Bachelor Girl (19 page)

Occasionally new spinsters wrote about life and inserted the slightly regretful “I look at my beatific sister with seven beautiful children…” sentence. But the majority of them wrote about their lives the way this thirty-year-old woman did in
The New York Times Book Review,
1928: “The average spinster of today is…as a rule self-supporting, independent, very
busy and surprisingly contented. If she is missing the best things in life, she does not seem to realize it!”

Of course this newest spinster confronted some of the same problems as had her predecessors. As Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote at the time: “There has occurred a rush of activity such as no one could have predicted even a decade ago…still values have not fundamentally changed.”

In other words, no matter how fashionable she appeared, she could not always peel off the scarifying old spinster markings. For example, many wives maintained a “considerate” refusal to discuss sex in the spinster’s presence, so that she would not “too acutely feel her loss.”

More significant, an unwed woman was still considered on permanent call to her family. Just as immigrant girls had been required to hand over their paychecks, so new spinsters were expected to keep an open-wallet policy. In the early sound film
Mannequin,
proud factory worker Joan Crawford explodes at her poor potato-peeling mother who has given her b’hoy of a brother (played, appropriately, by Bowery-boy star Leo Gorcey) her own week’s pay. Whipping a tea towel on a chopping block, she shouts: “I coulda bought a pair of stockings with two dollars, and I needed them…. he doesn’t want to find a job, and why should he? When he can get enough quarters and dimes outta my salary to throw around the pool hall. I’m sick of it!”

Among more firmly middle-class families, the situation was even worse. Mothers loved to throw lavish Sunday dinners. “Enormous chunks of meat for all!” read the caption of a cartoon defending the single girl who’d been asked to “bring in a few things.” There’s a horde of people in the background, watching her, waiting for her to leave and get the ham, the roast beef, bread, vegetables, puddings, cakes, and anything else that will be needed. The point seemed to be that because she supported no one but herself, she could contribute lavishly to the family fund. Brothers seemed to have felt this entitlement most acutely. Even if these men had jobs, the jobs never brought in enough cash. They had children, demanding wives, and other personal interests to support. And so, as it was reported again and again, brothers hit up their single sisters for cash, knowing that loyal single sisters would keep it se
cret. Many sisters came through. Thus, in the story, her moral superiority to the family is revealed not by hard work and generosity but by loyalty and discretion.

Of course some sisters saw it differently, and they wrote about it, one calling the condition “the New Dependency.” For years after, novels and short stories took on the issue. In Josephine Lawrence’s novel
But You Are Young
(1940), heroine Kelsie Wright, a savvy manicurist, is furious at her vampirish family, who wait each week, in a row, for the communal envelope. Kelsie rushes into a difficult marriage as if she were an immigrant panicked to get a green card.
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The new dependency became a subject not only for married-women/single-girl debates (by then as common as ads for talcum powder). Editorialists and college presidents joined in the discussion. Unanimously they sympathized with the sponger and somehow blamed the giving sister. One much-circulated and reprinted pamphlet explained this point of view: “How can this young man ever hope to get back on his feet when he is demoralized into taking such ‘gifts’ from an unwed sister? It saps the moral strength, turns our bright young men soft, unenterprising…ruined for all chances of manhood by the humiliation of taking handouts from a sister.”

And there was worse in store for the new spinster.

SEXOLOGY AND THE SINGLE GIRL

The response, or backlash, came in the form of sexology, a pre-Freudian system designed to scientifically classify types of sexual behaviors. Sexology was often confused with “free love,” the thrilling, somewhat baroque concept popularized in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller. In fact, sexology, a conservative response to new women workers, concerned just the
opposite. It reworked elements of phrenology (the categorizing of persons according to skull differentiations) and eugenics, the study of superior human breeding, to codify acceptable sexual practices, and then to regulate it.

An antivalentine to the single women of America, sexology propounded that sex was good, wondrous, life-affirming—
if
it was the right kind of sex. That meant married sex, as performed in the missionary position, either for the purpose of procreation—that most erotic aspect of female sexuality—or to make marriage stronger, more “companionate.” Women who were awkward, embarrassed, or for whatever reason uninterested, were diagnosed as cold or, a new and frightening word, frigid. Single women, who were presumed to miss out on intercourse entirely, were thus automatically considered frigid.

As far back as 1910, when “race suicide” was a familiar and threatening term, bookstores had been stocked with antisingular tracts condemning the “social worker” or “New Woman.” They had titles like
Antipathy and Coldness in Women
and
The Poison of Prudery.
Now sexology made the point specific to the flapper and the new spinster and any other variation of single working women.
What Should We Do with Our Daughters?,
a 1921 compendium of expert commentary, featured many viewpoints, although most may be summarized by one Dr. Ely Van de Warker, who declared, “The effort of women to invade all the higher forms of labor is a force battling with the established order of sexual relations.”

From another doctor: “Discovering…her innate feminine charm in the selling of dry goods [treating it] as a more alluring expression of her female self than that of the homely status of wife and mother, the girl exposes the grave crisis of the modern age…. This bounding into the world represents a futile struggle against nature…it touches on disease.”

The experts were very precise about the origins, symptoms, and lasting effects of this disease. There were several different strains among unmarried women.

First, there was the “war working woman,” the woman who’d bravely pitched in during the Great War and was thus also referred to as “a warrior maid.” More commonly she was called an intersexual, a single woman who because of her odd experience somehow had fused with a male inner soul
and who, though she appeared female, acted like a man. Charlotte Haldane, writer and antifeminist, viewed this “specimen” as a “significant enemy of motherhood.” As she explained, “The development through the experience of war work [led to] the phenomenon of the war working woman,” also the “more or less unsexed or undersexed specimen.”

