lonely. Families had begun their slow dissolve, shown the first fresh results of divorce, corporate transfers, migrations south and, of course, the familiar, now more frequent announcement “I’m off to the city, Ma, bye!” Many magazine stories and essays began this way: “The girl or boy who lived next door or two towns over has gone, off to school in the East, to Europe, or New York City.” It was a cliché—any reference to a girl next door had long been a cliché—and yet it was in some undeniable way true. “Anonymity” replaced “togetherness.”
In his 1965 book, The City Is the Frontier, Dr. Charles Abrams, the head of Columbia University’s urban-planning department, warned that the city was unprepared for the “convergence” of all these anonymous strangers. How would people meet? Not on the street, where a strict taboo prevented eye contact and conversation. The city, Abrams advised, would have to open to singles, to build special housing, unique public meeting places, become in some sense what he called a “trystorium.” Thus began a small singles industry. At the start there were simple “pay parties,” mimeographed telephone lists, and gimmicks—restaurants with phones at the tables so that if a girl wished, she might call a man seated elsewhere, or “wash-a-terias,” Laundromats that served Cokes and played records. In late 1964 Mike O’Harro, an ensign who had founded a private dating “association,” organized a computerized list of forty-seven thousand singles nationwide. “I had the idea at a party I threw in Virginia,” he told Newsweek. “I realized that every person at this party, everyone did different things, and they were all lonely. I was lonely, and it occurred to me that it had to be true in other places.”
Along with others who’d had the single epiphany, he began to stage regional activities. To be single in Denver at the time might have meant attending a “woodsie,” a weenie roast and dance party up in the Rockies. In New York, couples met at rooftop “drinks parties”; roofs had been declared among the “new mating frontiers.” “Causes” were also big—work for a candidate, attend many fund-raisers. Single visionaries took it further, plotting apartment complexes for singles only, miniresorts that would include pools and tennis courts, bars and lounges placed everywhere for optimum mixing.
Grossinger’s, the venerable Catskills resort, had held its first singles weekend in 1961. By the mid-sixties there was barely a resort or a cruise line that had not imitated the package. By 1965, single life was said to generate somewhere between twenty and fifty million dollars per year. And those figures grew as whole neighborhoods “went single.” Manhattan’s East Side, starting at East Thirtieth Street, heading up to Ninetieth and stretching from the East River all the way to Fifth Avenue, was christened “the singles ghetto,” a minicity of new high-rises and older buildings where girls learned a few quick rules about real estate. (“No one wanted to rent to three girls—three girls was a brothel,” says one marketing analyst, now fifty-six. “You claimed two and kept the third as a constantly recurring cousin from home. Or a stew.”) Thousands of actual stews, secretaries, ad copywriters, sports columnists, “just regular guys with jobs” filled out the area—780,000 of them, according to one insurance company. (There was in fact a real “stew zoo.” The address, as well known as the Barbizon Hotel’s, was 345 East Sixty-fifth Street. During the mid-1960s, the building was 90 percent stewardess-occupied.)
On weeknights residents filled the restaurants and movie theaters; on weekends, they filled the bars—Maxwell’s Plum, Mister Laffs, TGI Friday’s—a collection that stretched out along five crowded blocks of First Avenue. By midnight on Saturday, it seemed that someone had thrown a frat party without realizing a street fair was already under way. Newsweek called it “the body exchange.” Others likened it to a zoo, a “place made up of hands, hands, HANDS grabbing at you.” Or waiting on you. It became one of the city’s much-repeated mating tales that J. Walter Thompson employees actually competed for waiter and bartending jobs after hours. As one explained, “Where else am I going to meet chicks?”
The bar strip was also ground zero for journalists assigned to this generation’s singles beat. The standard device was to catch bits of conversations between couples who’d “connected,” as if on The Dating Game, and had invariably misheard each other’s names. The strategy, then, was to follow the strangers—one long-haired eyelinered female, one preppy male wearing bell-bottoms—as they moved in on each other and, if the reporter got lucky, left the bar together. But there were other scenes and other stories, and many girls could not stand the meat market that was the Upper East Side. Some preferred Village bars or jazz clubs or the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, Cheetah’s, or the Electric Circus, where there was less date making than dancing and for the shy a lot of visual distraction—Warholian performance art; the first of the sparkly-ball light shows—also much potential single-girl sex. Sometimes right there.
“Wherever you went out in the 1960s, and I went, just went, wherever—it was very dark,” says Julie, now forty-nine, divorced, and the mother of two kids she adopted on her own.
