Bachelor Girl (15 page)

Of course, one knew what Mother would say. In the age of the bachelor girls and, worse, bohemians, distraught mothers quickly became as acute a national stereotype, appearing in cartoons and illustrations holding another sibling back from the door, or bent over war-room tables covered with maps of Greenwich Village. This was the start of a war, all right, a protracted generation conflict that would grow more serious and heartbreaking as years passed. In the meantime, there were others more immediately upset by these unnerving young women.

As working gals had inspired absurd terror theories—Will she forgo having children and become a slut?—so these newest strays attracted fresh, outrageous condemnation. Much of this criticism was aimed at upper-class feminist or “womanist” types, but it trickled down to the bachelor girl. In his tirades against “race suicide,” Teddy Roosevelt now looked directly at the unmarried white woman, even if she was only eighteen, and called her trouble. There were more immigrants. There were more inexplicably single women—
bohemians
—and so, as he saw it, more than mere laws were in order. (There had already been plenty of legal assistance. Contraception and abortion had been outlawed and between 1889 and 1906, state legislatures passed more than one hundred restrictive divorce laws.) White women of all sorts would have to cooperate!

The true bohemian, like the radical spinster before her, ignored the fuss. The bachelor girl, however, paid attention. There are guilty acknowledgments of this “race suicide” concept throughout my collection of press clippings “re: Bachelor Girl, c. 1908–1914.” In stories such as “The Lives and Loves of a Bachelor Miss,” “Date with a Bachelor Girl,” and “Today’s Modern Bachelor Girl—Her Hopes, Dreams, Her Chances in Life,” we hear about one’s “essential responsibilities,” about the “sacred” duties ahead, and more than once about knowing “when the party is over.” In the articles “The Bachelor Girl, As Told by One Who Knows,” “Bachelor Girls of Today and Yesterday,” and “I Am a Bachelor Girl,” the phrases “later on in my life, proper,” and “when I am settled down,” appear three times. Five times in all we hear the phrase “when I am the mother of” followed by the phrase “sweet babes” or “tender babes” or “six or seven babes.”

But no matter how often she pledged to defend her future fertility, the bachelor/working/single girl was just as likely to take delight in describing her life as it was at the moment—and especially as the terms “bohemian” (serious, artistic) and “bachelor girl” (worker bee out for fun) began slowly to blur.

We’ll call them, along with everyone else, B-girls.

Many wore their hair short, after the girl/boy heroine of
Trilby,
George Du Maurier’s 1894 novel. Virginia Woolf called the type “cropheads,” the name she’d given Dora Carrington after the young artist chopped off and banged her hair. Some girls went in for a Chinese plait, but the primary fashion influence was Trilby. Trilby had inspired an early rush of icon merchandising (Trilby hats, dresses, waffles), and everyone knew her story: Parisian orphan who boarded with a ragpicker and his wife and lived
la vie bohème
without affectation. She dressed in burlap sacks, and wore sandals on what were, by any standard, huge female feet. (She also had a large, pliable mouth.) For money, she ironed clothing and modeled nude for male artists without a hint of shame. At night she smoked, dressed like a man, and paraded the Quartier Latin, where she was queen of the cancan. (Of course she’s taken down—made to feel guilty about her “ways” by the respectable man she deeply loves. He drops her straight into a bog of depression and self-hatred that makes her perfect fodder for the devil, presented here in the form of a music teacher named Svengali.)

Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original
Life,
the B-girls at times “unconsciously interpret[ed]…the eating rituals of [one]…tribe of Southern Africa…this conclusion is further supported by the post-prandial decision to paint their bodies with white and blue stripes and then to dance.” (The context of this short piece, wedged between two popular-science stories, makes it hard to say whether the speaker was joking.)

Reporters were out in full on the B-girl beat—the preflapper demimonde that stood to sink our great civilization. One cigarette-holding girl flung open the door (there apparently was a door) and met the press by exclaiming, “Welcome to liberty hall! Here we do exactly as we please!” She told all about her purple robe—no lilac for her but a
purple pure.
She spoke vaguely about a Communist lecture and then asked everyone to please take off their shoes.

“[Their] room[s],” noted one disgusted male correspondent, “[are] a mass of delightful contrivances whereby her gown inhabits the window seat and her frying pan the bookcase…. They eat off the ironing board, roaring with laughter about having only cheese to feast upon.” More serious stories tried to see past the “nursery antics” and into the inevitable repercussions.

Let’s consider the arguments of one Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, who like many writers on the somber subject of race suicide and later, “sexology,” used three names in her byline. (It informed the reader that the author was married but independent minded; it further indicated that she had a “career,” not a job.) In
Why Women Don’t Marry
(1907), she tries to categorize for the reader every possible explanation, outside of sheer perversity, for failing to wed.

