A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of women’s historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document I’ve quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.
There are many excellent overviews of women’s history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
On the history of feminism:
The standard reference and most frequently assigned women’s history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century,American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches(New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a women’s history class (usual recollection: It was “gay”; “it had this stigma”; “it was passé”), here is a brief beginner’s reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.
Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (New York: Ballantine, 1969); Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Vivian Gornick and Barbara K. Moran, eds., Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (New York/London: Basic Books, 1971), (see especially famed sociologist Jesse Bernard’s “The Paradox of the Happy Marriage”); Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (complete with diagrams for the revolution) (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial, 1979); the brilliant but scattered opus by “individualist” and celebrity feminist Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971); Juliet Mitchell, Women’s Estate (New York: Vintage, 1973); Robin Morgan, ed., Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York: Vintage, 1970); Mary Wollstonecraft, On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Economic Relation Between Women and Men (1898; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Lau rel/Dell, 1983), and Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1952; New York: Vintage, 1989).
Major cultural overviews:
There are a few academics who break through and, without sacrificing the beauty and complexity of their argument, write their studies in colloquial English. To put single women in context I relied on three scholarly works. First, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s erudite and imaginative essay collection, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Another essential work is Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor, 1988). And Lois Banner’s American Beauty (New York: Knopf, 1983) is a well-researched and amusing book on beauty culture and a must-read for anyone with an interest in the tangled evolution of female style.
Image and advertising:
For advertising in the nineteenth century, Ellen Gruber Garvey, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (New York: Ox ford University Press, 1996); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979); George Burton Hotchkiss and Richard B. Franken, The Leadership of Advertised Brands (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1923); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972); Erving Goffman, Gender Advertisements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); Martha Banta, Imaging American Women: Ideas and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). The best and most amusing feminist media survey of the postwar years is Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1994); also Joan Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House, 1997).
On film:
The two best books on women in film, both published in 1973, approach the subject from differing perspectives. Marjorie Rosen’s Popcorn Venus: Women, Movies & the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973) is a thorough sociological and historical accounting of women’s roles in film from the silent era through the 1960s; Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape, 2d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), takes a psychoanalytic approach to the female characters and film tropes of the same period. Two period studies that attempt to assess the effects film had on young women are: Herbert Blumer and Philip M. Hauser, Movies, Delinquency and Crime (New York: Macmillan, 1933) and Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: Macmillian, 1935); Kate Simon’s memoir A Wider World (New York: Harper & Row, 1986) is one of many memoirs and stories of taking refuge, and plotting out a life, at the movies. As she writes, “The brightest, most informative school was the movies. We learned how tennis was played and golf, what a swimming pool was and what to wear if you ever got to drive a car…and…we learned about love, a very foreign country like maybe China and Connecticut.” Also: Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1988); Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage, 1976); John Margolis and Emily Gwathmey, Ticket to Paradise: American Movie Theaters and How We Had Fun (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991).
On New York:
Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Lloyd Morris, Incredible New York: High Life and Low of the Last Hundred Years (New York: Random House, 1951); Hank O’Neill, Berenice Abbott: American Photographer (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), on the premiere photographer of the city; Mary McCarthy, Intellectual Memoirs: New York, 1936–1938 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); Mary Cantwell, Manhattan, When I Was Young(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995); James McCabe, Light and Shadows of New York (Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1872); Dan Wakefield, New York in the Fifties (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Elizabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (New York: Knopf, 1993); Luc Sante, Low Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
ON THE PRESS:
American journalism:
Frank Luther Mott, A History of Newspapers in the United States Through 250 Years, 1690–1940, 3d ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Single Blessedness, or the Single Ladies and Gentlemen Against the Slanders of the Pulpits, the Press and the Lecture Room(C. S. Francis and Co., 1852); Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1920); Horace Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: JB Ford, 1868); Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, New York Writing from the Penny Press to Melville (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995); Paul H. Weaver, News and the Culture of Lying (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1994). Godey’s Ladies Book, founded in 1830, became the premiere women’s magazine, the model for all others, throughout the nineteenth century. Stories, lectures, allegories, storiettes I used in research: “Woman” (1831), “An Old Maid” (1831), “Husband Hunters” (1832), “The Bachelor’s Dream” (1832), “Mary, the Prude” (1832), “Female Accomplishments” (1835), “Female Education” (1835), “Women at Twenty-one” (1835). Books on Godey’s include: Ruth Finley, The Lady of Godey’s, Sara Josepha Hale (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1931). Also, on magazines: Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, reprinted and updated, 1938–68).