It was the bars that were labeled “singles” bars that were the creepiest, I thought. Little red candles, all those guys with the open shirts and this glob of hair sticking out. People dressed alike. I liked places where there was more of a circus-y diffused scene…these bars really were meat markets…. I can remember at Maxwell’s, or one of them I got dragged to this one time, being afraid of going to the bathroom because I had inadvertently made eye contact with this manly-man kind of guy at the bar and I was afraid he would misinterpret my walking toward the bathroom as a cue…. It seemed so predatory.
WHERE HAVE OTHER SINGLES GONE?
At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers….Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”
In March 1966, Time devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike most parties, however, the boys and girls were naked.”
“That sounds about right,” says Sally Hoffe.
Very Berkeley, but I’d be lying if I said in the Midwest I did not attend my share of like events…there was a lot of loosening-up of what you wore and who you were. Or who you thought you were that week…[but] not everyone participated. There were many girls who still had on the sensible Butterick sew-it-yourself shifts…. There were the wedding announcements and the “bride elect”! I always remember that phrase, bride-elect, the chosen. But what was it she chose?…My radicalization was to see this engagement ritual as a kind of sleepwalking…. Didthey really want to get married, or had they run out of ideas already?
At about this point in time it becomes more difficult to write about single women as a unified class. There were so many variations on the single state, so many stops along the singular spectrum. For example, in 1967 half of all women in their thirties were married mothers who remained at home full-time. But of these women, 17 percent were legally separated, or temporarily apart from their mates due to the Vietnam War. Thousands of women were already choosing to keep rather than give away out-of-wedlock babies—and to live with friends, sisters, boyfriends. The number of women who reported cohabiting or “having recently cohabited” was at about 550,000. Some single women lived in Upper East Side apartments or at the Y. But an equal number lived in communes or feminist collectives or in coed group housing. And many were developing unique new views of singularity. A graphic artist and illustrator recalls life on “the commune of the Feminine Mystique, Brattleboro, Vermont”:
Everyone was equal and everyone was beautiful and cooked. Of all the memories of that time, I still see mostly the bowls and bowls of spaghetti. And I remember what they looked like the next morning, when I came down and, as one of two women, found them waiting for me…I was never really able to have roommates after that. If there was one night and things didn’t get put away, I became this insane despot…. I think it’s true about a lot of single women—theyhave their weird baggage. They’re pretty much always there, living alone, for a reason. And that reason is usually other people, no matter how many times they make the mistake again and again…. I think most of us end up where we want to be.
In Mary Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments (1977), we meet a young woman who’s devoted her entire adult life to caring for a pious father. Like a nun, she leaves the house for a walk just once a week; the rest of the time she organizes his papers, infuriating the local widows who desperately want the job. After his death, the widows seek their revenge, joining with the church leaders of this small Catholic community in trying to sell her off to some other old person in need of a secular nun. They manage to give her a hideous spinster haircut. But she is rescued by a trio of childhood friends who have watched over this stunted single life for years. One day they force her into the car, into the city, into a life of her own.
One asks if she wants to get married.
No, she doesn’t. “I want a terrific pair of high-heeled shoes…like Rosalind Russell…I want a very small apartment and I want people to refer to me as a bachelorette.”
“The term now is swinging single,” one of them tells her.
“And they call that progress,” she responds, knowing that they could have called it anything and called it an improvement.
SINGLE SLASHING
If singles were an increasingly diverse group, there was still one stereotype that reporters loved most of all—the “swinger”—that college grad with fake eyelashes and daiquiris or the faux hippies holding joints and daiquiris. By 1968, New York’s famed “singles ghetto” had been renamed the “girl ghetto.” And its residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny. Tired of writing about bar etiquette, reporters began to meet subjects at their apartments to get the inside view, often the morning after a singles night out. Many of these apartments were in upscale buildings—three and a half rooms, the rent at about $225 per month, making a three-way share just affordable. No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they’d got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That’s because reporters did not want to know.
These pieces (“Living It Up on Broadsway”) always began with an inventory of the girl’s appearance. She was usually dressed in a bathrobe or some kind of unflattering caftan or muumuu, one shoulder forward, so that it formed a bony shelf for messy hair. Mascara was always smudged and eyelashes glued together in tiny triangles. Here was the perfect way to survive articles you didn’t really want to write: Apply New Journalism techniques to an otherwise dreary scene. Stories told of freshly washed coffee mugs that “still had on them lipstick traces” and, once, brilliantly, a lipstick-stained school-size milk carton. They noted what was on the couch—a heart-shaped pillow, cat-shredded tasseled pillows, teddy bears—and what was under it (always a cache of cigarette butts, magazines, a shoe). These sorts of stories often included tours of the refrigerator, where some vegetable had metaphorically dried and shriveled. And they had a real time of it when it came to the medicine chest. Tranquilizers? Laxatives? And “depending on the carefulness of the housekeeping”…the Pill?
