Bachelor Girl (14 page)

For all of Saunders’s enthusiasm—her pride in watching her daughter accept a big new job in Washington, D.C.—it’s easy to understand how tired and betrayed office workers felt. Far from advancing beyond “shop girl,” they had landed in a parallel universe. And one with its own publicity mill. As late as 1935,
Fortune
was still extolling the modern office as a kind of female paradise. As one executive rhapsodized: “…the competent woman at the other end of the buzzer…the four girls pecking out the boss’s initials with pink fingernails on the keyboards of four voluble machines, the half dozen assorted skirts whisking through the filing cases of correspondence, and the elegant miss in the reception room….”

That may have been visual bliss for the men. The “assorted skirts” had their own views. Like the smarter shop girl, the office worker came to understand that “women’s” jobs meant those that men had done until they’d moved into a new managerial class. In 1870, less than 1 percent of all clerical workers were women. By 1900, tallying figures received from a thousand or more national employment agencies, the Labor Department estimated that more than 100,000 women worked as stenographers, typists, and secretaries. By 1920, more than 25 percent of all secretaries were women, and by 1965, the figure was 92 percent.
*
As sociologist C. Wright Mills would later famously state, offices had become “modern nunneries.”

Still, like all working single women, the office gal had to make the most of her situation, and enjoy what small amount of time she spent away from her job. Many reported having little energy for rackets and other noisy parties. The time between 10 P.M. and 6 A.M. was on most days devoted to hanging about with roommates or friends from the office and then to sleep. Kitty Foyle, though an invention, provides us with an excellent single-girl scenario:

In the best cases, an office girl overlooked the obvious, somewhat pathetic obstacles and learned to hustle. Strategize. She looked for the breaks. That meant seeking out a boss she could influence, pushing for overtime pay and promotions, keeping a running tab of better jobs elsewhere, and, of course, considering seriously all marriage proposals.

Kitty Foyle, who’d go on to become a cosmetics-industry executive, agreed that the business girl had to play all the angles. And that strategy was often a more complicated, exhausting business than the business itself. As she says offhandedly, “Lots of career girls have got raises for their ambition that was really Benzedrine sulphate.”

LUST FOR A LATCHKEY

All early working girls, regardless of what they did or where they did it, had similar problems. And the greatest of all could be summarized in three words: where to live. The fantasy solution could be summed up in one word: latchkey.

The latchkey, a four-or five-inch-long skeleton key, served for tired, exasperated girls as an amulet, a totem, an admission ticket inside. A key signaled the vanquishing of all boardinghouse breakfasts, the Y, and the landlady, her lieutenants and spies. In 1910 there were an estimated fifteen thousand boarding and furnished rooming houses, where girls were not so much chaperoned but placed on a permanent parole. Wrote one linen saleswoman in
The Independent:
“A [boarding] house like that should be a strictly hotel basis, no Christian stuff, sign this, sign here, be quiet, no guests—oh God, we just want a nice place to live like anybody and not an
swer questions—where have we been and with who…. How is it their business to know?”

Mary Gay Humphreys reported that sixty-eight thousand of the girls who boarded worked as salesladies (their updated term) and hoped to find a place where they might be free of all inquisition. As one male journalist wrote in their defense: “What right has the world to decide that working women must be treated as déclassé until they prove themselves otherwise?”

The working girl understood that like car keys in the 1920s—or car keys now for that matter—the latchkey would guarantee some measure of freedom. But it seemed all apartment keys had been reserved for men. Until the early twentieth century there were no apartments for women. They didn’t exist.

There had been interim solutions. The most famous was perhaps the large ocean liner the
Jacob A. Stamler,
owned by businessman John Arbuckle, which had docked for few months, 1907–8, at a Twenty-third Street pier. The offer was to let all rooms on board cheaply and without serious restrictions to “self-respecting girls who’d behave with honor.” This lasted a few happy months until the city needed the pier space and the ship moved on; one newspaper printed an etching of tired-looking girls in dark dresses and hats, standing clustered like mourners, watching it go.

No single woman, working or not, had ever been presumed trustworthy, economically solid, or discreet enough to make a desirable tenant. These qualities, if she learned them at all, she would presumably learn from her husband. And she was always suspected of prostitution. But given the statistics, the sheer visual evidence of girls out there, some builders and owners drew up plans for small hotels and apartment houses. Almost every plan, however, was scrapped in the discussion phase; no girl could afford such amenities, and who’d invest?

So it was big news, covered everywhere, when in 1910 the Trowmart Inn, looking for “self-supporting girls tired of the tawdry lodging room and sick of the miserable little rookery,” opened its doors. The Trowmart, brainchild of a successful New York merchant, welcomed young women who could prove they held a job earning no more than fifteen dollars per week. They also had to be provably under the age of thirty-five (meaning they were
not likely to become indigent spinsters and never leave). A bed inside one of the 228 dormlike rooms cost fifty cents per week. To live with just several others in more private rooms cost $4.50, and for a dollar more per week, a working woman could have a room all to herself. No one had to give references unless she planned to live there permanently. And with no marriage prospects and the age “thirty-five” years away, well, it didn’t sound all that bad. The Trowmart served food described as “reasonable” and “pleasant.” It was renowned for its “well-appointed” bathrooms. (More expensive rooms had the bathrooms in the room itself!) It had laundry facilities.