CHAPTER 1: THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER
Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Women and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), a wonderful study of women in England and their attempts to live communally in the mid to late nineteenth century; Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Working from four famous novels the author charts a fascinating and original thesis on societal responses to women living in groups. See also: Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Sheila Jeffries, The Spinster and Her Enemies 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), is the best work published on 1920s-era sexology and its long-term detrimental effect on single women. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) stands as the pioneering and intensive work on early single revolutionaries dubbed “the Singly Blessed”; Susan Leslie Katz, “Singleness of Heart: Spinsterhood in Victorian Culture” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1990).
Dorothy Yost Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Literature: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951), is the seminal work on the spinster in novels. The book received much popular attention because of what I’ll call its news peg: There were, or so it seemed, a large number of single women in the population, and one had to study them in historical context and, with an unavoidable 1950s bias, determine what they might do to “adjust” to their status. The author concluded there was much a spinster might do in modern society, as opposed to most of the sad women she wrote about. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2d ed. (1980; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Susan Koppelman, Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1984); Laura L. Doan, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Journal of Feminist Studies/Critical Studies Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
On Florence Nightingale:
I. B. O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 1820–1856: A Study of Her Life Down to the End of the Crimean War (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931); Nightingale had the distinction of being the lone woman included in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1918) and the far more unfortunate distinction of being viewed in it as a repressed sexual hysteric. Florence Nightingale to Her Nurses: A Selection from Miss Nightingale’s Addresses to Probationers and Nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s Hospital (London: Macmillan, 1914). There is an excellent discussion of Florence Nightingale in Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913); Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Atheneum, 1983). Myra Stark, ed., Cassandra (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979).
On Louisa May Alcott:
Ednah D. Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890); Sarah Elbert, ed., Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
On Clara Barton:
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); William E. Barton, The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1969).
Conduct books and nasty warnings:
Ann Judith Penny, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (London: Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858); Mrs. Ellis (Sarah Stickney), The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1842); Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (New York and London: G. P. Putnam/Knickerbocker Press, 1905); Susan C. Dunning Power, The Ugly Girl Papers, or, Hints for the Toilet (New York: Harper Brothers, 1875); Robert Tomes, The Bazar Book of Decorum(New York: Harper Brothers, 1877); Eliza Leslie, The Behaviour Book: A Manual for Ladies (New York: Willis P. Hazard, 1854).
“Muzzles for Ladies,” Strand Magazine, no. 8 (1894); W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant?” Literary and Social Judgments (London: Trubner, 1868); Daniel Defoe, “Satire on Censorious Old Maids,” in William Lee, ed., Daniel Defoe, His Life and Recently Discovered Writing, 3 vols. (1869; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969); Mary Ashton Livermore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1883).
Spinster novels:
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771; New York: Penguin, 1967); Jane Austen, Emma (1816; London: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Sense and Sensibility (1811; New York: Penguin, 1976); Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849; New York: Penguin, 1974), Jane Eyre (1847; New York: Bantam Classics, 1988), and Villette (1853; New York: Bantam, 1986); George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations(1860–61; Lon don: Penguin, 1965) and David Copperfield (1849–50; London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (New York: Penguin, 1981); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853; London: Penguin, 1976); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Buccaneer Books, 1982).
Twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Sanctuary (New York: Scribner’s, 1903); Edna Ferber, The Girls (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1921); Anne Parrish, The Perennial Bachelor (London: Harper Brothers, 1925); Margaret Ayers Barnes, Within This Present(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) and Edna, His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Josephine Lawrence, But You Are Young (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), a novel on the “new dependency,” a trend also known as “the piggy family,” and The Tower of Steel(Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), the story of four single girls in the city, an early version of this familiar genre (one is in flight from her piggy family—“the indecent demands made upon her spiritual privacy”—one commits suicide, and so on); Sophia Belzer Engstrand, Wilma Rogers (New York: Dial Press, 1941) and Miss Munday (New York: Dial Press, 1940); Zona Gale, Faint Perfume (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923); Fanny Hurst, The Lonely Parade (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942); Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born (New York: Scribner’s, 1942); Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Scribner’s, 1911); for the Lily Briscoe character, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland1909–1912; New York: Pantheon, 1979) and The Yellow Wallpaper (1892; New York: Bantam Classics, 1989); Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York/London: Governeur, D. Appleton and Co., 1943), for the two spinster piano teachers who live off the snacks brought to them or accidentally left by their piano students. Esther Forbes, Miss Marvel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Spinster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).
Theodore Pratt, Miss Dilly Says No (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1945), a little-known spinster novel about a movie-company secretary who writes terrible scripts no one bothers to finish—they’re as dull as she is! Then she writes a memoir of her life as a movie-company secretary, never thinking it might be published. It is. Be comes a best-seller. And so the film companies, her own especially, fight over the rights to make the movie of how idiotic they all are. Miss Dilly, locked up in a hotel room with a starlet bodyguard, repeatedly says “no.” Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: Knopf, 1963) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New York: Dell, 1966); Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) and The Group (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963); Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (New York: Avon, 1985); Anita Brookner, Look at Me (New York; Pantheon, 1983), Hotel Du Lac (New York: Pantheon, 1984), Family and Friends (New York: Pocket, 1985), and Brief Lives (New York: Random House, 1990); Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).