Occasionally, very occasionally, a woman wrote about the new single life for herself. The only prerequisite seems to have been that she find it, with six months’ retrospect, disappointing and scary. In 1966 The Washington Post Magazine ran an unusual parallel assessment of the city’s single life, from the point of view of a white writer, Judith Viorst, and a black writer, Dorothy Gilliam. The lead paragraphs:
Judith Viorst: Washington is full of single girls between 20 and 30 who are having a ball, cracking up from loneliness, being mistresses, living in deadly fear of rapists and purse snatchers, trying to decide which man to marry, or trying to face the dismal fact they never will.
Dorothy Gilliam: There are single Negro women all over Washington who live and breathe and laugh and weep and take tranquilizers and fret that there are too few men and too little culture. They aren’t poor or on welfare. Their lives are parallel to white working girls’ but with exceptions—exceptions that extend from the fact of their being Negro.
As the sixties wore on, the reporting moved from “realistic” to what may safely be called “hostile.” Writing about a bar in Washington, D.C., another Post reporter lightly described the patrons, then got down to it.
To walk into Wayne’s Luv is both an admission and an assertion. She is admitting to anyone who cares to notice that she has not been found attractive enough to have a date that night; and she is asserting that she is realistic enough not to worry with the mundane games of dating propriety that were encountered by an earlier set of singles. In a sense, she assumes a more active role of enticement, hoping in her own mind that somehow he will saunter out of the amber haze and notice and speak and want Her…. it beats the Great Grey Tube.
No stories ended without a reference to television. In Washington, D.C., clerks were stuck at home watching Get Smart. (Although Agent 99 had a fairly exciting single-girl life.) Secretaries in Chicago all had colds in the winter and nothing but Gilligan’s Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Lost in Space reruns to keep them company. Some stuck in their mate-meeting high-rises might have tuned in to one of the popular doctor’s shows, many of which carried a special message for uppity single women. In a 1989 essay, academic Diana Meehan relates the sad fates of three single-girl guest stars on these 1960s hospital dramas. First, on the popular Marcus Welby, M.D., Welby protegé Steven Kiley makes an advance on a nurse and she rejects him. Within hours she is thrown from her horse and paralyzed. On Dr. Kildare, a “No, thank you” to an internist seems to lead right away to a leukemia diagnosis. On the precursor to E.R., Medical Center, the one who says no, in the span of twenty minutes, contracts breast cancer.
During the early seventies, there was a popular Friday-night show called Love, American Style. According to TV Guide, more people were likely to see it in a given week than to experience anything like love of any genuine style in their lifetimes.
DAYS OF MACE
Back on August 28, 1963, a petty thief named Richard Robles broke into an Upper East Side apartment and killed the two young women who lived there. Years later, when such single killings had become commonplace, New York Times reporter Judy Klemesrud wrote with complete accuracy: “The brutal slaying of a young single girl…probably causes more shock and public horror than any other.”
But the “single girl murders” as they became known across the country that fall, were a shocking devastation. The perpetrator had chosen the address, 57 East Eighty-eighth Street, because he’d seen an open window, there was no doorman, and he thought no one was home. When he got through it, intending to steal jewelry or money, Janice Wylie, a blond twenty-one-year-old Newsweek researcher, ran in from the other room. Robles grabbed a kitchen knife and raped her. Emily Hoffert, a new roommate, entered the apartment, shrieking that she would remember his face, identify him—and something snapped. Robles began clubbing both girls with glass soda bottles, then for an hour slashed and stabbed them with knives.
The case is remembered now as the one that led to passage of the Miranda rights legislation; the wrong man, not properly questioned, spent years in jail before Robles was apprehended. But what remainded in consciousness, of course, was the girls. Emily had just started work as a teacher. Janice wanted to be an actress and looked so hopeful, ready to go!, in all her pictures. Her father, Max, a well-known adman and writer—who, with a third roommate, found the naked bodies—later committed suicide. (An ironic footnote: It was his brother, Philip Wylie, who wrote such misogynist tomes as Generation of Vipers, the World War II diatribe that accused those neurotic “Lost Sex” women of ruining men, killing them, destroying their souls.)