Next came the so-called “mannish lesbian” or “mannish woman” who took things further by dressing the part. (The definition of “lesbian” as we know it still had not settled and the term was often used to describe a woman who dressed like a man.) In medical journals and many popular articles—the word
warning
often appeared in the headline—these women were referred to as subnormal or inverts. Inversion, as described by Havelock Ellis, the father of sexology, matched precisely the traits ascribed to the new woman/flapper/new spinster:

Ultimately in the late 1920s, lesbianism began to take on its modern denotation: two women in a romantic and sexual pairing. No longer was the word used as a universal term gathering together schoolgirl smashes, the living situations of women in settlement houses, and heterosexual women who suffered subnormality and inversion. Lesbianism was, in sexological terms, about as bad as it got. As early as 1902, the
Pacific Medical Journal
had declared that “female boarding schools and colleges are great breeding grounds of artificial [acquired] homosexuality…. If carried into life, such learned perversities would lead to permanently skewed relations with men.” By 1925, the situation was much worse. Commented a woman sexologist that year: “Such a fate is so contrary to the fullness of female human development little can be said to express its horror.”

Statistics on lesbians, as so defined, are difficult to find, but one can find a bizarre number of estimates concerning frigidity. In 1925 leading sexologists estimated that 40 to 50 percent of all women were frigid, the highest numbers to be found among the more educated classes. According to experienced sexologist Weith Knudson, there were five categories of frigidity. Twenty percent of all women had turned out to be “cold,” 25 percent could be called “indifferent,” 30 percent “compliant,” 15 percent “warm,” and just 10 percent “passionate.”

From a sexological point of view, women living alone, especially those who made no effort to find a husband, were to blame. Knudson wrote angrily, “I have emphasized repeatedly that dysparunia”—the technical label for frigidity—“signals an inner negation…. obstinacy cancels the will to submission…. There are women who refuse to be made happy; they resent the thought that the man has saved them, that they owe him everything.”

But readers were assured that such an ungrateful unwed female would suffer for her obstinacy.

Walter Heape, an active commentator on sexological matters, called spinsters—all varieties—the “waste products of our female population…vicious and destructive creatures.” He suggested that like wounded dogs, they might, with the slightest provocation, snap entirely. “A thwarted instinct does not meekly subside,” he declared. “It seeks compensation and damages for its rebuff…. As the number of these women increases every year and, in systematic depreciation of the value of life, they are joined and supported by thousands of disillusioned married women who also scoff at marriage and motherhood as the only satisfactory calling for women.”

In other words, the single idea was contagious, and as it spread these women became increasingly scary. By 1929, the vicious psycho-spinster, a frustrated, vindictive harridan, had debuted as an American character. Walter Heape was one of many who characterized the evolving nightmare. Here is a part of his 1928 study of “inherently frustrated women who have failed to marry by the 25th year”: “She is…the guardian…[seated] in every auditorium of every theatre…haunt[ing] every library…in our schools, she takes little children and day by day they breathe in the atmosphere of her violated spirit.”

Sexology promoted itself as a salvation, a means for innately shy, prudish young girls—or girls who’d been wrongly swayed while at school—to marry and to enjoy a natural womanly sex life that led to many wonderful babies. There was the promise of great joy, if only a woman cooperated and did it right. Even the frigid might be brought back to life. But it was also true that some new spinsters were so deeply frigid, so mentally scarred, that there was no hope for their recovery or return to life.

This sad old girl was shown, as always, to be socially pathetic (“The normal woman must have something to live for, if it be only a cat,” wrote Mrs. Juliet Wilbor Tompkins in 1927.) But now she was also potentially sick. According to Tompkins in “Why Women Don’t Marry,”
Cosmopolitan,
for some new spinster misfits the “ways of sex will always remain a sealed—and rather horrid—book she reads at her peril.” Others of these “nuns by blood” would evolve a “repose, a gentle power of indifference” that sometimes made them “bewilderingly” interesting to men “who wonder if they may not be awakened.” The sad truth, however, was they would always be dormant. Even if they wed, their strange stillness would render any union abnormal. “Such women may marry and have ten children without seeming to come into any close relations with life: to the end they are stray angels, cool and aloof. The man who marries one of them will have no tempests to encounter, yet his way will not be…easy…for he can never fall back on his sex with her.”

The language of sexology, its strict hierarchies of frigidity and lesbianism, suggested that there was serious scientific proof for such claims. If anything, sexology gives us proof that female freedom was so terrifying, so unthinkable, that it had to be killed off—and not just by inventing replacement icons. Finally, all female abnormality would be smothered beneath a pile of specious scientific findings.

HOW THE NEW SPINSTER MADE OUT

In spite of these warnings, most young women still felt “a Ferris-wheel-at-the-top thrill,” as one of my own subjects put it, about trying on a single
life. Even if the top jobs were closed to women,
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there were still so many dizzying possibilities they seemed to pass by as if in a movie montage. My favorite character in search of career is the fictional Carol Kennicott, the determined, unintentionally hilarious heroine of Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
(1920). In one early packed paragraph, we learn that Carol had “hoped to discover that she had an unusual voice, a talent for the piano, the ability to act, to write, to manage organizations,” and that with each disappointment, she “evanesced anew—becoming a missionary, painting scenery, soliciting advertisements,” and on and on until she’s talked into marriage by a doctor from the Midwest with the promise of his rising hometown for her to conquer. Stuck in dreary little Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, she takes up urban planning, working to change street directions and move buildings, not that anyone has asked her to. She runs away once, to Washington, but comes back, because she’s waited too long. She has a child. She is not a career girl at this point but a middle-aged woman from, and even she has to admit it, Gopher Prairie.