Periodicals:
“The Old Maid of the Family—A Sketch of Human Life,” Atheneum, no. 3 (January 1830); J. A. Turner, “Link Not Thy Fate to His,” Peterson’s (Apr. 1859); “A Woman Alone: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly, vol. 51 (1978); Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer, “The Unglorified Spinster,” Cosmopolitan (May 1907); Francis Power Cobbe, “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” Fraser’s, no. 66, (1862); “Why Is Single Life Becoming More General?” The Nation (1868); Molly Haskell, “Paying Homage to the Spinster,” The New York Times Magazine (May 1988).
The cult of true womanhood/domesticity:
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, no. XVII (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New Eng land, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Memoirs and essays:
Marian Governeur, As I Remember: Recollections of American Society During the Nineteenth Century (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911); Domingo Sarmiento, Michael Rockland, ed. and trans., Travels in the United States in 1847 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: Richard and Bentley, 1883) and Modern Women and What Is Said of Them (New York: Redfield, 1868); Natalie Dana, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963); Hazel Hunton, Pantaloons and Petticoats: The Diary of a Young Woman (New York: Field, 1950); Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance (New York: D. Appleton and Co., Century, 1934).
CHAPTER 2: THE SINGLE STEPS OUT
On working women in general and their economic status in the United States:
Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Alice Kessler Harris, History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). On male attitudes about organized female labor, specifically the idea that men, not women, had to support what would be recognized as a “family,” see Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage,” part of the larger, very useful Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History,Ruth Milkman, ed. (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1985); Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
On immigration:
Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Sidney Stahl Steinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York (1902; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Maxine Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); portions of Susan Ware, ed., Modern American Women: A Documentary History (Chicago: Dorsey, 1989); the classic, still viable New York story, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), and Robert Hunter, Poverty(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), about Chicago; Henry Roth, Call it Sleep (New York: Random House, 1937).
Factory life and domestic service:
An extraordinary overview of women working in nineteenth-century New York is Christine Stansell, City of Women (New York: Knopf, 1986). The book tracks the long climb up from piece or “out” work to factory work (and includes a fascinating discus sion of how one patriarchal system—in the home—was simply substituted with another in the factory). It is invaluable as a study of Bowery culture, the rackets, prostitution, and attitudes about domestic work. Virginia Penny’s original Employments of Women, A Cyclopedia of Women’s Work: How Women Can Make Money Married or Single (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1863) literally lists the thousands of jobs a woman did or might do during the Civil War era. If a woman earned a dime doing it, it’s in here. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) is the best overall examination of the “culture of commercial leisure” (her phrase) and the dangers of the new, unsupervised world of dance halls and amusement parks and the practice of treating.
“The Story of a Sweatshop Girl,” originally printed in Independent, no. 55 (1902) and reprinted in David Katzman and William Tuttle, eds., Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women 1840–1845 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1977); Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (1889; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973); Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experience of Two Ladies as Factory Girls(New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1931); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America(London: Ox ford University Press, 1978). In Clara E. Laughlin, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913), each chapter is an in-depth report on one of many lowly jobs. The book is illustrated with precise black-and-white photographs of lone working women; Hutchins Hapgood, Types from City Streets (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1910); Garry Gaines, The American Girl of the Period: Her Ways and Views (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1878); Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (New York: MacMillan, 1911); Esther Packard, A Study of Living Conditions of Self-Supporting Women in New York City (New York: Metropolitan Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association, 1915); Carol B. Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Louise Henrikson, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life(Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Derek and Julia Parker, The Natural History of the Chorus Girl (London: David and Charles, 1975).
Store and office culture:
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); “‘The Customers Ain’t God’: The World Culture of Department-Store Saleswomen,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John William Ferry, The History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Helen Woodward, a successful advertising woman who began as a secretary, argued that stenography was “a woman’s shortest cut to a big job,” in Through Many Windows (New York: Harper Brothers, 1926); Grace Dodge, A Bundle of Letters (New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887); Florence Wenderoth Saunders, Letters to a Business Girl: A Woman in the World of Business (“…replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems of a Girl Stenographer…”) (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1908); Mary S. Fergusson, Boarding Homes and Clubs for Working Women, Bulletin No. 15 (The U.S. Bureau of Labor, 1898).
