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Betsy Israel: Bachelor Girl
Nov. 7th, 2018 11:55 amBachelor Girl, by Betsy Israel, is rather awkwardly and grandiosely subtitled 100 Years of Breaking the Rules — A Social History of Living Single, particularly since the author herself acknowledges that her study focuses almost exclusively on unmarried primarily white and middle class heterosexual women living in the United States in the period following the Industrial Revolution. While it sets to one side not only female bachelorhood in other cultures and in the working and underclasses, but the vast history of unmarried women from religioueses to working spinsters in the pre-industrial era, it does give insight into the icons that have formed the cultural perception of the single woman that still inform our understanding of the state of being unmarried.
Israel does take a brief look at the pre-industrial image of the single, hard-working, industrious spinster, gainfully employed in her own right, functioning in business as what came to be categorised as ‘femmes soles’, women who did not require the legal authorisation of a husband to conduct business or enter into contracts. However, she begins her cultural study of the ways society has looked at and categorised the single woman with those images common in nineteenth century urban America, and particularly the east coast. Rural and western American women at this time were predominantly married and working on farm, ranch or other home enterprise. Those who were unmarried were usually teachers, or unmarried relatives living in the home and contributing to the household economy.
It took the more varied economy of a mid-sized town or city to produce the cultural phenomenon of the single woman. The emergence of the idea of the “old maid” as a social category, of unmarried woman was based on the concept of the unfortunate daughter of the bourgeois or gentry who, trained for nothing much beyond becoming a wife and mother, has failed to achieve that status, becoming instead the dowdy, often impoverished maiden aunt who has an odd personality and is frequently dependent on the kindness of more fortunate relatives. Israel writes of such women: “This first public etiquette for American spinsters called for a muted surrender, as if a spiritual hysterectomy had been performed, leaving behind as scars an insecurity and chronic melancholia.Typically spinsters helped with the chores at home and moved between the homes of married siblings who needed help. And ... they hired themselves out as paid companions, tutors, schoolteachers or assistants, and seamstresses. Within the household, even if this was her original family household, she was made to seem unimportant and childlike—for a woman’s adult life began at marriage—and she was expected to keep herself well occupied and out of the way. “
However, Israel notes, there were some women from the middle and upper classes in this era who did not accept this image of the single woman as a woman left behind and shut out from the fullness of life: “She who ‘preferred to live her single life’ lived it most often in New England, from the 1830s through the mid-1870s. This was the era of ‘single blessedness,’ an almost devotional phrase used by a fairly elite and intellectual band of single women to describe a state of unmarried bliss. To sketch a quick composite of this early rebel, we can say that she grew up amid intellectuals, preachers or writers, with left-leaning principles and a love of oration. Household conversation ranged from abolitionism, transcendentalism, or trade unionism to any other radical topic then debated at public meetings and in Unitarian church sermons. She may not have received an education like her brother’s, but on her own she had trained her mind the way others had worked to play delightfully upon the pianoforte, or to sing lieder (not that she lacked these more delicate talents).“
Among these single women - some of whom we know today as activists in the abolitionist and feminist movements - were many who formed deep emotional relationships with other women, which may have also been sexual in nature. Certainly some unmarried women wrote to each other in highly passionate terms, and lived together in what came to be termed ‘Boston marriages.’ It is difficult to determine how many of these women were what we would now consider lesbians or bisexuals in intimate relationships - such things were rarely spoken of - but certainly some were.
Other single educated women joined the settlement house movement. A settlement house - perhaps the best known was Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams - was “a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives.”
Less fortunate were the “factory girls” - young working class women, often from immigrant families, who were employed in factories or did piecework from their homes - ‘ship girls’ and domestic servants. These working girls were often the subjects of stories in sensationalist newspapers, rife with suggestions that their poverty led to sexual vice. This was not true of all working girls - certainly some were carefully watched by families, employers and landladies for any sign of sexual impropriety, and their prime interest, beyond economic survival, was learning to assimilate. But their reputation for sexual adventurousness was in part merited - working girls earned very little compared to men, and often handed all of their earning over to their families. This meant that if they wanted to go out, enjoy themselves, have fun, they needed a boy to ‘treat’ them - and the boys expected to be recompensed in some fashion. In New York, the more socially and sexually active working girls became known as ‘Bowery girls’ - young women who dressed boldly, and ‘walked out’ with the boys of the Irish gangs who controlled the Bowery night life - “a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream....” Many of these girls engaged in casual prostitution to augment their meagre incomes. Some of these girls eventually married; others continued in the shops and factories; older women who remained single might move into teaching if they had a high school diploma, or into ‘business’ as office and clerical workers.
