Young B-girls expanded on their visions of Trilby. They were reported to wear only “sheaths” or “smocks” and to eat with their hands. In the dark. Often a B-girl had the lights put out as necessary economy, and lived by red candles offset by gauzy veils. There was other folklore about her lifestyle, as one writer put it, “a maze of weird and witching elements.” Bathrooms, whether in the hallway or the flat itself, had no doors. Mice were welcome guests and fed at table, which happened to be the floor. Everyone smoked. According to one story in the original Life, the B-girls at times “unconsciously interpret[ed]… the eating rituals of [one]… tribe of Southern Africa… this conclusion is further supported by the post-prandial decision to paint their bodies with white and blue stripes and then to dance.” (The context of this short piece, wedged between two popular-science stories, makes it hard to say whether the speaker was joking.)
Reporters were out in full on the B-girl beat—the preflapper demimonde that stood to sink our great civilization. One cigarette-holding girl flung open the door (there apparently was a door) and met the press by exclaiming, “Welcome to liberty hall! Here we do exactly as we please!” She told all about her purple robe—no lilac for her but a purple pure. She spoke vaguely about a Communist lecture and then asked everyone to please take off their shoes.
“[Their] room[s],” noted one disgusted male correspondent, “[are] a mass of delightful contrivances whereby her gown inhabits the window seat and her frying pan the bookcase…. They eat off the ironing board, roaring with laughter about having only cheese to feast upon.” More serious stories tried to see past the “nursery antics” and into the inevitable repercussions.
Let’s consider the arguments of one Juliet Wilbor Tompkins, who like many writers on the somber subject of race suicide and later, “sexology,” used three names in her byline. (It informed the reader that the author was married but independent minded; it further indicated that she had a “career,” not a job.) In Why Women Don’t Marry (1907), she tries to categorize for the reader every possible explanation, outside of sheer perversity, for failing to wed.
Sometimes they are young women of means, who find complete satisfaction in dogs and horses, or in travels and learning or bridge or nature-study. But more often you will find that they are workers… earnest young social workers… editors… energetic souls… [many] living in an eight-by-ten room, cooking [their] own chocolate over the gas, and studying avidly… full of pity for the shut-in woman…. And they are very happy in the middle twenties… with their battle cry of freedom! To their ignorance, life offers an enchanting array of possibilities. They see ahead of them a dozen paths and have but contemptuous pity for the woman of the past who knew one dull highway.
Others pointed out how many female characters in novels killed themselves rather than admit to failure at bohemian life, that is, the failure of all that presumed artistic talent or any men whatsoever to emerge. They were only bachelor girls, after all. Wrote a male reporter in Munsey’s (1906):
The plain fact is that the bachelor and… bohemian girl [are] merely single women of small means living in the city in order that [they] may work…. As for her chances [with men] she may become a little harder to suit, but, on the whole, even that is doubtful. That she stays in her single state is largely due to the fact that possible men are just as scarce in the domain of the bachelor girl as in the life of the domestic.
But as bachelor girl Olga Stanley wrote back in 1896: “Probably the thing which first appeals to us is our absolute freedom, the ability to plan our time as we will… bound by no restrictions, except those imposed upon us by a due regard for proprieties.” As for those who called “her existence ‘pathetic,’” what was more pathetic than waiting to find out whether “Tom, Dick or Harry or whoever he may be turns out to be a good husband?” Of course she’d take a husband, “forego the delights of female bachelorhood,” if an excellent opportunity arose. Until then, however, she and her many unwed sisters would emit “a sigh of thankfulness… and draw nearer the fire, and resting our toes on the fender, lean back in our easy chair and congratulate ourselves upon our good fortune.”
CHAPTER THREE
Thin and Raging Things: New (New) Women, Gibson Goddesses, Flapping Ad Darlings, and the All-New Spinster in Fur
Am I a boy? Yes I am…Not.
Don’t worry girls! Corsets have gone! The American girl is independent!…a thinker who will not follow slavishly the ordinances of the past!
On the street, you do not recognize old maids and spinsters anymore. You cannot pick them out. But you will be conscious of an increasing number of women who are alert, handsomely dressed, of spirited car riage. That is the picture of today’s unmarried woman. You may be very sure she has a fur coat.
I AM (NEW) WOMAN, WATCH ME SMOKE
It is tricky to reconstruct a group photo of the New Woman. A few visual details float into focus—shirtwaists, suffrage banners, serious-looking girls with their arms around each other—but much of the picture has faded. Over time, the precise meaning of “new woman,” like that of the contemporaneous term “free love,” has become impossibly blurry.
So let’s clarify and state that the new woman, an essential character in the history of single female life, belonged to a group of women considered “individualized” (roughly translated, self-aware and unconventional) that the press began to cover at the start of the twentieth century. At the time, everyone was reporting on single phenomena—the bohemian, the numerous varieties of working girl—and “new woman” sometimes served as an umbrella designation for every newly uncovered independent life-form. (“No one who is not absolutely an old woman,” remarked humorist George Ade, “is safe from being considered a new woman.”) But the true new woman, a term derived from Henry James and his irreverent moderns Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, was very much a distinct singular entity. Unlike the average bohemian or bachelor girl, the new woman possessed a leftist intellectual pedigree. Her attitudes and beliefs were descended from the elite early feminists—the singly blessed spinsters of the Civil War era and the later reformers who’d helped found or been among the first to attend the women’s colleges.
Our early-twentieth-century new women went to college, and some even managed to argue their way into traditionally all-male graduate schools. Some were suffragists (ette, they believed, was a cute, belittling suffix) known for their impromptu speeches and some for their acts of political agitation—hunger strikes, for example, or handcuffing themselves to the fence outside the White House. Some were “womanists,” precursors to feminists whose ideology stressed women’s social and moral duties as opposed purely to women’s rights. Others had unlikely careers—choreographer, economist, journalist, politician, pilot—while still others advocated dress reform, abortion, and contraceptive rights, or simply smoked defiantly in public, a punishable offense after 1908, the year the federal government banned women from smoking. Some new women—Margaret Sanger, writer and economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writer Louise Bryant, reporter Ida Tarbell—became living monuments to what many called the “new possibilities.”