Working-girl novels:
Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl (1905; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990): the controversy surrounding the authenticity of the author’s account was never officially resolved, although it seems she likely did as she said: had some early experiences as a working girl, then later in life went back as an undercover reporter. The sticking point was how much time she could possibly have spent as a young penniless girl in the factories. In her hometown, she worked for the Pittsburgh Dispatch; in New York she wrote for many publications, including Eugene Debb’s Social Democrat, and in 1899 she began a ten-year engagement at the New York Herald. That’s when she did her research for what’s been called—and I think, accurately—an autobiographical novel. Richardson published another novel in 1924, The Book of Blanche, this one about a single woman, a musician, trying to establish herself in New York City. The book, less socially conscious, had more traditionally romantic and sexual concerns, but as in The Long Day, the heroine never marries.
Sinclair Lewis, The Job, 3d ed. (1917; Omaha: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Main Street (1920; New York: Dover, 1999), and Ann Vickers (New York: P. F. Collier, 1933); Christopher Morley, Human Being (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932) and Kitty Foyle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Penguin Classics, 1986) and Jennie Gerhardt (1910; New York: Penguin, 1994); Anzia Yezierska: The Breadgivers (1925; New York: Persea, 1999) and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (New York: Persea, 1999).
Prostitution:
Ned Buntline, G’hals of New York (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850); Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America, 1900–1918 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Kathy Peiss, “Charity Girls and City Pleasures,” in Pow ers of Desire, Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); George Ellington, Women of New York (New York: New York Books, 1869).
Periodicals:
Edgar Fawcett, “Woes of the New York Working Girl,” Arena (Dec. 1891); Lillian W. Betts, “Tenement-House Life and Recreation” (Outlook 61, Dec. 11, 1899); Mary Gay Humphreys, “The New York Working Girl,” (Scribner’s 20, Oct. 1896); Barbara Schreier, “Becoming American: Jewish Women Immigrants, 1880–1920,” History Today (Mar. 1994); Mark K. Maule, “What Is a Shop-Girl’s Life?” World’s Work (Sept. 1907); “A Salesgirl’s Story,” Independent (July 1902); “The Shopgirl,” Outlook (Feb. 1908); “After Business Hours, What?—Pleasure!” Ladies’ Home Journal (Feb. 1907); “What It Means to Be a Department Store Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal (June 1913); “Glimpses at the Mind of a Waitress” (American Journal of Sociology 13, July, 1907); Belle Lindners Israel’s “The Way of the Girl” (Survey 22, July 3, 1909).
The early bohemian periodicals:
Mary Gay Humphreys, “Women Bachelors in New York,” Scribner’s (Aug. 1896) and “Women Bachelors in London” (Scribner’s, Aug. 1896) in which we learn “Women are everywhere; climbing down from omnibuses; coming up in processions from the under ground stations. They are hurrying along Fleet Street…Chelsea and South Kensing ton are peopled with petticoats…. This new figure has no place in fiction. That is why we know so little of her….”; “Feminine Bachelorism,” Scribner’s (Oct. 1896); Olga Stanley, “Some Reflections on the Life of a Bachelor Girl,” Outlook (Nov. 1896); Winifred Sothern, “The Truth About the Bachelor Girl,” Munsey’s (May, 1901); “The Matinee Girls,” Metropolitan (June 1900). For the origins of the Trilby character, see Lois Banner, American Beauty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Novels:
From The Folks (1934; Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), the “Margaret” section: I. “The Hidden Time,” II. “Basement Apartment,” III. “And It Had a Green Door,” IV. “After the End of the Story.” Ruth McKenney, My Sister Eileen (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1938). Enormously popular novel turned play and musical film featuring two sisters who daringly take a basement apartment in the Village. Tragically, just after publication, Eileen, the pretty, adventurous sister, was killed in a car accident with her husband, Nathanael West, who was the author of Miss Lonelyhearts and other novels.
CHAPTER 3: THIN AND RAGING THINGS
Social crusaders:
Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and City Streets (New York: Macmillan, 1909), Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910), and The Second Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1930). For more general information, Allen Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (London: Oxford University Press, 1973); the section on Hull House in Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); Karen J. Blair, The Club Woman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); William Dean Howells, The Minister’s Charge (Boston: Ticknor, 1887).
New women:
Judith Schwarz, The Radical Feminists of Heterodoxy (Lebanon, N.H.: New Victoria, 1982); Elaine Showalter, These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1978); Lila Rose McCabe, The American Girl at College (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1893); June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910–1920 (New York: Quadrangle, 1972); Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Ellen Trimberger, “Feminism, Men and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900–1925,” in Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson, eds., Powers of Desire (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983); Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out: New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1930 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981) provides an overview of attitudes among middle-class urban kids in the teens; Terry Miller, Greenwich Village and How It Got That Way (New York: Crown, 1990); Lillian Federman, Odd Girls and Twilight Ladies: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Lydia Kingsmill Commander, “An American Idea: Does the National Tendency Toward a Small Family Point to Race Suicide or Race Development?” The American Idea (1907; New York: Arno Press, 1972).
