Bachelor Girl (35 page)

Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to
then,
then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”

She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.

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: Har
court 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).