Others pointed out how many female characters in novels killed themselves rather than admit to failure at bohemian life, that is, the failure of all that presumed artistic talent or any men whatsoever to emerge. They were only bachelor girls, after all. Wrote a male reporter in
Munsey’s
(1906):

But as bachelor girl Olga Stanley wrote back in 1896: “Probably the thing which first appeals to us is our absolute freedom, the ability to plan our time as we will…bound by no restrictions, except those imposed upon us by a due regard for proprieties.” As for those who called “her existence ‘pathetic,’” what was more pathetic than waiting to find out whether “Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever he may be turns out to be a good husband?” Of course she’d take a husband, “forego the delights of female bachelorhood,” if an excellent opportunity arose. Until then, however, she and her many unwed sisters would emit “a sigh of thankfulness…and draw nearer the fire, and resting our toes on the fender, lean back in our easy chair and congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.”

I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE

It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.

So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.

Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (
ette,
they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a pun
ishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”

But the new woman was most famous for her refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)

The press continued to recycle the prevailing view of matrimony: that no woman was qualified to do anything else but wed. In
The Ladies’ Home Journal,
1900, we learn that “to women, the business world looks to be a great mysterious whirl of which she can understand nothing…. To attempt…comprehension is to strain unnecessarily.” In a 1904 survey,
Good Housekeeping
asked five thousand men to list the qualities they required in a potential bride and then those features that “repelled” them. The winning prerequisites were an “attractive manner,” “Christian tendency,” “modesty,” and “womanliness,” while “career minded-ness,” “an argumentative nature,” “the urge to smoke,” and “physical imperfection” doomed an increasingly large percentage of the population to a new old-maidhood.

But I doubt that many in the ranks of new womanhood took subscriptions to
Good Housekeeping
. Author Susanne Wilcox, writing in
The Independent
in 1909, explained, “The desire to participate in what men call the ‘game of life’ has fastened itself upon many modern women, and their appetites are whetted for more abundant and diverting interests than the mere humdrum of household duties.”

A male peer writing in the same publication in the same year noted, “The average young American woman, especially if college-bred, now leads a life of mental unfolding and progression abreast with young men…many occupations have been thrown open to her…. If she does not find a congenial mate, she avails herself of these opportunities and finds much satisfaction.”

Here were the true perpetrators of Teddy Roosevelt’s alleged “race suicide.” Between the years 1880 and 1913, the U.S. marriage rate hit its lowest point in the country’s history, and an unprecedented drop in the birthrate followed. It further seemed that many who’d already married were determined to get out. In 1870 there had been just 1.5 divorces per 1,000 marriages; by 1890, that figure had doubled, and by 1910, it had risen to 5.5 per 1,000, the majority of petitions filed by women with at least a high school education.

A researcher studying the 1902 edition of
Who’s Who
isolated the women honorees (977 of a total of 11,000 entries) and investigated details of their personal lives. He found that 45 percent of these prominent women had married but that 53.3 percent of them—for the time an enormous number—said they would never marry, viewing it as a “profound disincentive” to serious work. Many new women wrote essays and editorials in response, pointing out that the majority of white middle-class women eventually married (which they did—80 percent in 1910). But the notion of the best and the brightest refusing to marry and reproduce, preferring instead to conduct scientific research, attend conferences, smoke and/or chain themselves to fences, had taken hold.

According to much-quoted psychologist Stanley G. Hall, “The daughter refuses to do the things her mother did without question…higher education is at fault.” Charles W. Eliot, writing in the
North American Review,
agreed. “Girls are being prepared daily, by ‘superior education,’ to engage, not in child-bearing and house-work but in clerkships, telegraphy, newspaper-writing…and if they have their ‘rights’ they will be enabled to compete with men at the bar, in the pulpit, the Senate, the bench.” Because many an average new woman had read Chaucer, spoke French, and knew chemistry, she had developed, in Hall’s phrase, “unreasonable expectations” that led her to “abhor the limitations of married life.”

One can almost hear a new woman snort with laughter. Jane Addams once asked rhetorically: “[Is she] supposed to stay at home, to help her mother entertain?…Take a course in domestic science?…How…could any girl stay sane?”

The new women had an altruistic streak. They had come largely from
the comfortable middle class—the truly rich upper-class girl did not go to college—and they genuinely hoped to “reclaim” or “uncover” the “individualistic possibilities” in every woman, educated or not. In 1912 Marie Jenny Howe, a nonpracticing Unitarian minister, founded Heterodoxy, the country’s first feminist (as opposed to strictly suffragist) group in Greenwich Village. As a nascent consciousness-raising group, it required of each member only that she “not be orthodox in her opinions.” It helped if she lived in the Village or at least in the city and could attend the argumentative all-night meetings. But Heterodoxites took their show on the road. They were the first to sponsor popular general-interest meetings about feminism, the first of them, in 1913, called “What Is Feminism?” or, as it was officially titled, “Breaking into the Human Race.” These were huge affairs for up to one thousand, and they featured prominent women from around the world addressing every issue imaginable. Here, according to an account, one could “glimpse the women of the future, big spirited, intellectually alert, devoid of the old ‘femininity.’”