The tea-dancing modern girl, circa 1913:
Susanne Wilcox, “The Unrest of Modern Women,” Independent (July 8, 1909); “Why Educated Young Women Don’t Marry,” Independent (Nov. 25, 1909); Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, “Why Women Don’t Marry,” Cosmopolitan (Feb. 1907); “The Passing of the Home Daughter,” Independent(July 13, 1911); Margaret Deland, “The Change in the Feminine Ideal,” Atlantic Monthly (Mar. 1914); Ethel W. Mumford, “Where Is Your Daughter This Afternoon?” Harper’s (Jan. 17, 1914); “New Reflections on the Dancing Mania,” Current Opinion (Oct. 13, 1915); “Turkey Trot and Tango—A Disease or a Remedy? Current Opinion 55 (Sept. 1913); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The New Generation of Women,” Current History (Aug. 18, 1923).
White slaving:
“Five White Slave Trade Investigations, McClure’s (May 1910); “The White Slave Films” Outlook (Jan. 17, 1914); “The White Slave Films: A Review,” Outlook (Feb. 14, 1914); John Stanley, “Traffic in Souls: The Horror of White Slavery,” San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 21, 1990).
The Gibson girl:
Ann O’Hagen, “The Athletic Girl,” Munsey’s (Aug. 1901); Richard Harding Davis, “The Origin of a Type of the American Girl,” Quarterly Illustrator, vol. III (winter 1895); “Charles Dana Gibson, the Man and His Art,” Collier’s (Dec. 1902); Winifred Scott Moody, “Daisy Miller and the Gibson Girl,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1904); “Gibson Girl Would Fit in Fine in the ’90s,” Roanoke Times and World News (Apr. 9, 1995).
The flapper and 1920s youth:
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995); Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrill Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Con temporary American Culture (New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1929) was cited routinely for decades as the preeminent microcosmic view of American middle-class society; Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Anita Loos, A Girl Like I (New York: Viking, 1966); John Keats, You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970); Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 7th ed. (New York: MacMillan, 1970); A Flapper’s Dictionary, as Compiled by One of Them (Pittsburgh: Imperial, 1922).
Periodicals:
George Ade, “Today’s Amazing Crop of 18-Year-Old Roues and 19-Year-Old Vamps,” American Magazine (March 1922); “Says Flapper Aids Church,” New York Times (Sept. 2, 1922); “An Interview with a Young Lady,” New Republic (Jan. 1925); “A Doctor’s Warning to Flappers,” Literary Digest (Oct. 1926); Judge William McAdoo, “Young Women and Crime,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Nov. 1927); Zelda Fitzgerald, “Eulogy on the Flapper,” Metropolitan (1929); Ruth Hooper, “Flapping Not Repented Of,” New York Times Book Review (July 16, 1926).
The new spinster:
We know the former flapper “new spinster”—her frustrations, joys, successes, snipey conversations with wives, and wardrobe changes—from articles published in magazines and newspapers. Primary information about her sex life—and she apparently had one—is found in Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1935, a privately funded study, Vassar College) and in Daniel Scott Smith, The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution, part of the collection The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, Michael Gordon, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). Also Ellen Rothman, Hand and Hearts: The History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and portions of Beth L. Bailey’s highly enjoyable From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); there are wonderfully frightening images of the late flapper down and out in two Jean Rhys novels: After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and Quartet (1928; New York: Vintage, 1974).
Periodicals:
Grace M. Johnson, “The New Old Maids” (Women Beautiful, May 1909); Elizabeth Jordan, “On Being a Spinster,” Saturday Evening Post (Apr. 1926); Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” Harper’s (Oct. 1927); Lillian Bell, “Old Maids of the Last Generation and This,” Saturday Evening Post (Dec. 1926); “Feminism and Jane Smith,” Harper’s (June 1927); Lorine Pruette, “Should Men Be Protected?” Nation (Aug. 1927); Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist,” Harper’s (May 1929) and “The New Masculinism,” Harper’s (June 1930); “And Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper” New York Times Magazine (July 28, 1929); Margaret Culkin Ban ning, “The Plight of the Spinster,” Harper’s (June 1929); Mrs. Virginia Kirk, “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” Literary Digest, no. 105 (Oct. 10, 1930).
CHAPTER 4: THE SUSPICIOUS SINGLE
Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984); Anne Hirst, Get and Hold Your Man (New York: Kinsey, 1937); Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Ben L. Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (New York: Sheridan House, 1937); Susan M. Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change(Boston: Meridien, 1987) includes oral histories of women in all areas of the war industries; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1947); Elizabeth Hawes, Anything but Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behaviour from Birth to Death, Given Out in Print, On Film, and Over the Air, Read, Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women (New York: Rinehart, 1948).
