Bachelor Girl (28 page)

Interestingly, the spinster as a type had floated back into the national discourse, this time as the subject of an obituary. So many millions of girls automatically married that the society for some time had lacked traditional spinsters. But lamenting the lost spinster—that toothless, brutally bunned stick in black—was actually a handy way of denouncing the new single. In cartoon panels and staged photos, our suddenly beloved spinster was juxtaposed not with the baby housewife who had replaced her, but with a Pill-taking stew or a wealthy single babe, a socialite with décolletage stretching down to her navel. In 1963
The New York Times Magazine
ran a spinster eulogy that refined the identity of the primary “spinster killer,” who was none of the above—not the baby bride, the pill-taking girl, or the rapacious socialite. She was, rather, the average unmarried working girl who could easily beome any one of the above. She applied cosmetics, hair dye, and as one caption put it, “overnight, she’s a new girl, with a new look, a new personality, a new life.” Whatever direction it
took, she was very unlikely to end up a traditional and suddenly beloved auntie spinster.

I’M FEMALE, FLY ME

According to the Labor Department, single women in the sixties worked in greatest numbers as secretaries, titles that after several years might be renegotiated, fluffed up, and rechristened “assistants to.” That is, if the girl in question remained a girl and didn’t marry. There was still a deep mistrust of the married working woman, who would, wrote one insurance-company employee in
Glamour,
“naturally get herself pregnant at the first opportunity and abandon her precious files one afternoon, just like that.” (United Airlines enforced what were perhaps the most blatant restrictions. Until 1969, all stewardesses had to be provably single; if they married, they “retired.”)

But the finest of the young career breed—the white, the virginal, the unwed—were often canonized in
Look
and
Life
spreads, as they had been twenty years before. The jobs, or the companies at least, had cachet—CBS, the UN, Christian Dior. The girls, however, still took shorthand.

As
Life
exclaimed in 1962, “Glamor, Excitement, and Romance and the Chance to Serve the Country—How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl and Work in Washington!” And there she was—Nancy Becker of Columbia, Missouri, at her desk, chin at rest on manicured hands, her pearls, her pencils precisely arrayed, her eyes “full of stardust.” She worked, filing, for the Justice Department. On the following pages young women with similar jobs were seen at Georgetown dinner parties, playing touch football (just like the Kennedys!), and shopping for antique rocking chairs. “It’s the perfect opportunity and so honorable to be here,” said a twenty-three-year-old interviewed for the piece. “But I think we most all agree, most of us are going to be marrying and seeing where that takes us, even if that’s Kansas.” They’d always have Washington.

In New York City the working girls weren’t so sure. In a 1961
Made
moiselle
piece, “The Great Reprieve,” young Joan Didion wrote of Manhattan as an Emerald City that held out to its most tentative residents

By 1963, the year
The Feminine Mystique
crash-landed, many reported “feeling bugged,” bothered about “all the intense spying to see what I am up to,” to quote an airline ticketing agent in
Glamour
. “I expect to look up and see my brother standing there, 600 miles from home, just dropping by to examine my ring finger.” One of Didion’s subjects refused any longer “to parry delicate questions about my
plans
.” They had left home, gone off, transformed themselves. They were trying.

“It was an outrageous dare,” says “Sally-Jo,” age now “fifty-plus.”

Just as they had in the fifties, and in the thirties, and in the time of the Bowery gal, officials likened these “girls” to unwanted immigrants. It was as if the shirtwaisted shop girl had reemerged in Marimekko separates, gotten drunk at lunch, and been spied on her break doing the Watusi. No one knew what to do about her or it or
them
: gangs of fully developed females who’d finished at school and now seemed to be on quixotic scholarships of
their own design. An excerpt from a 1964 inquiry published in the Sunday
New York World Telegram
:

One soothing remedy from the past was to count them. According to New York’s YWCA, there were about 100,000 more in 1964 than there had been the year before and an employment agency specializing in the now popular “communications” jobs (advertising, TV, magazines) reported its “applicants from out of town going up, up, up—8 percent more this year [1964] than last.” There were 350,000 total, reports read. One heard that 25,000 were hiding out in the Village, 300 of them appearing semiweekly in Babe’s Beauty Shop and close to 400 working or volunteering in museums. Odd random surveys, to cite one, revealed that 500 girls interviewed on the subways had once been Girl Scouts, though most—93 percent—did not think their scouting skills helped much in their lives as city girls. And it seemed they now wanted jobs that demanded more than a proven ability to whip through “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-semicolon.”
Glamour
in its 1963 “Happiness Index,” reported, “Happiness is an $8 raise; the boss’s compliment; not having to shave your legs.” A contemporary issue of the
Saturday Evening Post
proclaimed: “The girl who comes to New York is no longer just the young actress or ballet dancer yearning for a chance…Madison Ave. has replaced Broadway as the street of dreams…the new girl is more likely to see herself writing sparkling copy or holding a clipboard for a television producer.”

By the mid-sixties, young single women had begun to appear in ads and fashion spreads as busy TV-set assistants, lone car drivers, career girls holding blueprints with pencils tucked behind their ears. Although these were models, human props, it’s hard to imagine anything like it—discernible professional tracings—even five years before. Lone girls were also shown doing unlikely things. (One 1965 Goodyear ad showed a woman in standard sensible dress changing a tire. Read the caption: “When there’s no man around, Goodyear should be.”) Even tampon ads featured actual photos of young singles with names like Deborah or Patty. Dressed crisply in white, they were “stepping out” on their own. Tampax, say what you will, was another sign of their “independence!”

