Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century by Betsy Israel

Author:Betsy Israel
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 0380976498
Publisher: William Morrow / HarperCollins
Published: 2002-10-01T10:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

THE SECRET SINGLE: RUNAWAY BACHELOR GIRLS; CATCHING THE BLEECKER STREET BEAT AND/OR BLUES AT THE BARBIZON

It may be said that she has learned by the use of her independence to surrender it without a struggle or murmur when the time comes for making the sacrifice.

—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, ON AMERICAN WOMEN, 1838

The Single Career woman…that great mistake that feminism propagated may find satisfaction in her job. But the chances are that she will suffer psychological damage. Should she marry and reproduce her husband and children will be profoundly unhappy.

—LIFE MAGAZINE, SPECIAL REPORT ON WOMEN, 1956

Girl gets off bus in Port Authority Terminal, goes into Bickford’s, Chinese girl, red shoes, sits down with coffee, looking for Daddy. Life. Something.

—JACK KEROUAC, “A BEAT TOUR OF NEW YORK,” HOLIDAY MAGAZINE, 1959

I DO, I DO, I HAVE TO

I had a friend for a while when I was single who, between day jobs, worked as a performance artist. According to her self-produced catalogue notes, her art consisted of, or was “located” in, the re-creation of “aesthetic epochs,” as they were “parsed out in the locution, Decades.” That meant she continually redid her apartment according to themes such as “1922” and “1890.” The 1950s, however, represented her greatest triumph—a live-action tableau vivant starring a single girl, living alone in a single-girl apartment that is outfitted with the perquisites, the furniture and clothing, of married life.

“Jill,” as she was known within the installation, asked all visitors to leave their shoes at the door, directing them to period shoe racks that held all manner of appropriate footwear: bowling shoes, saddle shoes, impossible pumps, sensible shoes to look good beneath a gray flannel suit. If there were no shoes that fit, visitors walked in socks among the various pieces: the blond-wood Scandinavian couches and modular chairs, and the coffee tables—low and slatted or biomorphic—each stacked with amoebic ashtrays, old issues of Life and Look. A dwarfing hi-fi cabinet opened onto a tiny TV screen and turntable. The space was small, and because she’d made a breakfast nook and a sewing room and because there were filmy stockings everywhere on lines “drying,” visitors selected decorative pillows and hit the floor.

During the run of this “show,” Jill appeared in lima bean–green midriffs with striped pedal pushers. Or she’d whip open a door wearing mock Dior New Look tea dresses, squealing “hel—loow,” Annette Funicello trying on a mid-Atlantic accent. Most all of this annoyed her boyfriend, Jim, a writer who lived in the space with Jill, whose name, he liked to remind people, was really Ann. Jill would French-inhale her cigarette and squeeze his arm sympathetically. She understood. Here was a man who every day for months had been asked to impersonate a “beat poet, struggling,” when all he wanted to do was write or drink his coffee. But it was hard even for Jim to deny that life inside this made-up 1950s could be absurd and amusing. Jill served pancakes, fondue, and highballs all at once. And we all played a game she called Do the Dot.

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