Periodicals:
Mabel Barbee Lee, “The Dilemma of the Educated Woman,” Atlantic (Dec. 1930); Genevieve Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s (1935); “Anxious Ladies: To Be Wed) or Not to Be,” Mademoiselle (1938); Juliet Farnham, “How to Meet Men and Marry,” book excerpt, McCall’s(1943); “Somebody’s After Your Man!” Good House keeping (Aug., 1945); “In Marriage, It’s a Man’s Market!” New York Times Magazine (June 17, 1945); “Your Chances of Getting Married,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1946); “U.S. Marriage Rate Zooms to All-Time High,” Science Digest(Oct. 1947); “How Feminine Are You to Men?” Women’s Home Companion (May 1946); “No Date Is No Dis grace,” Women’s Home Companion (Nov. 1946); George Lawton, “Proof That She Is the Stronger Sex,” New York Times Magazine (Dec. 12, 1948); “The Unwilling Virgins,” Es quire (May 1949); “The High Cost of Dating,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1949).
Advice/conduct guides:
Steven Hart and Lucy Brown, How to Get Your Man and Hold Him (New York: Dover, 1944); Cora Carle, How to Get a Husband (New York: Hedgehog Press, 1949); Jean and Gene Berger, Win Your Man and Keep Him (Chicago: Windsor Press, 1948); Judson T. and Mary G. Landis, Building a Successful Marriage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1948).
On the emergence of bobby-soxers, see This Fabulous Century: 1940–50 (New York: Time-Life, 1969).
CHAPTER 5: THE SECRET SINGLE
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Lawrence and Mary Frank, How to Be a Woman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954); Norman Hamilton, How to Woo and Keep Your Man (New York: William Fredericks, 1955); Robert O. Blood, Anticipating Your Marriage, the classic marriage text (New York: Free Press, 1957); Nicholas Drake, The Fifties in VOGUE (New York: Henry Holt, 1987); Rona Jaffe, The Best of Every thing (1958; New York: Avon, 1976); Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming of Age in the Beat Generation (New York: Washington Square, 1983); Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955); Winnie Dienes, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up in the 1950s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961).
Periodicals:
“What You Should Know About Women, Even if You’re a Woman,” Collier’s (Nov. 1951); “No Right Age for a Girl to Marry,” New York Times (Oct. 19, 1952); Patty DeRoulf, “Must Bachelor Girls Be Immoral?” Coronet (Feb. 9, 1952); “Her First Date,” Look, (Dec. 1953); Juliet Tree, “When a Girl Lives Alone,” Good Housekeeping (Mar. 1953); “Life Calls on Seven Spinsters,” Life (June 8, 1953), in which Life went out and found spinsters as it might earlier have found the Dionne quints (seven sisters, thirty-eight to fifty-one, all wait on Dad and dress alike—quirky Mousketeer sensibility or psychopathology?); “How to Be Marriageable,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Mar. 1954); James A. Skardon, “Room, Board and Romance,” a series on new coed board inghouses in San Francisco, New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 20, 1954); “Is Marriage the Trap?” Mademoiselle (Dec. 1955); Anita Colby, “In Defense of the Single Woman,” Look (Nov. 29, 1955); “The Date Line,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1956); “Some Persons Should Stay Single,” Science Digest (May 1956); Life Magazine Special Issue on “The American Woman,” Life (Dec. 24, 1956); Polly Weaver, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” Mademoiselle (Sept. 1956); “Will Success Spoil American Women?” New York Times Magazine (Nov. 10, 1957); Gael Greene, “Lone Women,” series, New York Post (Nov. 18–Dec. 1, 1957); Earl Ubell, “Pressure and Tension Beset the Lone Woman,” New York Herald Tribune (Dec. 6, 1957); James H. S. Brossard, “The Engagement Ring: A Changing Symbol” New York Times Magazine (July 14, 1958); Gloria Emerson, “The Lives of a New York Career Girl” Holiday (May 1958); “If You Don’t Go Steady, You’re Different,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1959); “Bachelor Girls—They Play by Their Own Rules,” five-part series, New York Daily News (Apr. 1959).
Novels:
Gail Parent, Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York; (New York: Putnam, 1972) Judith Rossner, Looking for Mr. Goodbar (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (1973; New York: NAL, 1995); Mary Gordon, Final Payments(New York: Ballantine, 1978).
CHAPTER 6: THE SWINGING SINGLE
Books:
Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geiss/Random House, 1962); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Dell, 1973); Charles Abrams, The City Is the Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Joan Didion, Something Toward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1968); Howard Bahr and Gerald Garrett, Women Alone: The Disaffiliation of Urban Females (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1976); Suzanne Gordon, Lonely in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976); Jean Baker Miller, Toward A New Psychology of Women (Boston: Beacon Books, 1979).