As the nineteenth century came to an end, another category of single woman came into the public consciousness - the ‘bohemian girl’ and her slightly tamer cousin, the ‘bachelor girl,’ collectively known as ‘B-girls.’
“Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or something new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry.” The bachelor girl was more interested in making money, but was also drawn to the artistic life; these girls tended to cluster around urban communities like Greenwich Village in New York, or at least spend their leisure time in such venues.
While all these culturally defined varieties of single women were sometimes lumped together under the umbrella term of the “new woman,” this term more specifically applied to a new icon, often distinguished by their “refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)” New women were educated, middle-class, politically left-wing, engaged in the suffragist movement, early feminism, and social reform. They had careers rather than jobs. These were the spiritual daughters of the previous century’s devotees of ‘single blessedness.’
The next major shift in the image of the single girl appeared after the end of WWI, when the post-war social upheaval led to the emergence of the ‘flapper.’ As Israel notes, “The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part.” The flapper was the first ‘single girl’ to be a large enough demographic group to be attractive to advertisers, and was a significant segment of the single female population for much of the 1920s. Social critics bemoaned her freedom and tendency to place herself as the equal of men, and feared a plunge into sexual immorality and an end to marriage, but flappers were not more sexually active than previous generations of young single women. Many of the eventually married. But those who did not, but soight instead to build independent careers, fell afoul of two crushing social expectations. First, the single working woman was still seen as a part of her family and expected to turn her earning over to the family. And second, the new, Freudian-influenced approach to sexology, held that only in a marriage could a woman find true sexual maturity and fulfilment, and the new spinster risked being labeled frigid or, worse, a lesbian.
Despite this many young women remained unmarried and career-oriented throughout the 1920s, only to find all their ambitions dashed in the stock market crash and subsequent depression years, when any available middle-class jobs were for men who had families to support. There was little place for the working girl. While some women held onto jobs that men, even desperate men, would not take - filing, cleaning - most women were driven into dependency, on families or husbands. In many states, married women were denied the right to work at all so men could have their jobs. The Depression saw a vast increase in homelessness and migratory labour, and though it is rarely talked about, many of the hobos riding the rails, living rough and seeking casual work, were women. Boxcar Bertha, as she was known, was a member of a network of migratory women who looked out for each other, protecting their sisters against both the world, and male migratory workers.
And then, as the idea of the singe woman had been just about subsumed into the image of the wife and mother, came the war. “The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return.” Working women became essential to the continuation of the economy’s smooth functioning: “female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.”
But even as the work of women became temporarily essential, government and the media were building the groundwork for forcing women out of the workforce once the boys came home. For every story praising a Rosie the riveter was a story about how men and women could not work together without sex destabilising the workplace, or the inefficiency of working women with their monthly ‘women’s problems.’
There were two big problems with women once the war was over - the first, hw to get them, not just back into the home, but change them back to women who had learned to be self-sufficient, to manage jobs and households, to be, if married, the head of the family, and if single, that they didn’t need men. The second problem was what to do with the excess women. Many men didn’t come home, and a significant number of those who dd, brought foreign brides. Suddenly there were vast numbers of women who could not be shuffled off into marriage. The answer was to increase the pressure to compete for what men there were. The old psychological stories about the immaturity and neuroticism of the single woman, the necessity of marriage and children to the formation of a healthy female psyche, were dragged out with a vengeance. The single woman - never married or increasingly common divorceé - was a threat, a locus of social instability.
Yet even at the peak of the ‘back to the home’ movement, some women insisted on living, at least for a time, a single life.