An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later confessed that he’d seen her stumbling and, thinking her drunk, changed his mind.
Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.
“The nurse under the bed” became a set piece in scary games girls played during my childhood. The message was clear: If you live by yourself without a husband, you’d better learn how to hide.
By the seventies, and the full blossoming of the bar scene, single murders began to fall into a category of their own. This kind of dispatch was commonplace: In October 1973, Carol A. Hoffman, thirty-one, a publishing assistant, was stabbed and then brutally strangled with panty hose in her apartment. The most shocking aspect of the Hoffman case was that she had let the killer into her apartment because she’d felt sorry for him. He had appeared at her door in distress and told her he was looking for another resident of the building who’d raped his wife. While the man was there, elaborating on this story, Ms. Hoffman’s boyfriend happened to call. He advised her to get the guy out quickly and even spoke by phone to the distraught visitor. He raced over, but by the time he arrived she was dead. Building residents were horrified—but not, it seemed, all that shocked. Here was a “mostly singles” apartment, no doorman, with a history of muggings. One neighbor, identified as Marti, a graphic designer, recalled bringing home a strange man who, after three hours of conversation, attacked her. She’d escaped by racing down the hallway, banging on doors. “How could I report it?” she asked the reporter. “What was I going to report? Oh, hi, I brought a man home with me, and look what he did!”
The women who wrote these stories—Gloria Emerson, Judy Klemesrud, Charlotte Curtis, Nan Robertson, among others—were on their own emerging as singular voices. They had come up the usual journalistic route: from file clipper or researcher, then moving, after a few years, to the 4F sections or pullouts. (4F: “food, furnishings, fashions, family” was still the journalistic female ghetto). Some of them had been quiet forces in the sex desegregation of the New York Times help-wanted ads in 1967 and had been active in the landmark class-action sex-discrimination suits brought against the Times, Newsweek, and other news corporations during the early seventies. (Without these actions, it’s unlikely their bylines would ever have appeared anywhere outside the 4F cookie/sweater slum.)
Their stories of singular peril began to take on an eerie similarity. Imagine modern Bowery gals, a group of friends dressed up to go out one weekend night, to a place that seemed like a wild carnival midway. It was loud and friendly, but there was also an unmistakably dangerous undercurrent. Patrice Leary, Roseanne Quinn…their names blurred with their stories and photos. Just regular young working girls, in their twenties, hair parted down the middle, found dead after leaving a bar alone or with a man they did not know. Their friends, who resembled them, would be photographed huddled together outside the bar. Sometimes their words made up the captions: “There is no such thing as too cautious.” “To be realistic in this city means to be paranoid.” “I sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed.” “The uglier I look, the safer I’ll be.”
An acquaintance of mine recalls:
In the early to mid-seventies—that was when New York made its big turn…. It was not just edgy in some places, but filled withdrug addicts and people who weren’t wearing shoes and talking to themselves…. It seemed very dangerous all of a sudden…. I remember the week I was flashed by three guys, once right in the subway and, I swear, he was looking straight at me; once when I came home—I lived in the Village—and found a guy on the steps with his dick hanging out, and once as I waited to be buzzed in at a friend’s…. I had been at the bar [W.M. Tweed’s] where Roseanne Quinn disappeared, I still remember that, and I left and walked over to this apartment and there was the man with his dick out…. That’s when I got a purple belt in karate.
As journalist Lucinda Franks wrote of young women in the early seventies, “Anxiety had slipped around their lives like a back brace.”
It seems in the spirit of the times that Jane Fonda won the Oscar for Klute (1971), in which she played a prostitute stalked by a crazed john. Another hugely popular film, Play Misty for Me, flipped the roles, updating the noir B movie Detour, in which an inexplicably demented woman stalks a man she’s casually met, here a radio deejay played by Clint Eastwood. Looking for Mr. Goodbar, based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, concerned a seemingly plain Irish-American schoolteacher who, in response to upsetting events in her past, starts to pick up men in bars, night after night, year after year, until finally one of them kills her.
