To begin with, the number of female professionals had increased by a mere 8.5 percent during the 1920s. If single women were serious about careers, as opposed to mere jobs, wouldn’t that figure be higher? It was further noted that professional women earned less than their male counterparts, so much less that they could not possibly be serious about sustained and important careers. And even in “female” professions, men outearned them. In 1939 male teachers averaged $1,953 a year, women just $1,394; male social workers received $1,718 compared with women’s $1,442.
Young women continued to draw up their own personal blueprints, and to present their own plans. And they were continually besieged with these retorts. In one 1938 Coronet piece, a twenty-year-old relates a conversation she had with her mother. The daughter said she wanted to see France; her mother replied, “So did Amelia Earhart,” the aviator who’d recently gone missing. “See to getting yourself settled! Figure that and someday you can take a trip.”
Those who took the solo trips—college, careers without husbands, forays to Greenwich Village—found it no more difficult, than those who’d gone before. But they were viewed differently in the post-Depression world. Why now would anyone risk their security? In novels and stories, we find images of women missing more than their hearts; they are falling apart.
Let’s look at two popular novels. Ann Vickers (1933), by Sinclair Lewis, concerns an ambitious social worker who becomes a prison warden and reform advocate, somewhat like Clara Barton. In coordinating such a difficult career, Ann Vickers has sacrificed anything resembling a coherent personal life. She has an illegal abortion. When she does finally marry, it ends in divorce, and she takes up with a gangster. Although successful (and popular!) as a prison warden, she suffers a nervous breakdown.
In The Folks, Ruth Suckow’s novel about the Iowa farm family, we pick up the story of Margaret Ferguson, the dark and arty girl who ran off to Greenwich Village and rechristened herself Margot. Finally, after several years spent living in New Mexico with her married lover, she returns to New York City. Margot’s life has been, to choose one word, controversial. Her family doesn’t understand; in fact, only one small-town neighbor has ever understood at all. “Margaret’s generation of girls is wonderful!” she had said to herself during one of Margot’s rare visits home. “They went out and grabbed at life.” Margot’s thoughts precisely. Yet that was years ago, and now, at almost thirty, she finds the city of dreams and adventure changed and cold. “She felt a bitter hatred of the noise and the hugeness around [Grand Central] station, making her think of how she was now to earn a living. Everywhere [she] seemed to see these smooth metallic girls whom she hated. They were like the modern buildings, not individualized but stylized… groomed into urban smoothness.”
Later, wandering her old neighborhood, Margot is stopped by a sight even worse: a “hag” selling pencils on a street corner near the apartment where she once had burned candles and danced with scarves. It’s an archetypal moment in the single narrative: The younger woman sees her future in the older one, in the lonely and forgotten hag selling “pencils she knew no one wanted to buy.” During the mid- and late thirties, protagonists like Margaret-Margot were held up as icons of female disaster. If college and career could make you crazy, the unconventional life was like a suicide. Usually writers posed it as a question: What became of runaway girls, not just the down-and-out but the bohemians, the superannuated flappers, the Margots, who’d set out to see the world without a guidebook? The answer: Either they’d wise up and marry or they’d eventually take a place on the street corner.
Jean Rhys, in her melancholy novels, was a premiere chronicler of the aging adventurer now about to fall apart. The best of her slender oeuvre is After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930). Here we have the problem called Julia, a Londoner long ago self-exiled to Paris, where she’s had her share of exotic experiences. Now she is older and broke. One former lover, noting her shabby clothes, observes, “It was obvious that she had been principally living on the money given to her by various men. Going from one to another had become a habit… she had not saved a penny.” All true. As Julia explains to one of them, “You see, a time comes in your life when, if you have money, you can go one way…. If you have nothing at all… you go another.” And sometimes rather than fight, you take up residence in a fantasy world. “Every day is a new day,” Julia dreamily tells herself. “Every day you are a new person.”
There were millions of single women in 1940—office drones, struggling reporters and nurses, end-of-the-road new women, the homeless, and all those still waving a tattered bohemian flag. But what became of any of them was once again a question put indefinitely on hold.
HOW I WON THE WAR
So much has been written about the experiences of women during World War II that I will not describe in the usual minute detail how they “answered the call to duty,” as invoked by the deep, paternalistic urgings of mid century newsmen—Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Edward R. Murrow, and Lowell Thomas.
Let’s instead look at it this way: The entire female population was for an odd slip of time effectively single. No one knew if their fiancés, boyfriends, lovers would ever return. As one California woman wrote in her diary in 1942, “All plans changed last week or fell away.” Single meant “available,” but not as prospective brides to men. The War Manpower Commission, supported by the Office of War Information, produced voluminous amounts of working-girl propaganda to fill the void.
Millions of suddenly essential 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.
Suddenly it was glorious and patriotic to be single. Newsreels with titles such as “Glamour Girls of 1943” reported that with “industrial advances” a girl might do “practically anything!” There were no limits to “the types of jobs a woman could do…. whether she has a husband or not.” Any single gal who didn’t step up, sign on, cooperate, was considered as much a disappointment and failure as those who had favored a career over marriage in decades past.
One female worker recruitment film, entitled To the Ladies, and shown as part of newsreels throughout 1942 and ’43, opens with an establishing shot of fictional Middletown, USA. The camera pans the sidewalks, town squares, store windows and finds only women. They’re young, hair down, in flowered dresses, or they’re older, more professional-looking, hair piled up, shoulder pads piled up nearly as high. We intercut between life scenes: girls at a drugstore counter giggling over sodas and twirling in their seats… women buying nail polish… women having lunch… women going to the movies in the afternoon. The Voice of Authority asks us to compare this lackadaisical portrait with others from around the world.