And one of the questions that came to obsess those observing the single working woman was, what was she doing abut sex? Through the 50s and much of the 60s, there was an ambivalence about the single girl - sometimes threat, sometimes frigid and neurotic, sometimes sad and damaged, sometimes a plucky girl in search of a man and supporting herself along the way, but never as fufilled as the wife and mother.
Then women’s liberation arrived on the scene, and it became harder to persuade women that their only path to happiness was through marriage. The single woman could have a career, independence, and a satisfying sexual relationship without a permanent attachment to a man. Marriage became something a woman might do because she wanted to, not because she had to. And it became something a woman might leave if it was no longer fulfilling. Even motherhood was no longer out of the question for the single woman, whether through pregnancy or adoption. Indeed, there was no longer such a thing as ‘the single girl’ just a large number of women who hade decided to forgo marriage, temporarily or permanently.
Israel ends on a somewhat ambivalent note, listing modern ‘single icons’ like Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones who, despite financial independence, are profoundly unhappy with being single. She quotes single women who bemoan the lack of interesting, worthwhile men. She suggests that there is still something not quite right in the lonely life of women who work, and date, but remain unmarried. Yet at the same time, she acknowledges that, by objective measures, single women are not unhappy as a rule, and that many feel strangely trapped if they do marry.
In short, in the end of this long examination of single women, Israel has discovered that they are people, with all the joys and discontents of other people.
Israel does take a brief look at the pre-industrial image of the single, hard-working, industrious spinster, gainfully employed in her own right, functioning in business as what came to be categorised as ‘femmes soles’, women who did not require the legal authorisation of a husband to conduct business or enter into contracts. However, she begins her cultural study of the ways society has looked at and categorised the single woman with those images common in nineteenth century urban America, and particularly the east coast. Rural and western American women at this time were predominantly married and working on farm, ranch or other home enterprise. Those who were unmarried were usually teachers, or unmarried relatives living in the home and contributing to the household economy.
It took the more varied economy of a mid-sized town or city to produce the cultural phenomenon of the single woman. The emergence of the idea of the “old maid” as a social category, of unmarried woman was based on the concept of the unfortunate daughter of the bourgeois or gentry who, trained for nothing much beyond becoming a wife and mother, has failed to achieve that status, becoming instead the dowdy, often impoverished maiden aunt who has an odd personality and is frequently dependent on the kindness of more fortunate relatives. Israel writes of such women: “This first public etiquette for American spinsters called for a muted surrender, as if a spiritual hysterectomy had been performed, leaving behind as scars an insecurity and chronic melancholia.Typically spinsters helped with the chores at home and moved between the homes of married siblings who needed help. And ... they hired themselves out as paid companions, tutors, schoolteachers or assistants, and seamstresses. Within the household, even if this was her original family household, she was made to seem unimportant and childlike—for a woman’s adult life began at marriage—and she was expected to keep herself well occupied and out of the way. “
However, Israel notes, there were some women from the middle and upper classes in this era who did not accept this image of the single woman as a woman left behind and shut out from the fullness of life: “She who ‘preferred to live her single life’ lived it most often in New England, from the 1830s through the mid-1870s. This was the era of ‘single blessedness,’ an almost devotional phrase used by a fairly elite and intellectual band of single women to describe a state of unmarried bliss. To sketch a quick composite of this early rebel, we can say that she grew up amid intellectuals, preachers or writers, with left-leaning principles and a love of oration. Household conversation ranged from abolitionism, transcendentalism, or trade unionism to any other radical topic then debated at public meetings and in Unitarian church sermons. She may not have received an education like her brother’s, but on her own she had trained her mind the way others had worked to play delightfully upon the pianoforte, or to sing lieder (not that she lacked these more delicate talents).“
Among these single women - some of whom we know today as activists in the abolitionist and feminist movements - were many who formed deep emotional relationships with other women, which may have also been sexual in nature. Certainly some unmarried women wrote to each other in highly passionate terms, and lived together in what came to be termed ‘Boston marriages.’ It is difficult to determine how many of these women were what we would now consider lesbians or bisexuals in intimate relationships - such things were rarely spoken of - but certainly some were.