But despite its seeming death sentence, single life in New York City continued to thrive. New Yorkers, after all, like single women living anywhere, had been forced to cultivate and maintain a sense of humor—satiric, or sardonic, and that adjective so often stapled to the single woman, masochistic. The most perfectly preserved example of sardonic female masochism may be found in the Gail Parent novel Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York (1970). Sheila, who’d moved from Franklin Square, Long Island, to the city, has, after several years, decided that she has no hopes of marriage. Every girl in New York City has the same apartment she has, the same hairstyle, has read the same books and has the same recipes and goes to the same kinds of events to meet the same men. In the movies, Doris Day had moved to the city and day one found a spacious brownstone she paid for with her unemployment check. The next day she ran into Cary Grant, who accidentally spilled coffee on her, gave her a job, and eventually married her. As Sheila observes, her life has taken a slightly different course. Thus she’s decided to kill herself and spends most of the novel both looking for a mate and shopping for a nice, reasonably priced coffin.
But let’s put aside all the feelings of terror and doom and look at some of the more common low-grade anxieties that plagued the 1970s single pioneers. The best depiction of this ill ease, the widespread state of singular dislocation, may be found in a little-known film called T. R. Baskin (1971), starring Candace Bergen. Here is a young single woman, well educated and interesting, ready to experience life, yet self-protective and a little shy. Her circumstances, that is, the 1970s, don’t favor the self-protective and slightly shy. She has just moved alone to Chicago, has her own apartment, works at an anonymous office job, and on the weekends attempts to go out with her friends—but it’s always a struggle. In groups they go to restaurants and clubs or to apartments far more garishly decorated than her own. The parties always start up quickly. Never is she really a full participant.
By the early seventies, the singles culture had reached the point where men very often assumed that single women they met wished to have sex with them. That’s the atmosphere here—uninvited male hands suddenly everywhere. Men attempting to feed our heroine Kahlúa, whiskey sours, and spilling the drinks down her shirt. More than once we watch T. R. struggling out of a male hold and explaining to friends, who tease her, call her a prude, so uptight (then practically a curse word), that she must go. Like a lot of reserved young women, T. R. is uncomfortable in the anonymous new single world. I think of the old shop girls and how the same questions applied: Will the heroine maneuver out of the dreary job and away from all those awful people? How can she avoid parties like sexualized rackets if they scare her? And what about the friends determined to find her a one-night guy? Why, as T. R. might have said, do I have to be this age and single right now?
THE BIONIC SINGLE
In many ways it was an excellent time to be young, single, never-married, or even divorced. Penny, a science writer, now forty-nine, says,
People don’t understand that the 1960s progressed very slowly in terms of actual change. On tape, it all looks like a…colorful streak! But for a long time girls had helmet hair and pleated skirts on, stockings with garters, not panty hose, plus squishy-toed heels. To go out, you prepared for upwards of two hours. You went out “put together” or you—my mother said this—“put your face on” and then, all “faced up,” you could face the world. Even though the fashions had this baby-doll quality, the little dresses and booties, you still had on so much makeup and support garments that you kind of looked armored…. Most girls, remember, got married—that’s what you did; you got married and that was the progression. A lot of people lived through all the weirdness of the 1960s in a married couple. But when things really crashed—in 1969 and I’d say 1970—they really crashed. The changes started seeping out from there, and there was no going back.
Consider that in 1957, 53 percent of the American public had believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally. During the early seventies, a similar study found that just 33 percent of a large sample group had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them “neutrally” and 15 percent approvingly.
There was even a weak but nonetheless official endorsement of single womanhood from the New York Times. In August 1970, the Times ran an editorial announcing the emergence of “the Liberated Woman.” It began by providing necessary context.
Because western societies are increasingly rich, they can afford to educate more of their women and provide them with leisure. Because science has eliminated most of the drudgery if not the tedium of farm [and]…household work, millions of women are free to leave the fields and the kitchens and work beside men…those women who have no taste for marriage or childbearing will feel less constrained by society to adopt roles which are uncongenial….
That was not to incite all solo girls to rush out and change. As the authors went on to note: “The family has proved to be a durable human institution in many social settings…. The revolution in the status of women will change much and will leave much else unaltered.”
One of the biggest changes would be in mass perceptions of unwed women.
During the next few years the single woman would enjoy her own widely endorsed public honeymoon. Newsweek reported the following year that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” There were stories on dropout wives, and some sociologists and economists predicted that we would eventually find ourselves in a “totally singles-oriented society.” Frozen dinners for one. A rebellion against the terms “double-occupancy” and “family discounts.” The Mary Tyler Moore show was in its prime, Rhoda and Phyllis still popping in to complain before fleeing Minneapolis for their own single sitcoms. In 1974 the New York Times wrote, “In all respects young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago. [They are] self-assured, confident, secure.”
