Had it worked out for her in the big city, Carol might have discovered what many real young women had discovered: Jobs were not, as the Atlantic Monthly had concluded, “open-sesame’s to life.” They were, as any man could have testified, only jobs. Una Golden, hero of an earlier Lewis novel, The Job (1917), skips out on small-town life and rushes to the city where she finds work in an office, a new world that sustains her for about half the book. That is, until the day Una understands that it will never change. She asks herself, “[what are] days… beyond a dull consistency of… machines and shift keys and sore wrists?” Not much, and at the end Una establishes herself and her fiancé in a successful real estate brokerage.[10]
She was one lucky character. In the late 1920s, the lawyer, writer, lecturer, and feminist Crystal Eastman prophetically stated, “Women who are creative… with administrative gifts or business ability and who are ambitious to achieve and fulfill themselves along these lines, if they also have the normal desire to be mothers, must make up their minds to be sort of superman.”
Margaret Culkin Banning, who wrote sensible new-spinster stories for the Saturday Evening Post, continued well into the 1920s to praise the new spinster as that sleek figure in a modish cap, freed of the troubles of her married friends. But she understood the point Crystal Eastman had to make. It would increasingly be difficult. With some resignation, she wrote in 1929,
The normal social unit is made up of a man and a woman in love, courting or married. The unmarried woman who has made a job the other half of her social unit… is bound to be somewhat extraneous… out of the social picture…. The masses… administer printed condolences and sedative terms—“new woman,” “bachelor girl,”—but the world in general has not approved the sight of a lady jogging through life alone.
All of this discussion came to an instantaneous halt with the 1929 stock-market crash. Within weeks, it seemed, the troubling unwed American female—whether professional, fun, academic, political—slipped from beneath the cultural microscope. The U.S. Women’s Bureau estimated that just six months after the crash, two million women, many single, had lost their jobs. It was made very clear, however, that men had suffered more. They’d lost more than just jobs; they’d lost their essential core of masculinity. Amidst a collapse so hulking and vast, there was little energy left to think about the single woman. But there would always be something to say.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Suspicious Single: Job Stealers, The Riveting Rosie, And The Neurotic Husband Hunter
—“But aren’t ya ever going to fall in love?”
—“A career itself is a romance. I haven’t the time…”
—“Aren’t ya ever going to marry?”
—“My de-aah, when you spend 14 hours a day with your dearest illusion, it loses something.”
Now, listen… forget about yourself… You know what it means to the girls in this show? Those poor kids gave up jobs and will never be able to find other ones!… If you let them down… they’ll have to do things I wouldn’t want on my conscience and it’ll be on yours!
Let him know you are tired of living alone…. You want him to take charge. You want now to have your nails done.
SINGLE GIRLS ONLY NEED APPLY
If attention turned to the single woman—and occasionally, of course, it did—there was just one question for her: Did she work?
If the answer was yes, the response was almost always angry. Women, during the Depression, were not under any conditions supposed to hold jobs. Jobs were for men—all those guys thrown out on their asses and depicted sitting home, too depressed to lift their feet for the carpet sweeper. Women seen dressed for work, entering an elevator in an office building, made this horrific situation, this stigma of compromised manhood, that much worse. Even if she was en route to a job no man would take, the stares, the muffled traitor talk, reminded her of life’s primary motto: “DON’T STEAL A JOB FROM A MAN!”
This made life tense and difficult for single women, because single women were just about the only women out there working—and sometimes there were more of them working than men. By 1932, legislation in twenty-six states prohibited married women from holding any jobs whatsoever, and that included teaching and positions in the Civil Service should a relative already hold one. In states where getting married didn’t require retirement, an employed woman who married was nonetheless expected to make a “full disclosure” or risk losing that job or incurring fines for “misleading statements.” And that applied even to women in those female jobs no man would take—typing, filing, cleaning.
My father, a schoolboy during these years, recalls: “If we found out a woman who worked in our school was married, we were shocked. I think at one point there was talk that the librarian had a husband and we wondered, why does she have a job? Why is she working? If her husband is a dentist or a lawyer or a truck driver, what does she have a job for?”
There was much discussion of job-hogging acts of afemininity. However, little was said about the myriad problems, anxiety, and sacrifices of single women, many of whom were also supporting their families, parents, siblings, grandparents—the new dependency in crisis mode. Millions of unemployed single men would ultimately regain jobs and misplaced respect. So would some single women. But more than a quarter of all women who’d been between twenty and thirty during the Depression years would never have careers. They also stood to lose much more.
“A quarter of all women” is a much repeated estimate that’s hard to break down. But it’s known that thousands would not, as planned, attend college or at least finish up their degrees. Hundreds of thousands who would have married never wed, never had children, and by 1932 the U.S. marriage rate had hit a historic low, while the birthrate had dropped to its lowest point since 1900. And many of those who married simply did not consider themselves financially stable enough to have children. Despite the danger and illegality, abortion was commonplace, and according to a 1933 Gallup Poll, 63 percent of the population favored “some form of birth control.” In 1933 the condom industry, a $350 million enterprise, produced something like one million units a day. Wives could obtain an early form of diaphragm known as a pessary, and so could single women, as long as they posed as wives and appeared in doctors’ offices wearing wedding rings.
Mary McCarthy[11] describes the complex procurement process in her novel The Group, set in the thirties and written in 1966. For weeks one character schemes and plans to get the item, telling her prospective lover that she will call him as soon as she has it in her hands. After an embarrassing doctor’s “fitting”—what is perhaps the first flying-diaphragm scene in all literature—she leaves with her secretive bag and calls him to find he’s not in. She walks around, calls again, then again, and finally tells his landlady that she is waiting in Washington Square Park. Seated on a bench, the precious treasure on her lap, she starts to reconsider. Hours have passed and obviously he’s not coming. Ultimately she leaves the bag beneath the bench and walks off feeling terribly alone and embarrased.
10
It’s interesting that Sinclair Lewis, the man, seems to have had a personal change of heart about career women when his own wife, former journalist Dorothy Thompson, became exasperated with marriage and his drinking and went off to cover World War II. He left her in 1937, claiming that her work had destroyed their relationship. “American women are like that,” he concluded, “killers of talent.”
11
Some of the best recorded sex in all thirties literature can be found not in the sexologized males of the period but in Mary McCarthy, particularly in the interwoven short stories