Bachelor Girl (20 page)

Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the
Atlantic Monthly
had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel,
The Job
(1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days…beyond a dull consistency of…machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiancé in a successful real estate brokerage.
†

She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are
creative…with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be sort of superman.”

Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the
Saturday Evening Post,
continued well into the 1920s to praise the new spinster as that sleek figure in a modish cap, freed of the troubles of her married friends. But she understood the point Crystal Eastman had to make. It would increasingly be difficult. With some resignation, she wrote in 1929,

All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.

SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY

If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?

If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”

This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.

My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does
she
have a job for?”

There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single women, many of whom were also supporting their families, parents, siblings, grandparents—the new dependency in crisis mode. Millions of unemployed single men would ultimately regain jobs and misplaced re
spect. So would some single women. But more than a quarter of all women who’d been between twenty and thirty during the Depression years would never have careers. They also stood to lose much more.

“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.

Mary McCarthy
*
describes the complex procurement process in her novel
The Group,
set in the thirties and written in 1966. For weeks one character schemes and plans to get the item, telling her prospective lover that she will call him as soon as she has it in her hands. After an embarrassing doctor’s “fitting”—what is perhaps the first flying-diaphragm scene in all literature—she leaves with her secretive bag and calls him to find he’s not in. She walks around, calls again, then again, and finally tells his landlady that she is waiting in Washington Square Park. Seated on a bench, the precious treasure on her lap, she starts to reconsider. Hours have passed and obviously he’s not coming. Ultimately she leaves the bag beneath the bench and walks off feeling terribly alone and embarrased.

Many real single women spent the Depression years feeling terribly alone and desperate. Work was hard to find and no matter how irrational it came to seem, there was still a stigma attached to the job hunt. The compromised “forgotten” man—he was the one who needed work. But there were also needy women, and some of them literally began to starve. Fainting, in fact, became a common melodramatic plot point in the numerous backstage musicals of the time. The starving girls were almost always revived by Broadway stars who just happened to be passing by and who went on to make the emaciated girls tap-dancing miracles. Back on earth, of course, fainting was not a career option. Most women who could, as well as those who couldn’t, typed. Even college graduates typed. Barnard College reported that only one third of the class of 1932 who sought jobs found them, and that most of the class at some point took up typing.

“Most of the girls I knew in those years were typists or bookkeepers who had their jobs because they were the only ones who knew how some cigar-reeker of a slob kept his files,” recalled Bess, now seventy-nine and herself a bookkeeper who worked until 1997. “Women weren’t taking over men’s places. What man do you know who wants to cross his legs and take dictation?”

This was still an age of classifieds listing “Jobs—male” and “Jobs—female.” (In fact, this age would last until the late 1960s, when protests and sit-ins inspired newspapers to blend the job offerings.) And it was “Jobs—male,” the jobs in heavy industry, that took the biggest hits during the thirties. Clerical jobs, like all others, thinned out but never to the point where there was nothing. Women who held these jobs both hated and cherished them. There was little else out there and, for the city emigrants, nothing at all to return to.

But there were a few positions beyond typist, telephone operator, unwed teacher, and a handful of actress jobs. The biggest professional openings were in journalism, specifically, in the women’s sections, what were known well into the 1970s as “4F” for “food, furnishings, fashion, and family.” From the 1935 handbook “So You Want to Be a Reporter: A Hard-Boiled Look at the Profession for Eager Cubs,” we learn just how difficult a challenge it will be. A wizened Chicago newspaperman, or someone imitating one, says:

It goes on to describe a life so grueling one might be reading a publication of the U.S. military. Yet by 1934, the Labor Department estimated that there were 15,000 “girl reporters” (compared with a total of only 7,105 in 1920), including several hundred editors across the country. Although most of these young women found themselves on the casserole-and-sweater beats, they kept at it, and by 1950, there were 28,595 female journalists.

Within a few years, the existence of so many reporters would inspire a rush of “girl-reporter” movies as well as the birth of comic-strip perennial Brenda Starr. But at the time, books and movie serials featured reporter like snoops, detectives with blond hair, nice manners, and remarkable powers of deduction. Nancy Drew, who debuted in 1930, drove a blue coupe and with her two girl pals, Bess and George, solved community mysteries. Detective Judy Bolton went to work in 1932, and that same year Joan Blondell, best known for playing sardonic chorines with a past, became Miss Pinkerton, a nurse who investigates a murder on the large estate where she lives and works.

These fantasies tried to pull struggling women into small mysteries and story lines more captivating than those of their own lives. But plenty of women were out there having real-life wild adventures of their own.