There were also certifiable single working girls on TV—Marlo Thomas as
That Girl
in her yellow-striped chain-belted minis; Honey West, girl detective—as well as clever dare-taking teenagers (Patty Duke; Sally Field) and magical creatures beyond male control as on
Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie,
and the little-remembered
My Living Doll,
in which Julie Newmar, prior to Catwomanhood, played a beautiful robot who goes her own way. Real life provided even more exotic singular oddities (Joan Baez,
*
Gloria Steinem, Barbra Streisand, Renata Adler, Shirley Chisholm, Diane Arbus, Jane Fonda, Anna Karina, Suzanne Farrell, Twiggy). Even the singles featured in the long newspaper stories (“Why?” “For how long?” “What about those babies?”) seemed more stylish, daring, and accomplished. One
World Telegram
Sunday section, circa 1965, featured young, pretty, and, for a change, serious professionals. They interviewed a twenty-five-year-old woman who designed furniture. Another worked at
Mademoiselle
and also freelanced for a magazine called
In: A Guide to the Swinging Single New York.
There were real estate brokers. Broadway production assistants. Former civil rights workers hoping to get involved in politics.

Of course at least one among the young professionals questioned it all.
Here that was a thirty-two-year-old advertising account executive who, pictured chewing a pencil, admitted, “I want a career, but I don’t want to be the kind of woman men talk about as career women. I’d like to keep at least a few shreds of my femininity.”

Single-girl stories always included such confessions, worries, or an authorial caveat, as if it was the writer’s responsibility to list all contraindications for this radical trial drug called independence. Most of the pieces concluded with a haunted question: “Even now, in black moments, they ask, ‘What am I doing here?’” or “Why should I stay? Who’d notice that I was gone?” “What if there is no one here for me?” or “Is this…it?” But there were also breakthroughs. Entrée to a key social circle. A new man. Better, several men. And there were always the women who—damn it all!—went out and battled to become the serious “girl” who did not type. (Typical tale: As late as 1968, famed NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg was told by a potential employer, a friend, “Nina, you know we have our girl already.” Nina, successfully, went and became the Girl somewhere else.)

Even the average single woman now had, as the
Reader’s Digest
said, “a shot at life previously unimagined. Today’s plain Janes have opportunities their spinster aunts never did—trips to Europe, a Peace Corps assignment in Asia, interesting jobs in research or government. And in all these places they have a chance to display a mettle that may attract a man who might otherwise have been addled by a momentary attraction to a dumb blonde.”

They also had a bit of fun. Many became expert at blowing off whole afternoons at foreign films or in Lord & Taylor’s. And gradually, whether they liked the idea or not, young single women began to go out in mixed groups. When asked where they were going, no one said, “On a date.” The new reply was “Just out.”

THE SINGLE STRIP

The “swinging” singles scene began with a simple and unglamorous realization: Young people were lonely. Families had begun their slow dissolve, shown the first fresh results of divorce, corporate transfers, migrations
south and, of course, the familiar, now more frequent announcement “I’m off to the city, Ma, bye!” Many magazine stories and essays began this way: “The girl or boy who lived next door or two towns over has gone, off to school in the East, to Europe, or New York City.” It was a cliché—any reference to a girl next door had long been a cliché—and yet it was in some undeniable way true. “Anonymity” replaced “togetherness.”

In his 1965 book,
The City Is the Frontier
, Dr. Charles Abrams, the head of Columbia University’s urban-planning department, warned that the city was unprepared for the “convergence” of all these anonymous strangers. How would people meet? Not on the street, where a strict taboo prevented eye contact and conversation. The city, Abrams advised, would have to open to singles, to build special housing, unique public meeting places, become in some sense what he called a “trystorium.” Thus began a small singles industry. At the start there were simple “pay parties,” mimeographed telephone lists, and gimmicks—restaurants with phones at the tables so that if a girl wished, she might call a man seated elsewhere, or “wash-a-terias,” Laundromats that served Cokes and played records. In late 1964 Mike O’Harro, an ensign who had founded a private dating “association,” organized a computerized list of forty-seven thousand singles nationwide. “I had the idea at a party I threw in Virginia,” he told
Newsweek
. “I realized that every person at this party, everyone did different things, and they were all lonely. I was lonely, and it occurred to me that it had to be true in other places.”

Along with others who’d had the single epiphany, he began to stage regional activities. To be single in Denver at the time might have meant attending a “woodsie,” a weenie roast and dance party up in the Rockies. In New York, couples met at rooftop “drinks parties”; roofs had been declared among the “new mating frontiers.” “Causes” were also big—work for a candidate, attend many fund-raisers. Single visionaries took it further, plotting apartment complexes for singles only, miniresorts that would include pools and tennis courts, bars and lounges placed everywhere for optimum mixing.

Grossinger’s, the venerable Catskills resort, had held its first singles weekend in 1961. By the mid-sixties there was barely a resort or a cruise
line that had not imitated the package. By 1965, single life was said to generate somewhere between twenty and fifty million dollars per year. And those figures grew as whole neighborhoods “went single.” Manhattan’s East Side, starting at East Thirtieth Street, heading up to Ninetieth and stretching from the East River all the way to Fifth Avenue, was christened “the singles ghetto,” a minicity of new high-rises and older buildings where girls learned a few quick rules about real estate. (“No one wanted to rent to three girls—three girls was a brothel,” says one marketing analyst, now fifty-six. “You claimed two and kept the third as a constantly recurring cousin from home. Or a stew.”) Thousands of actual stews, secretaries, ad copywriters, sports columnists, “just regular guys with jobs” filled out the area—780,000 of them, according to one insurance company. (There was in fact a real “stew zoo.” The address, as well known as the Barbizon Hotel’s, was 345 East Sixty-fifth Street. During the mid-1960s, the building was 90 percent stewardess-occupied.)