For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time ever, single women began to think about establishing adult, fully furnished lives by themselves. Landlords, who’d clung to the image of stewardess-with-dead-plants (or, not that it was said out loud, “dead stewardess”), began to see a new kind of single female tenant—older, meaning thirtyish, more established and serious. In the words of one young woman, “Do not dare call me a swinging single. I’m an unmarried grown-up.”
“Women’s lib,” as it was still called, had started to change things. “I never in a gazillion years thought I would rent, much less buy a house without being married or at least living with someone,” says one never-wed art appraiser, “age—deliberately vague.” But, she says, by the time she’d reached thirty, “I was tired of living out of the big version of a suitcase—not having the nice things in the style I wanted them in because, goddamit, I was supposed to have these things selected from my registry, or to pick them out together with my husband, with whom I was to establish a real, permanent home…. I didn’t even have a nice car. Everything was on hold and I was just too far along in all the other areas of my life to live without a decent shower curtain or wineglasses.”
One marketing executive called it learning to “think singly.” And everyone, even the very married, was advised to learn the dance steps.
By 1975, one in four households were headed by single women, the combined results of so many women waiting to wed and so many others having their marriages unexpectedly end. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of that year made it much easier for women to buy condos and entire houses and to have aligned in their wallets as many credit cards as they chose. (Before that, in many states, it was impossible for a woman to get credit except under her husband’s name.) And many were using them “to buy very ‘nice things’ like Limoges china and Baccarat crystal,” as The Christian Science Monitor reported in 1975. “They don’t feel that a woman’s home life begins when she marries.”
“It’s hard to imagine attaching much importance to an ashtray, or to even now believe you owned an ashtray, but I bought a Steuben ashtray,” says “Jo March,” forty-six, special-events manager for a large department store. “It was so clear and heavy and big it took over the room. I saw it that way, anyway. Because it was ‘real.’ Because it didn’t fold up or come in garish colors. I’m not sure I even liked it, I just wanted to have a Something that told people I was living in that place for real, that I was a big girl, and that I had taste.”
The other enormous change in single lives was the addition of children.
Back in 1960 an approximate 10 percent of all unwed mothers had kept their babies; ten years later that number had climbed to 45 percent, and in 1975 fully half of all unwed mothers—in most major cities in the Western world—kept their babies. When interviewed, most of these women said they’d like a mate and a large number indicated that they had wanted to live with the baby’s father. Then they’d go on to explain why, for many complex reasons, it was not possible. But that didn’t change a thing about the baby. He/she was hers and belonged to her alone (not in any way to her parents, spouse, priest, “society,” or the baby’s father), and she planned to raise him/her on her own. Starting in 1970, more young mothers every year would never marry.
It had also become easier for a single woman to adopt. In 1968 New York City officials had looked at the “staggering illegitimacy rate” and decided, according to one city-administration official, that “half a home would be better than none.” Borrowing from a Los Angeles program, New York social services offered to qualified singles “children termed hard to adopt,” meaning over the age of three, handicapped, or mixed-race. The adoptive parent had to meet specific criteria—have a steady income and a college degree. It was important that they have primary family members nearby. As it happened, all of those who qualified were women, former or full-time social workers, either widows or divorcees.
The most visible symbols of change were not these sudden mothers minus fathers but the outspoken and very cool-looking single celebrities. The best example of the breed was without a doubt Gloria Steinem. Steinem began her public life during the early sixties as a hardworking journalist, who happened to be very pretty and went to A-list parties and dated famous men. She hated being referred to as a “woman writer,” which of course meant the secondary, soft kind of reporter. But from the start of her writing career, she’d been drawn to women as a subject. To mass changes occurring in women’s lives. And to situations that exposed what was not yet called sexism. She also chose female subjects who seemed to have much stifled anger and no voice, most famously Pat Nixon, who managed to express much outward public rage at Steinem’s perceptive and honest portrayal.
The details of Gloria’s life intrigued people. She’d grown up poor and neglected, then won a scholarship to Smith and spent a year abroad as a Neiman Fellow in India. She returned to New York and settled into an Indian-themed studio in the East Seventies that she kept filled at all hours with interesting people—politicians, reporters, actors, and, increasingly, prominent women. Over the years, Gloria was most frequently pictured out dancing with her wealthy, good-looking beaux. But by the early seventies, once she’d been declared the new voice of feminism, magazines like Newsweek stopped the dance-party photos and went with long vertical shots of her giving speeches, the sort where the viewer begins at the shoes and works up the long, long legs to the incredibly short dress, to the famous hair, and then, lastly, the microphone.
