Spinster (14 page)

Talk was their greatest tool, and with it they forged an all-inclusive “conversational community” that united genders and classes. “Free speech was self-conscious, flashy, daring, ostentatiously honest and sexual,” Stansell reports, skipping “from poetry to birth control to the situation of the garment workers…a pastiche of speech, a bricolage.” This glorious explosion of words obliterated the “mannered conversation of the patrician drawing room” and the “barren commonplaces of the middle-class parlor.”
The writers among this group reveled in “confidence, discovery, self-delight” and “liked expansiveness and embrace, not doubt and mockery; crossing over lines, not drawing them.” Their brief, shining moment has gone down in history as “the innocent revolution,” “the lyric years,” “the joyous season.”

These people were the anti-hipsters.

In the manner of many an iconic moment, one oft-told story to emerge from the period is about an episode that—in hindsight—actually signaled its demise.

It was a cold night in January 1917. Six self-proclaimed “Arch Conspirators” (most famously, Marcel Duchamp, who'd already scandalized the world with his
Nude Descending a Staircase
four years prior) broke into the Washington Square Arch, climbed its spiral staircase to the roof, and staged a mock revolution of the most courteous variety: after stringing up Chinese lanterns and red balloons they sat on a picnic blanket talking and sipping tea by candlelight until dawn. Two of the six insurgents were women, one of whom read aloud the group's declaration of independence: Greenwich Village was seceding from the Union and would henceforth be known as the “Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square.” Then they shot off their toy cap guns.

My kind of bohemians!

After four years of enervation in the stodgy faux-metropolis of Boston, these charismatic radicals felt like century-old emissaries of my own emotional storm. To break with the past and invent a new future was a rebellion I wanted to get behind. Indeed, I hoped I was already making it happen.

I was particularly intrigued with a woman named Neith Boyce—again, I'm ashamed to admit, because she, like Maeve Brennan and Edna Millay, felt so familiar. Like me, she'd moved to New York City from Boston in her twenties. Like me, she wasn't radical, but she was clearly independent and strong. She'd been the sole female reporter at an influential (now defunct) city
newspaper. She “harbored strong literary ambitions and was determined to launch a career that would spirit her away from the destiny of marriage and motherhood,” Stansell wrote.

She sounded like someone I might like to know.

I squinted at the photo, but I couldn't tell much from what I saw: a shadowy profile of a young woman with pale skin and heavy-lidded eyes, dark hair pulled back in a loose knot.

Today, when I flip to page nineteen, where her entry is acknowledged by a faint pencil checkmark in the margin—a signal to myself to look her up when I got home—I marvel over how the doors to our futures can be as unassuming as they are unexpected.

Neith's place in recorded history is so slight that it took me a week to finally hear her voice (so to speak). A footnote had led me to the bottom of New York University's Bobst Library, where I threaded a spool of film into a microform machine and started to scroll through ancient issues of
Vogue
. Finally, there it was, May 5, 1898:

I was born a bachelor, but of course several years elapsed…before my predestination to this career became obvious. Up to that time people acknowledged threatening indications by calling me queer, while elderly persons who wished to be disagreeable said that I was independent…. It hurt them to think that the unblemished escutcheon of the family should be invaded by the pen rampant and shirt-collar, saltier-wise, argent, of the bachelor girl.

It was the opening salvo of The Bachelor Girl, Neith's recurring column in praise of the single life.

The day it became evident that I was irretrievably committed to this alternative lifestyle was a solemn one in the family circle. I was about to leave that domestic haven, heaven only knew for what port. I was going to New York to earn my own bread and butter and to live alone.

In 1898 women still laced themselves into corsets so tightly it was believed they actually breathed differently than men—from the top of the chest, not the diaphragm. To go swimming, they wore elaborate and cumbersome “bathing costumes”—generally a knee-length flannel dress embellished with lace or embroidery and worn with bloomers, dark stockings, high lace-up slippers, and a cap; a beribboned burka by another name.

More relevant, marriage and motherhood were the entire point of a Victorian woman's existence. As I'd learned from Edith Wharton's novels, until a daughter of the upper class turned eighteen and was formally presented to society, she was kept at home among matrons who oversaw her training in the feminine arts (ballroom dancing, light conversation, pouring tea, etc.); her subsequent betrothal—which, ideally, took place before the year was out—and its attendant flurry of social activity (the engagement dinner and rounds of celebratory parties, all of it closely chronicled in the society pages) was the most exciting period of her life. Status confirmed, family wealth consolidated, she retreated into the domestic fold. (“I am becoming ardently matrimonial,” Alice James, Henry James's sister, confided to a friend in the mid-1870s, “and if I could get any sort of man to be impassioned 'bout me, I should not let him escape.”)

I couldn't decide which astounded me more: that one of these antique Victorians so blithely rejected marriage, or that her column saying as much appeared in a national fashion magazine not exactly known for championing the feminist cause.