The language of Heterodoxy briefly entered the national vocabulary, if only as a source of fun. Political cartoonists played for months with phrases such as the “free-willed, self-willed woman” and “the parasitism of the home woman.” Marie Jenny Howe’s declarations, too, were a source of much joking: “We declare to be ourselves, not just our little female selves, but our whole big human selves” or “we are
feminists
!” Feminism, as a term, did not exactly leap into everyday use. (The
Oxford English Dictionary
would not include it until 1933.) And that was to some extent because it had so quickly, so immediately, been turned into a joke. But it was also true that no one really believed in the prospect of a larger women’s movement. No one really believed much would change.

Even Ida Tarbell, the first woman “muckraker,” author of
History of the Standard Oil Company
(1904) and defiantly never wed (“it would fetter my freedom”), had her doubts. As she wrote, “In an urban setting, there are now simply more women outside, doing things. There is a sense of freedom, due to numbers of women…. But that
doesn’t
mean freedom.”

In a preview of what would be called “sexological” thinking, psychologist Stanley G. Hall summarized the “new” situation in far more dracon
ian terms. The woman who “abhorred the limitations of domestic life” was not just unconventional, newly or blissfully “devoid of the old femininity.” She was “functionally castrated.”

SEX O’CLOCK IN AMERICA

To young single women who’d been born just as new womanhood coalesced—say, around 1895—the idea of a “new” woman quickly came to seem kind of old. Even if the woman in question was only thirty, to her younger counterparts she seemed aged due to the impression, even in casual conversation, that she was always giving a speech. Of course there were fights to fight, but as one young woman told
Harper’s
magazine, “the New Women don’t seem to see how there is…life to live!” This dated “new” character with her upstanding shirtwaist and erect posture made one observer think of “a funereal procession of one.” New womanhood seemed to be set to a dirge while the young(er) world was starting to move to popular songs.

This generational divide is reminiscent of the gap so painfully in evidence during the late 1980s and ’90s. It’s fair to say that second-wave feminists were so successful that the entire Western world changed heroically. But if you were a baby while it was changing, if you missed the big battles—and never experienced the old restrictions and unfairnesses—then how could basic freedoms generate a sense of wonder? Of gratitude? How could you be on your guard for hints of sexist regression?

A young woman, twenty-three, an artist’s model and aspiring dress designer, told
Life
magazine in 1923 the same thing someone twenty-three might have said eighty years later: “I think many of our women’s rights people expect that everyone is going to work for their ideas and causes, even though the battle’s already won as much as it will ever be…. They get very angry if they sense you have an interest in minor things, in how you
dress,
not in political talk. Or you are not interested in THEM and their struggle to free YOU and your friends. Why aren’t we all grateful?”

A symbolic battle had been declared against the tedious new woman—
its rallying cry a slogan borrowed from a
Life
magazine cartoon showing a mother draped in a suffrage banner with a daughter in sporty clothes, holding a tennis racket. The mother is lecturing; the daughter smiles but shrieks to herself:
“Oh, Mother dear, please I do need to leave to go please, please, SHADDUP!”

A backlash against the educated female had developed from within her own ranks.

In a first-person magazine confessional, “Why I Am an Old Maid” by “A Daughter of New England” (1911), we learn that “men instinctively avoid a woman who can discourse at length on sun spots.” More serious statistics seem to bear out this observation—or at least women’s belief in it.

Consider some figures from Bryn Mawr College. Between 1889 and 1908, the peak political years of new womanhood, only half of all graduates married. Of those who did, some 62 percent continued on to graduate school and nearly all the married new women continued, according to a university report, “to achieve in their chosen professions.” But that changed. Just a few years later an additional 10 percent of all graduates started to marry out of school and the number who continued in their careers simultaneously began to drop. Between the years 1910 and 1918, only 49 percent of married class members continued on to graduate school.

I’ll call it the age of the popular as opposed to the reformist new woman, a new woman without the glasses and the prim boater, and in its place a huge yellow hair bow. (And I mean
huge,
as if she were wearing two colorful party balloons joined at the nape of the neck and floating upward. In my grandfather’s Springfield, Ohio, high school yearbook, 1911, not one girl in forty-three is minus her gargantuan bow.)

This new girl, known once again as the bachelor girl or “the bachelorette,” had grown up, according to the
Saturday Evening Post
(1912) “permeated in the modern world.” During the years 1910 to 1913, six states voted in favor of a women’s suffrage amendment. Advertisements, popular novels, quick-change fashion trends—all had been present from the start of her conscious life. Our new bachelor girl wore looser-fitting skirts that allowed her to bicycle everywhere. Some had been on aeroplanes, and others boasted that they’d made cross-continental phone calls. With one mil
lion plus cars out on the roads, they’d all been out driving, even if they retained passenger status (there were no laws against women driving, just, initially at least, a reluctance to let them take control).

Much of the Jazz Age imagery we associate with the 1920s—driving, incessant dancing, loose-fitting clothes—actually took shape around 1913. One
Boston American
columnist described the popular new woman like this: “…the 1914 girl: You’ll recognize her. Just look for a slim creature who is not on closer inspection a boy in a dress, shaped like a pencil.”

One columnist for the
St. Louis Mirror
called the era “sex o’clock in America.”