Another day months later Ann shows up outside the house, her thuggish boyfriend looming behind. Annoyed, he pushes the ragged-looking Ann toward a smart-looking woman approaching in furs. Ann looks up to see Joan, her replacement, home from shopping. She asks after the boy, then gets to the point. She needs money. Joan gives her a little, and Ann is gone, back to her gangster. She gives him the money; he shoves her. “Hey!” he shouts, “ain’t that dame married to your husband?”
Throughout these years, single women were objects of suspicion. Perhaps they worked when men did not. Perhaps broke and alone, they hitchhiked from place to place—as unwomanly a thing as a knife fight. In mass-movie fantasy, some grew into self-contained man-eating monsters.
But most real women, like most men, were just frustrated. They had been forced to take an unexpected detour from what they once would have called “the normal things.” And this tangent had lasted so long that the once-upon-a-time state known as Normal now seemed exotic. Especially for the young among them—all those who had grown up without dance crazes and arguments about flappers and smoking. Asked what she remembered about these years of “massive economic dislocation” (as common a phrase as “Jazz Age”), Bess the bookkeeper said, “I wanted panty hose. I wanted a room that had fewer than four sisters and a cousin in it. I wanted to get married—well, forget that. Forget the room while we’re at it. Panty hose.”
THE SWING OF THINGS
The original new women, now in their fifties, had organized their networks and pushed hard for their causes—aid to indigent families with children, civil rights, minimum-wage laws, nationally sponsored health care—and they had a stalwart ally in Eleanor Roosevelt. Several of the circle headed New Deal agencies, and as a unified block they spoke out about the unspoken everything, from the harassment of unwed mothers to the instant need for antilynching legislation. Now they looked toward Europe.
Genevieve Parkhurst asked in a 1935 issue of Harper’s: “Are the women of America going to realize the destiny marked out for them when they began their long march toward emancipation? Or are they, like the women of Germany, to stand accused of having betrayed themselves?”
The American Women’s Association called upon all American women to fight fascism, which dictated that women stay in their homes and reproduce for the glory of the Fatherland.
I imagine average American women hearing this and blinking up into the light, confused, exhausted, and mumbling something like “panty hose.” As historian Lois Scharf wrote in Holding Their Own (1982): “The massive economic dislocation… riveted the attention of Americans along the entire ideological spectrum… events overseas… [were] completely subsumed by anxiety… demoralized… disintegrating families,” and within a few years, she might have added, the complete indifference of many young women.
In 1935, shortly before her death, Charlotte Perkins Gilman lamented that the original new women had failed to train successors. Others admitted that they had, in fact, alienated many young women by publicly insulting the popular culture of the 1920s. All that was true. But if many young women were apolitical, it was not because they felt excluded by older feminists. With the exception of the very wealthy and the very lucky, most young women had missed out on the basic things they’d been raised to expect, as one young woman told the New York Times: “dating, driving, horseback riding…. I never went ice skating or out dancing…. One year our school play was canceled because the stage was considered unsafe and there was no money to replace it. Also we had no sets and costumes.”
As the Depression finally eased, this young woman, like thousands of others, would officially attempt to have fun. As early teenagers, these “kids” threw parties, listened to music—big-band, swing—that offended their parents, evolved an inside slang (“ugly duck” and “scrag” versus the “fly” or “nifty” girl), and traveled in high school packs, kid constituencies that, as in the 1920s, formed a discernible if less extravagant youth group.
As one salesman put it, there was scattered throughout the country a whole generation, sixteen to twenty, “none of whom have owned a second pair of shoes. Can they know what it is to have a closet full of shirts? Wearing the same clothes every day for weeks, months on end…. How many recordings does the average youngster own? No need to start counting…. Imagine having your own radio!”
This atmosphere was captured by one of my oldest subjects, who declines to give her age but says, “My name is Ida-Mae, that’s how old I am”:
There was a longing to run around with your friends, and talk fast about… pure nothing…. I remember our mothers couldn’t understand why we wanted to have many boyfriends, instead of just one. And music, oh yes! My mother, I remember this, called it “Jewish sex music”! Maybe the clarinet was too phallic for her. Benny Goodman was prominent…. We were always dancing, in basements or someone’s living room. Sometimes it got a little lewd. But, believe me, in the average crowd, nobody had sex. We ran around with boys…. After the Depression years, going out for a soda—that was fun. Oh boy! And if you happened to go with fifteen other kids who all wanted to sit in the same booth—even better!… Nobody knew what was coming. I remember thinking about two things. I was going to find a husband. And I was going to college. Not in that order.
But, like others, she encountered resistance to what she called “the college end of the bargain.” With the wane of the crisis came a renewal of public arguments about the purpose of higher education for women. Why, and especially after this enormous social mess, would the average girl want more than a home? And if that was to be her destination, was it fair to men, who had suffered, that she take up needed space in classrooms? The Atlantic Monthly, 1937, solemnly noted: “When the point is reached where, in order to secure a higher salary, she must study for a master’s degree, she may realize with a sudden anguish that her chance of marriage [is] growing more remote and that the pattern of her life is more and more following the lines of spinsterhood.”
During the late 1930s universities were referred to as “spinster factories.” And as in the Victorian period, prescribed remedies to this factory life turned up in the media. A typical Life feature demonstrated how a mother might work on a girl when she was young so that when it came time for college that girl would already be married. One 1937 story consisted of several panels in which the chosen girl, Susan, eleven, was pictured deep in training to be “a winning female!”
In one panel, Susan makes beds. In another, she studies the way her mother fixes her potentially “beguiling” nails. In still another photo, Susan sets the table. “Homemaking doesn’t come instinctively to a teenaged girl,” Life explained. “It’s easier to teach a little girl than to nag at an older one…. Now the child can do simple meal planning and cooking, creditable bed making and charming table setting.”
It was a familiar process. Evidence is dragged forth to prove that what society wants for single girls is what these girls want for themselves. Back in the nineteenth century, no intelligent young woman wished for bedrest, the prescribed “cure” for hysterical antifeminine behavior. Yet after all she’d been through—the shrieking fights with mother! Her insane demands not to wed!—wasn’t bedrest what she secretly craved? Likewise, after the Depression, after all she’d been through, did she really want to do tough academic work? Ignore for a moment the actual facts, for example, that 15 percent more women were enrolled in college in 1938 than in 1933. Instead consider some of the expert arguments.