No matter what Gloria Steinem said or did, no matter whom she interviewed—and she was for a long time a political columnist for New York magazine—it would be noted only that she “did something for clinging dresses,” thanks to legs “worthy of mini skirts.”
She was described as “the thinking man’s Jean Shrimpton.” Even after she’d founded Ms., turned her apartment into a sort of women’s shelter, and become the women’s movement’s most important player, its secret weapon—the one not perceived as ugly, angry, or cranky—here’s how people wrote about her: “She stands there, striking in hip-hugging raspberry Levi’s, 2-inch high wedgies and a tight poor-boy t-shirt. Her long blonde-streaked hair falls just so above each breast and her cheerleader-pretty face has been made wiser with the addition of blue-tinted glasses; she is the chic apotheosis of with-it cool.”
Gloria Steinem liked to state that “young girls were refusing to be blackmailed into domesticity.” But no matter what she said, the ultimate question for Gloria Steinem was always What about you? She was gorgeous, though well into her thirties, and so what was she waiting for? When all was said and done, people wanted to know When Would Gloria Settle Down?* Otherwise put, when would she shut up and get a man?
She married for the first time at age sixty-five.
THE SINGLE TAKES A SLIDE
The 1980s, by any estimate, marked a low point in the public accord between single women and men, each side accusing the other of roughly the same crimes: insensitivity, dishonesty, stupidity, and sometimes martyrdom. It was during the late 1970s that this public mudslinging got under way. In newspapers and books and on TV talk shows, the women—“liberated,” successful, often divorced—suddenly began to lament a shortage of intelligent, sensitive men. And it was more than mere numbers, more than the well-known fact that so many men were gay. It was the quality of the men themselves. As Mademoiselle had put it with great prescience back in 1955, “Perhaps there is only a shortage of desirable men—men who are not too fearful and too repressed or too smug or too uninteresting.”
In stories typically entitled “Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” prominent women denounced the single-male population—those “guys” hunkered down in dated bachelor pads, who readily lied and preferred jail bait or the standard fuck-and-run. Reporters in cities everywhere gathered groups of men in bars, apartments, offices, and asked them to answer the charges. Sessions sometimes lasted well into the early morning. Christ! Weren’t these bitches just spinsters-in-training? Victims of women’s lib? They were probably dogs. There were references to dry vaginas.
And the conclusion: If there was a shortage of men, it was only because so many women out there were female losers. As one man, forty-one, told the New York Times: “All these intelligent, articulate frank strong women…[who are] attractive, beautiful and who now feel so much better about themselves, now look around only to find men suffering from various sexual and psychological dysfunctions? Who’s jiving whom? If you’re not turning us on, baby, check your assets. You really haven’t come a long way. You are boring us.”
On it went, from 1974 to 1980:
Women: “I have lost all patience with men who like little girls.”
Men: “Women want to see your pay stub and your investment portfolio before accepting a drinks date.”
Women: “Aging bachelors can age all on their own, without my assistance.”
Men: “What do women want? They want to be free to do whatever they want, as long as a man pays for all of it.”
Both: “It’s just too hard…I think I’ll stay home…I got an answering machine!”
Columnist Russell Baker, in 1978, questioned the value of so many staying home alone.
The women’s movement attempts to lionize the female bachelor. Newspapers, books, and magazines recite happy tales of women who, having successfully skirted the perils of husbands and nestbuilding, have found contented anchorage in private harbours alone with their TV sets, their books, their wine, their pictures, their telephones, and their self-fulfillment…. you wonder whether we are becoming a race that is simply afraid of people.
There were many women out there in other parts of the country who were not afraid of people, not angry, and not included in this press coverage of the single and her minidramas. Single life as presented in the mass media was a phenomenon of the big cities and the affluent areas in particular. Said one woman in the mid-seventies:
I just laugh when I read about the exciting single life…what wonderful chances there are for a girl alone today. That Cosmopolitan Girl! Wow! I’m a secretary to a man who owns a liquor store—the only other men I meet are married liquor dealers. If it hadn’t been for my kids, I would’ve moved to a bigger town—maybe Detroit, when my husband took off. But I bring home ninety-five dollars a week—before taxes, get that—and my mother takes care of my two little girls while I’m working…. Where is my wild single life? And I am twenty-eight, thank you.
At the same time, no matter their circumstances, all single women had many unlikely things in common.
To speak of the very tangible, unmarried women’s household incomes averaged 60 percent less than two-income (usually married) households; unmarried men, however, maintained household incomes just 15 percent less than those of married couples. Single women paid more taxes than married women—as much as 20 percent more (“America has a severe case of the singles,” said Money magazine in 1976). And there was also the bizarre single world of insurance. For a long time it was hard for single women to buy homeowner’s insurance: because there was likely to be no one home during the day, she was considered a bad risk.