Other single educated women joined the settlement house movement. A settlement house - perhaps the best known was Hull House in Chicago, founded by Jane Addams - was “a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives.”
Less fortunate were the “factory girls” - young working class women, often from immigrant families, who were employed in factories or did piecework from their homes - ‘ship girls’ and domestic servants. These working girls were often the subjects of stories in sensationalist newspapers, rife with suggestions that their poverty led to sexual vice. This was not true of all working girls - certainly some were carefully watched by families, employers and landladies for any sign of sexual impropriety, and their prime interest, beyond economic survival, was learning to assimilate. But their reputation for sexual adventurousness was in part merited - working girls earned very little compared to men, and often handed all of their earning over to their families. This meant that if they wanted to go out, enjoy themselves, have fun, they needed a boy to ‘treat’ them - and the boys expected to be recompensed in some fashion. In New York, the more socially and sexually active working girls became known as ‘Bowery girls’ - young women who dressed boldly, and ‘walked out’ with the boys of the Irish gangs who controlled the Bowery night life - “a daring all-night party. Couples crowded for miles beneath the elevated train, or El, whose tracks cast slatted lantern strips across the gaudy attractions—the famed Bowery Theater, freak shows, oyster houses, hundreds of eateries and food carts, some selling the first mass-produced ice cream....” Many of these girls engaged in casual prostitution to augment their meagre incomes. Some of these girls eventually married; others continued in the shops and factories; older women who remained single might move into teaching if they had a high school diploma, or into ‘business’ as office and clerical workers.
As the nineteenth century came to an end, another category of single woman came into the public consciousness - the ‘bohemian girl’ and her slightly tamer cousin, the ‘bachelor girl,’ collectively known as ‘B-girls.’
“Typically our bohemian was a high school or college dropout who had tried but could not live within the strictures of the bourgeois society she had only narrowly escaped. She often told reporters, whether she’d been asked or not, that she possessed a “real” self, a poetic artistic self that had been stifled in her previous existence. But now, surrounded by other like souls, in a unique and freeing place, she, or this self, or something new and amazing would emerge. Generally speaking, she was hoping for signs of artistic talent or the ability to attract a monied husband who would elicit and encourage her inchoate artistry.” The bachelor girl was more interested in making money, but was also drawn to the artistic life; these girls tended to cluster around urban communities like Greenwich Village in New York, or at least spend their leisure time in such venues.
While all these culturally defined varieties of single women were sometimes lumped together under the umbrella term of the “new woman,” this term more specifically applied to a new icon, often distinguished by their “refusal or, rather, polite disinclination, to marry. (And when new women did marry, the unions were almost always unconventional. Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jane Addams, Edna St. Vincent Millay—all had marriages that involved living apart, sometimes continents apart, “with an understanding.” There were public and tolerated affairs; in some cases they divorced and husbands took custody of the children.)” New women were educated, middle-class, politically left-wing, engaged in the suffragist movement, early feminism, and social reform. They had careers rather than jobs. These were the spiritual daughters of the previous century’s devotees of ‘single blessedness.’
The next major shift in the image of the single girl appeared after the end of WWI, when the post-war social upheaval led to the emergence of the ‘flapper.’ As Israel notes, “The flappers were singular democrats. Anyone could join. Whether she worked, studied, taught, performed, or played around, all a woman needed “to flap” was a youthful appearance and attitude—a sassy vocabulary, a cool way with men, a bit of daring, humor, and some professional smarts. Lacking these latter qualities, one could easily just dress the part.” The flapper was the first ‘single girl’ to be a large enough demographic group to be attractive to advertisers, and was a significant segment of the single female population for much of the 1920s. Social critics bemoaned her freedom and tendency to place herself as the equal of men, and feared a plunge into sexual immorality and an end to marriage, but flappers were not more sexually active than previous generations of young single women. Many of the eventually married. But those who did not, but soight instead to build independent careers, fell afoul of two crushing social expectations. First, the single working woman was still seen as a part of her family and expected to turn her earning over to the family. And second, the new, Freudian-influenced approach to sexology, held that only in a marriage could a woman find true sexual maturity and fulfilment, and the new spinster risked being labeled frigid or, worse, a lesbian.