My heart beat faster. I read on:

I never shall be an old maid, because I have elected to be a Girl Bachelor. And as to regretting this choice, you know the saying of the philosopher, “Whether you marry or not, you will regret it.”

The philosopher she referred to was most likely Kierkegaard, who said something along those lines, as did Darwin around that time, listing the pros and cons of matrimony. That both were men is no coincidence; ambivalence over marriage wasn't a woman's prerogative.

And yet, as I came to learn, Neith wasn't ahead of her time—she was exactly of it, articulating the unspoken desires and sating the curiosities of a large portion of
Vogue
's readership. The term
bachelor girl
was coined in 1895 to describe a specific breed of middle-class woman who chose to pursue the new educational and vocational opportunities opening up around her, which allowed her to live alone and support herself—so very unlike her sister the spinster, who was closely associated with the home, and the working-class women for whom work was an economic necessity. From roughly the 1870s to the 1910s, the marriage rate among educated women fell to 60 percent, 30 percent lower than the national average; clearly, for more than a few the single life was a deliberate choice.

That said, Neith was perhaps a touch too articulate for her editors (all of them women, I assume); in the next issue's table of contents the word
fiction
is appended to the title of her column. By the third installment of The Bachelor Girl it's gone again. All through the summer and into November she invited readers to ponder the true stories of a real-life happily unmarried woman.

Her point of view is straightforward: living the bachelor life
isn't easy, and it's not for everyone, but if one cultivates a few key qualities and habits it can be the best game in town.

To start, a Bachelor Girl must, above all, be confident, as, “without self-confidence, no Napoleon nor even a war-editor or a woman reporter ever achieved success.”

Clean clothes increase morale: “The linen collar—of the latest mode, be it understood, and fresh at least once a day—has tended to strengthen the backbone of the bachelor girl.”

It doesn't hurt to have patience for small-minded sorts, as the Bachelor Girl's “point of view is rather a new one, and persons who are wedded to good old points of view, most respectable people in fact, hate the effort of adjusting themselves to uncertain new ones.”

Her aim, after all, isn't merely to live an independent life but also to “convince the world that she is possible.”

Given the “brain-energy” this mission requires, it's crucial to surround oneself with like-minded people. This means eliminating “non-essential social elements (otherwise bores)”—a radical suggestion at a time when the bulk of a woman's day was spent following the convention of paying calls—and getting “the most good from the greatest possible number of fellow-beings.”

By definition, the Bachelor Girl has very little in common with her married peers, and she doesn't fool herself into thinking otherwise. This is why you'll “find bachelor girls largely flocking by themselves,” all of whom “have some definite everyday occupation”—which is to say, they make their own way and aren't supported by a trust fund or a generous great-aunt. The Bachelor Girl is self-sufficient, economically and philosophically.

Threaded through Neith's practical guidance are anecdotes about her domestic misadventures. By the late 1800s, massive demand had sent urban rents skyrocketing, making boardinghouses and residential hotels, longtime fixtures of the American
landscape,
*
¹
the only affordable option for women who wanted to live on their own. As expected, Neith appreciates her boardinghouse for providing the independence she desires, but she can't stand the food, so she and a fellow girl bachelor, Olivia, get their own apartment. Soon enough, her roommate reveals herself to be a humorless penny-pincher, and so Neith returns to the boardinghouse.

“The thing that was responsible was a difference in our ideas of economy, or rather the fact that I had no idea of economy, whereas to Olivia it was a necessary condition of existence if not the foundation of the moral law,” she explains. The bright side: “I was not a man and married to Olivia.”

Whether by coincidence or design, at this point in the series fashion illustrations of bustled women in feathered hats run alongside the column, as if to remind readers that the writer is indeed female.

The experience with Olivia leaves Neith wary of “the cooperative feminine ménage,” but eventually her longing for good food wins out, and she moves into a communal house with six other like-minded career women plus a housekeeper. Things start out well. Each night they gather for a civilized dinner at a nicely laid table. But they can't for the life of them keep a housemaid—the last quits claiming she's afraid of the “crazy ladies”—and anyway, at the end of a year, Neith is the only one who hasn't succumbed “to the prevalent matrimonial epidemic.”

Decades before social psychologists published academic papers explaining that one's lifestyle choices are heavily influenced by one's social circle, Neith laid it out herself:

I realize the deadly character of the engagement germ, which consists in its contagious quality. I know that if one girl, in
a house where there are seven, becomes engaged, it is seven thousand chances to one that the other six will follow suit—provided, that is, that there are available suitors, and there generally are if one is not particular.

Beneath the brittle scrim of Neith's slightly antiquated diction is a certainty and clarity that took me completely by surprise—her pre-ideological perspective felt far more modern than the one my contemporaries and I assumed when we spoke about our own lives. She was funny without being mean, strong-minded but never didactic.

Finally, here it was, the conversation I'd been looking for.