And they shared less tangible things.
Most significant was the fact that women, even if they loved their single lives, were not accustomed to spending so much time by themselves. In Toward a New Psychology of Women (1979), Dr. Jean Baker Miller, a feminist and psychiatrist, addressed this absence of “connection.” She described one subject, a “bright career woman” about twenty-seven or twenty-eight, who was “very active and effective” but essentially depressed. As difficult as it was for her to believe, this woman had found that she could not feel happy without a man around, even briefly, to watch her and approve her efforts. After many years of training to perform in front of or manipulate men—not that she would have put it quite that way—she found that she needed the affirmation, if not the security of a regular relationship. As quoted in a story on the book:
I know it’s bullshit…but what if there isn’t a man there, watching me? Then it’s like this moment—whatever it is I am doing—doesn’t matter…. Of course I really care about my girlfriends; that’s a given in my life. But those bonds can’t really ever develop into what I’d call the fundamental thing. To make it real, or meaningful, or whatever, there has to be the sound of one man clapping. I know this sounds totally sick.
Miller argued that such women—and there were a lot of them—suffered less from father fixations or advanced insecurities than they did problems of “affiliation,” what Miller called the learned overemphasis on connections to men. As she wrote, “They lack the ability to really value and credit their own thoughts, feelings and actions. It is as if they have lost a full sense of satisfaction in the use of themselves and of their own resources or never had it to begin with.” One single woman, thirty-one, put it bluntly: “There’s the sense that there has to be the other person there.”
There was also the shared sense that the singles scene, or culture, or business was becoming an embarrassment. “I went, I swear, once to a ‘singles fair,’” says a bonds trader, forty-eight, married now but at the time the kind of woman who had “affiliation” issues. (“I always sat on my couch facing kind of sideways, with my legs curled up, as if I was having a conversation with someone. I wasn’t.”)
She recalls leaving the fair after one group exercise: To walk out of the hotel hosting the event and into a nearby “department store and to walk out with the names and phone numbers of three single men. I would rather have risked the humiliation of being rejected at Studio 54 than have had to do that,” she says. “This was the key to my future?”
Singles expos, singles magazines (Your Place or Mine?), and humiliating gift books (How to Make Love to a Man, with chapter headings such as “Wash the Dishes Nude”) made single life seem sleazy. And it was still, more so than ever, a dangerous way to live.
City cops and social workers routinely made statements to newsmagazines such as, “Young unmarried women are destroyed by seeing liberation strictly in terms of sexual freedom.” They referred to the fact that the single murders so common in ’73 and ’74 had continued and now most often had a drug connection. And they didn’t mean the much beloved Quaaludes. (Just to give some sense of how “beloved”: In 1979, Edlich’s Pharmacy at First Avenue and Fiftieth Street reported filling eighteen thousand prescriptions for methaqualone, generic for ’ludes, more than half the entire state’s total and more than half went to young women.)
“Nice” girls were found in motels far west on Forty-second Street, overdosed on heroin, and others OD’d from the lines of cocaine that were passed around on party platters. Girls from the suburbs were found in Central Park, unconscious or dead. Rape attacks were up or just reported more consistently.
The head of the New York City rape squad very memorably put it this way: “Single women should avoid being alone in any part of the city, at any time.”
And there were deeper, less immediately palpable terrors still.
In January 1979 the New York Times reported, “Hospital at last identifies its shopping bag lady.” Pictured was an old Hungarian woman who’d been found a while back wandering, stupefied, her possessions—old photos, letters, postcards, canned soup, pretty scarves—neatly arranged inside Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s shopping bags. The director of the Human Resources Administration’s Office of Psychiatry noted that “there are probably a couple of hundred shopping bag ladies in the city.” (If you had looked up the very first reference to “shopping bag lady” in The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, 1977, you’d have found “see tramps.”)
Her cheeks had collapsed around her gums. Her hair was gray and spongy, and she wore whole sets of clothes on top of other clothes as if she were her own personal closet. She looked like a character summoned to the present from an old fairy tale, only the summoning spell had played a trick. She was not the pretty, wide-awake heroine you’d been expecting. She was the embodiment of all that can go wrong to the pretty and wide-awake heroine. Hers was one of the classically awful female fates—the hideous hag—and there was nothing comfortably mythic or metaphorical about her at all.