Despite this many young women remained unmarried and career-oriented throughout the 1920s, only to find all their ambitions dashed in the stock market crash and subsequent depression years, when any available middle-class jobs were for men who had families to support. There was little place for the working girl. While some women held onto jobs that men, even desperate men, would not take - filing, cleaning - most women were driven into dependency, on families or husbands. In many states, married women were denied the right to work at all so men could have their jobs. The Depression saw a vast increase in homelessness and migratory labour, and though it is rarely talked about, many of the hobos riding the rails, living rough and seeking casual work, were women. Boxcar Bertha, as she was known, was a member of a network of migratory women who looked out for each other, protecting their sisters against both the world, and male migratory workers.
And then, as the idea of the singe woman had been just about subsumed into the image of the wife and mother, came the war. “The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return.” Working women became essential to the continuation of the economy’s smooth functioning: “female workers took over male positions such as cabdriver, elevator operator, bus driver, and security guard. In one year, the number of female defense-factory workers increased by 460 percent, a figure that translated into 2.5 million women assigned to the unlikeliest tasks. Instead of making carbon copies or assigning homework, many women now manufactured tank parts, plane frames, engine propellers, parachutes, ships, gas masks, life rafts, ammunition, and artillery. Another two million women continued in or picked up clerical work; the number of newly indoctrinated typists would double before the end of the war. And for the more serious, educated woman, the absence of men presented a guilty holiday. For the first time, many women found positions in symphonies, as chemists, and in some states, as lawyers. Harvard University accepted its first small number of female medical students in 1944.”
But even as the work of women became temporarily essential, government and the media were building the groundwork for forcing women out of the workforce once the boys came home. For every story praising a Rosie the riveter was a story about how men and women could not work together without sex destabilising the workplace, or the inefficiency of working women with their monthly ‘women’s problems.’
There were two big problems with women once the war was over - the first, hw to get them, not just back into the home, but change them back to women who had learned to be self-sufficient, to manage jobs and households, to be, if married, the head of the family, and if single, that they didn’t need men. The second problem was what to do with the excess women. Many men didn’t come home, and a significant number of those who dd, brought foreign brides. Suddenly there were vast numbers of women who could not be shuffled off into marriage. The answer was to increase the pressure to compete for what men there were. The old psychological stories about the immaturity and neuroticism of the single woman, the necessity of marriage and children to the formation of a healthy female psyche, were dragged out with a vengeance. The single woman - never married or increasingly common divorceé - was a threat, a locus of social instability.
Yet even at the peak of the ‘back to the home’ movement, some women insisted on living, at least for a time, a single life.
And one of the questions that came to obsess those observing the single working woman was, what was she doing abut sex? Through the 50s and much of the 60s, there was an ambivalence about the single girl - sometimes threat, sometimes frigid and neurotic, sometimes sad and damaged, sometimes a plucky girl in search of a man and supporting herself along the way, but never as fufilled as the wife and mother.
Then women’s liberation arrived on the scene, and it became harder to persuade women that their only path to happiness was through marriage. The single woman could have a career, independence, and a satisfying sexual relationship without a permanent attachment to a man. Marriage became something a woman might do because she wanted to, not because she had to. And it became something a woman might leave if it was no longer fulfilling. Even motherhood was no longer out of the question for the single woman, whether through pregnancy or adoption. Indeed, there was no longer such a thing as ‘the single girl’ just a large number of women who hade decided to forgo marriage, temporarily or permanently.
Israel ends on a somewhat ambivalent note, listing modern ‘single icons’ like Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones who, despite financial independence, are profoundly unhappy with being single. She quotes single women who bemoan the lack of interesting, worthwhile men. She suggests that there is still something not quite right in the lonely life of women who work, and date, but remain unmarried. Yet at the same time, she acknowledges that, by objective measures, single women are not unhappy as a rule, and that many feel strangely trapped if they do marry.
In short, in the end of this long examination of single women, Israel has discovered that they are people, with all the joys and discontents of other people.