Periodicals:
Joan Didion, “The Great Reprieve,” Mademoiselle (June 1960); “Do Women Provoke Sex Attack?” Cosmopolitan (Mar. 1960); “The Non-Woman, A Manhattan Enigma, Cosmopolitan (Mar. 1960); Sylvia Porter, “Women Alone,” New York Post (Sept. 13, 1960); Carol Taylor, “East Side, West Side, They Flock to New York for Job, Dream, Dream Man,” New York World-Telegram (Jan. 3, 1960); “Go West Young Woman if You Wish to Wed,” New York Herald Tribune (May 10, 1961); Phyllis Rosenteur, “Unwed Woman a Likely Cynic,” (Newsweek, book excerpt, May 1962); Gloria Steinem, “The Moral Disarmament of Betty Co-ed,” Esquire (Sept. 1962); “How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl in Washington, D.C.,” Life (Mar. 23, 1962); Marion K. Sanders, “The Case of the Vanishing Spinster,” New York Times Magazine (Sept. 22, 1963); “Two Girls Murdered in E. 88th St. Flat,” New York Times, (Aug. 29, 1963); Nan Robertson, “Where the Boys Are Not: At the Barbizon,” New York Times (Oct. 19, 1963); on Kitty Genovese, Loudon Wainwright, “The Dying Girl That Nobody Helped,” Life (Apr. 10, 1964); Sylvia Porter, “Girls Without Jobs,” New York Post (Mar. 25, 1965); Nina McCain, “New York and the Single Girl!” New York World-Telegram (Dec. 14, 1965); “Cities and the Single Girl,” Newsweek (Nov. 15, 1965); “Students in the Free Sex Movement,” Time (Mar. 11, 1966); Judith Viorst and Dorothy Gilliam, “Washington and the Single Girl,” Washington Post (June 22, 1966); “Where the Singles Are!” Newsweek (Sept. 26, 1966); Douglas Sefton, “The Girl Ghetto: East Side, West Side, Gals Buoying It Up on Broads-way,” New York Daily News (May 10, 1967); “New Rules for the Singles Game,” Life (Aug. 18, 1967); “The Pleasures and Pain of the Single Life,” Time (Sept. 15, 1967); Jean Baer, “The Single Girl in the City,” New York Post (Sept. 21, 1968); Shelby Coffey III, “Single Style Yesterday and Today,”’ Washington Post (Jan. 14, 1968); Christina Mirk, “Mingle but Stay Single!” Sunday Daily News (Mar. 23, 1969); “The Politics of Sex: Who’s Come a Long Way, Baby?” Time. (Aug. 31, 1970); Jon Nordheimer, “Vacation and the Single Girl: Tireless Pursuit of a Dream,” New York Times (July 29, 1970); “A Very Nice Kind of Ski Bum,” Life pictorial on single girls, living together in Aspen (Mar. 8, 1971); “Gloria Steinem: A Liberated Woman Despite Beauty, Chic and Success” Newsweek (Aug. 16, 1971); see also “The Thinking Man’s Jean Shrimpton,” Time (Jan. 3, 1969); Judy Klemesrud, “Single Women Against a Dangerous City,” New York Times (Jan. 12, 1973); Grace Lichtenstein, “Slain Woman’s Neighbors Express Both Horror and Detachment,” New York Times (Oct. 25, 1973); Leslie Maitland, “The Singles Scene Has Sordid Side,” New York Times (Nov. 1, 1974); Susan Jacoby, “Forty-nine Million Singles Can’t All Be Right,” New York Times Magazine (Feb. 17, 1974); Gloria Emerson, “In a City of Crowds, So Many Lonely Women,” New York Times (Jan. 28, 1974); Wendy Shulman, “Singles Becoming More Stable Tenants,” New York Times (July 1974); Judy Klemesrud, “Bachelor’s Life: Things Aren’t Always Hunky-Dory in Paradise,” New York Times (May 3, 1974), “Margaret Mead Puts Single Life in Perspective,” New York Times (Jan. 25, 1974), and “They Tell How They Feel About Being Single Women,” New York Times (Dec. 1974); Robert J. Levin and Amy Levin, “Sexual Pleasure: The Surprising Preferences of 100,000 Women,” Redbook (Sept. 1975); “Men Bite Back,” New York Times (Aug. 1978), a response to Nan Robertson’s controversial essay “Single Women Over 30: Where Are the Men Worthy of Us?” (to quote from one typical male subject: “I am bored with women who claim all that liberation, self-realization, self-fulfillment pap and blame all the woes of women since Eve on me.”); John Kifner, “Hospital at Last Identifies Its Shopping Bag Lady,” New York Times (Jan. 10, 1979).