ON THE ROAD, FEMALE EDITION

There were always a few women reporters who published more than their recipes. Many of these writers had been encouraged by Eleanor Roosevelt, who held a weekly woman-only press conference, inviting prominent journalists including Lorena Hickok of the Associated Press; Genevieve Forbes Herrick of the
Chicago Tribune
; Marjorie C. Driscoll from the
Los Angeles Examiner;
Grace Robinson, the New York
Daily News;
Elenore Kellogg, the
New York World
; Ruth Finney of Scripps-Howard, and Emma Bugbee from the
New York Herald Tribune
. Over time, the First Lady had come to view women as a class apart, a group having its own distinct, neglected problems, and she believed reporters might best bring these postsuffrage issues into public debate. Even those not within the inner circle got the message. Freelance writer Grace Hutchins makes the perfect example.

During the mid-thirties, Hutchins spent two years traveling the country in search of the Forgotten Woman. She found a great one: Miss Bertha Thompson, aka Boxcar Bertha, the famed lifelong female hobo. At age thirty or thirty-two—she wasn’t quite sure—Bertha told Hutchins her life story. How her family had hit the road in desperation years earlier. How she’d learned to read and spell by sounding out the words painted on the sides of passing freight cars. Her mother taught her the rest of what she needed to know, a body of knowledge that might be entitled “Don’t Count on Men.”

At the time Hutchins met her, Bertha had established a chain of female “transient bureaus” that functioned as M.A.S.H. units and impromptu wilderness kaffeeklatsches. She described her fellow travelers as a “great army of women, all motivated by the same things…no work, family barely on relief…no prospect of marriage, the need for a lark, for sex, freedom, living and the great urge to know what other women were doing.”

Bertha couldn’t possibly have kept up with the traffic. According to Hutchins, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 homeless women wandering around, many of them teenaged runaways who slept outside. The YWCA estimated in its 1933 Christmas message that there were 145,000
women who “very well could be” described as “home-less and footloose…at dangerous odds.” In 1935 the Salvation Army reported that in eight hundred cities across America there were 10,000 women a night asking for shelter. Another source of information about transient women was social scientist Thomas Menehin, who wrote of his travels “hoboing” his way around the country in 1936. His estimates: One out of every twenty tramps was a “girl,” although many, like Veronica Lake in
Sullivan’s Travels
(1942), dressed as a man for protection. Life on the road was extremely tough; women were in constant danger of rape, especially in the public shelters.

Or so it was assumed. Menehin, like others, did not have any hard data on what homeless women did at night or, for that matter, by day. Did they band together, or was it a rule of the road to trust no one? Where did they sleep? “The Forgotten Man” became a vivid national icon in part because he turned up in newsreels. With the colorful exception of Boxcar Bertha, Forgotten Women were invisible. Writer Meridel LeSueur asked, point-blank, in a 1932 issue of
The Masses
:

One read about these women on very slow news days, in stories that often seemed more like public-service announcements. Women who made the news were valorous like Eleanor Roosevelt, brave and spunky like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, glamorous—the duchess of Windsor, Marlene Dietrich—or extraordinary, like Babe Didrikson Zaharias, the mega-sportswoman. (At a time when there were no organized women’s sports, Zaharias served as a one-woman Olympic team. Asked once if there was anything she didn’t play, she answered, “Dolls.”) But the average single woman
wasn’t asked very often what she thought or did. And when someone—a man, an official—happened to ask, certain assumptions about her character seemed always to creep their way into the questions.

THE CASE OF THE MISSING HEART

One of the key single-female motifs in Depression-era America was the heartless woman. She stole jobs from men. She stole herself away from men who needed her. She even stole cosmetics from stores. She could not help herself. Either she’d been born hard or, to paraphrase from numerous magazines and dime novels, something human had been ground out of her in hard times. She was missing a vital piece. The word
malevolent
began to appear before the words
woman
or
female
.

The mannish sexological ice block seemed healthy and whole in comparison. Here was a woman missing more than sexual warmth or desire. She was missing her heart. And this freak condition was best open to exploratory surgery on film. As early as the mid-twenties movies had featured intense, almost rabid female bosses who spit out orders. They hired! They fired! They lived in art moderne palaces around servants they hired and fired! Most important, they dismissed romantic love as a plebeian distraction. At least for the first forty-five minutes of the movie. A classic example in this brittle-bitch genre is
Smouldering Fires
(1925), starring Pauline Frederick as a corporate executive named Jane Vale (that’s for “vale of tears” as opposed to “wedding veil”). Miss Vale shrieks her way through staff meetings. She yells at ninny secretaries who seriously discuss makeup and men. She has a signature motto: “Be necessary to others and let no man be necessary to you.”