The latchkey at last.

Some girls wore their spindly keys on long chains that dangled, while others hid theirs inside a boot or a shoe and stood on it all day to be sure it was safe. It was not an engagement ring, but in its way it symbolized a rite of passage; single female life had at last been deemed a grown-up life. In his 1992 film
Singles,
Cameron Crowe captures the same sort of exultation on the face of Kyra Sedgwick as she holds up her newly acquired garage-door opener. (It’s meaningful, really, because it is her own garage, and that garage is just below her own very first ever condo!)

And once the key, one’s own private space, had been secured? Then came relief, excitement, and a swiftly spreading sense of disappointment. Girls called the arrangements “better,” “more free”—they loved having unsupervised parlor time—but they also used phrases such as “in the overall, small in feeling.” One twenty-one-year-old office clerk told
Munsey’s Magazine
that the Trowmart and its few imitators had “narrow rooms” with bad lighting and “mincy wardrobes.” Many residents took to the parlors, although these filled up rapidly, and so in all kinds of weather packs of girls were out on walks. Out wandering—swiftly wandering so as not to seem vagrant or “loitery”—they often met equally claustrophobic friends, and had marathon teas. A bit later on they escaped to nickelodeons, neighborhood theaters consisting of a small homemade screen and wooden chairs.

There is no document of daily life at the Trowmart Inn. But we can imagine it based on the descriptions of comparable hotels, both the real, for example, the Barbizon—subject of numerous Sunday-magazine features during the 1950s and ’60s—and the fictional. There’s a great section of
Kitty Foyle
in which she describes her life at the fictitious Pocahontas Residence for Women, a dwelling obviously based on the Barbizon. As always, Kitty narrates in a tart but sympathetic manner:

THE BACHELOR GIRL AND THE BOHEMIAN

By the turn of the twentieth century, so many single girls were visibly out there—working, eating in restaurants, dancing—that it became harder to immediately categorize them. (And arranging single girls into identifiable groupings was a necessity not only among editors, writers, and retail merchandisers. State and U.S. government officials frequently organized mass prostitution raids. An increasingly diverse single population made the task much more difficult. At urban rackets and in the newer Broadway cabarets, government agents became famous for “getting the wrong girl wrong,” accusing a shop girl of being a hooker, and “getting whonked for their mistakes,” meaning kicked in the ankle.)

One magazine columnist, writing in 1907, put it this way: “In the great cities, thousands of our young women” live in a “swarm of singularity.”

But there was an identifiable strain of “new girl” who appeared at the turn of the century, an intense, dramatic type who’d consistently reappear in years to come: the bohemian. Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not
live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped.
She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic
artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or
something
new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry. One twenty-year-old told the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1905, “It is wonderful to be able to walk along the street, singing…. There are men who admire that impulsive daring.”

The bohemian had a less deeply poetic, slightly less intense, kind of younger cousin. That was the Bachelor Girl. “The B.G.,” as she was known, had come to the city not so much to escape, but to work and send money home. Which she did. But she also developed a taste for rushing after work or whenever possible to Greenwich Village, at that time the city’s premiere “artistically inclined place of residence.” (I quote from “Why I Am a Bachelor Girl,”
The Independent
, 1908.)

By 1910, the Village had settled as an Italian and German enclave, surrounded by the baronial brownstones of Washington Square and Fifth Avenue and pockets of very poor blacks and Irish. For the committed or aspiring bohemian, the setting was perfect—filled with cafés, tearooms, spaghetti parlors, and the unlikeliest and therefore the most interesting people in New York just lounging about. It was still almost a secret. Before 1918, no subway stops connected Greenwich Village to the rest of the city, and one had to practice at navigating its tiny disjointed streets. Many houses, painted pink or blue, had no numbers. Asking directions was useless. Most inhabitants couldn’t quite explain it. Didn’t know. Didn’t feel like it. They spoke, one visitor told the
New York Times,
“in an iambic pentameter, as a bad word play or joke.”

Wandering the Village, bohemian and bachelor girls could, to borrow from their own overly dramatic phrasebook, create themselves anew. Margaret Ferguson, of Ruth Suckow’s 1934 novel,
The Folks,
makes a wonderful case study of this transformation. We meet her as a girl, the older, misunderstood “dark” daughter of a prosperous Iowa farm family. Not as pretty as her sister, often overlooked, she comes to believe there is “a wonderful shining special fate for her” and that she will find it in New York City. If she didn’t take the dare and leave, she would likely wander into a
more ordinary female fate, “getting older and older, a spinster daughter like Fannie Allison, who had taught the third grade every year since anyone could remember…and lived with her brother and his wife and took care of his children.”

Margaret moves to the Village and takes a candlelit cellar apartment that has a green door. At a party a few nights later a strange man sprinkles a few drops of gin on her forehead and she is rechristened Margot.

For real characters, there were many similar declarations of freedom. Taking a walk without interrogation or scrutiny. Entering a restaurant, sitting down, and not feeling the urge to rush out. One might sit for hours in a teahouse, one of those dimly lit and narrow rooms that were always decorated with mismatched furniture and too many dark oil paintings. One might even talk to a man seated nearby and not, for the moment, think: What would Mother say?