CHAPTER 7: TODAY’S MODERNE UNMARRIED—HER TIMES AND TRIALS
Nancy L. Peterson, Our Lives for Ourselves: Women Who Have Never Married (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981); Dr. Connell Cowan and Dr. Melvyn Kinder, Smart Women, Foolish Choices: Finding the Right Men, Avoiding the Wrong Ones (New York: Signet, 1986); Molly McKaughan, The Biological Clock (New York: Doubleday, 1987); Sylvia Ann Hewlett, A Lesser Life: The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (New York: Warner Books, 1987); Peter J. Stein, Single Life: Unmarried Adults in Social Con text (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981); Barbara Levy Simon, Never Married Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Cynthia Heimel, Sex Tips for Girls (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
The terrorizing Yale/Harvard study that so inaccurately predicted my life’s out come is best dissected in Susan Faludi’s still-brilliant Backlash (New York: Crown, 1991). Two of the hundreds of paralyzing “You lose!” documents: Eloise Salholz et al., “Too Late for Prince Charming,” from the cover story “The Marriage Crunch,” Newsweek, June 2, 1986; Barbara Lovenheim, Beating the Marriage Odds: When You Are Smart, Single and Over 35 (New York: William Morrow, 1989).
Marcelle Clements, The Improvised Woman: Reinventing Single Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998); Louise J. Kaplan, Female Perversions (New York: Doubleday/Nan A. Talese, 1991); Lee Reilly, Women Living Singly (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996); on hypochondria, the only documented disease of the unwed, Susan Baur, Hypochondria: Woeful Imaginings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Modern conduct guides in all earnestness:
Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, The Rules: Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right (New York: Warner, 1995).
Modern conduct guides with attitude and irony:
Cynthia Rowley and Ilene Rosenzweig, Swell: A Girl’s Guide to the Good Life (New York: Warner, 1999).
Periodicals—1980s/1990s–present:
Christine Doudna with Fern McBride, “Where Are the Men for the Women at the Top?” Savvy (Feb. 1980); Peter Davis, “The $100,000 a Year Woman,” Esquire special issue on women (June 1984). The author, in correspondence with editor, searches for a New Type who earns more than the average man—what is that like? What is she like? He finds her. Somehow convinces her to let him follow her through life for several months, and to interview her bosses, colleagues, ex-husband. She takes him on adriving trip with her parents, and gives him access to her diary; she comes off after all this exhaustive day-in-the-life attempt at finding “new pathos” as a demanding, difficult but truly remarkable, memorable person; Janice Harayda “Unwed Women Needn’t—and Don’t—Despair,” Wall Street Journal (June 27, 1986); Claudia Wallis, “Women Face the ’90s” Time(cover, Dec. 4, 1989); Richard Cohen, “What About Alice?” Washington Post, (July 28, 1991); David R. Williams, David T. Takeuchi, Russell K. Adair, “Marital Status and Psychiatric Disorders Among Blacks and Whites,” Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, vol. 33 (June 1992); “Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1989 and 1990” (The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1995); Torri Minton, “Road to Modern Romance Is Paved with Potholes,” San Francisco Chronicle (Feb. 12, 1993); Florence King, “Spinsterhood Is Powerful,” National Review (July 19, 1993); John Tierney, “Picky, Picky, Picky,” New York Times Magazine (Feb. 1995); Cynthia Heimel, “Solo Contendre,” Playboy (Feb. 1995); Judy Abel, “Sisters: The New Generation Gap: Twentysomethings Are Choosing Mom’s Family Values and Not Their Siblings’ Career Paths,” New York Post (Aug. 6, 1996); Katie Roiphe, “The In dependent Woman (and Other Lies)” Esquire (Feb. 1997); “Why Marriage Is Hot Again,” special section, Redbook (Sept. 24, 1997); “American Marriage Today,” special supplement, Brides Magazine: The Heart of the Bridal Market (Sept. 26, 1997); Lois Smith Brady, “Ready to Propose? Make it Short, Sweet and Real,” New York Times (Oct. 1997); Elizabeth Cohen, “They Don’t Want Kids: Why Women Are Opting out of Motherhood” (with a quiz: “Should You Become a Mom?”) (May 14, 1998); Sarah Bernard, “Early to Wed,” New York magazine (June 16, 1997); Jim Yardley “Going on Full Alert for a Dream Dress,” New York Times (Feb. 1, 1998), on the frenzy at Kleinfeld’s, the famed Brooklyn wedding gown emporium.
Novels
Gail Parent, A Sign of the Eighties (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1987); Margaret Diehl, Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988); Alice Hoffman, Seventh Heaven (New York: Ballantine, 1990); Lorrie Moore, Like Life (New York: Knopf, 1990) and Birds of America (New York: Knopf, 1998); Susannah Moore, In the Cut (New York: Knopf, 1995); Can dace Bushnell, Sex and the City, collected essays (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996); Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (New York, MacMillan, 1998).