I interviewed one woman, a pediatrician, married at twenty in 1956, divorced in 1968 with four kids. She laughed, then deeply sighed as she recalled “the marriage-attack-from-Mars years.”
If I tried honestly to describe it, I’m not sure my own four girls would believe it. One example, in high school, if you did not have a date for a Saturday night, that meant you stayed in, hiding out, and swearing your younger siblings to silence. And I mean you were HIDING. In your room, with the lights off, in the event a boy you knew passed in a car and saw your light on. That meant they would KNOW you were in without a date…. College years, it was all right to date around for a year or so… [but] if you weren’t set by junior year, and there was another group of new freshmen coming, oh, that meant your life was slipping away…. Land[ing] a guy seemed like the only possible way you were going to survive economically…
It is hard to read a magazine or watch a movie from that time and imagine any woman living in peace by herself. Everyone in the culture seemed programmed to harangue her. The Saturday Evening Post warned in 1952, “It’s harder than ever to snare a husband!” Unless, of course, one made sacrifices, for example, abandoning school. The writer, Rufus Jarman, speculated that the dreaded war brides, all 113,000 of them, had moved in on American women because too many of “these American dynamos had those three letters of doom—Ph.D., doctor—in front of their names.” To the GIs, the American single had shown “superior airs” and no instinctive gifts for housekeeping. But now, he noted, “most girls who are doing postgraduate work for various high-flown careers would drop their studies and get married in a minute if the right man came along.”
Some limited exceptions were made for artistic types—dancers, actresses, fashion designers—and it further helped if one resembled Lauren Bacall or Audrey Hepburn. Later in the decade, exemptions passed to younger celebrities who had a tough kind of girl/boy quality—Shirley MacLaine (married, though her husband lived full-time in Japan) and Françoise Sagan, who, at twenty-one, had published a wild unapologetic mistressy novel called Bonjour Tristesse. Françoise instantly became an object of fascination to men and women both, who loved her short hair and red sports car and her way with a cigarette. Then, of course, she was French, barely spoke English, and the French, as one commentator wrote, were born “astray.”
But even here, in provincial married America, all sorts of girls went astray. Even if they did so very briefly.
DOWN THE UP STAIRCASE
The roots of the 1950s marriage mania reached back into the postwar culture: the GI Bill, which made low-income housing and other benefits available to veterans who married; the restrictions these same GI privileges imposed on women (fewer college openings; fewer jobs), and then all that pseudo-Freudian dogma demanding that real women seek out their male halves. But there were thousands who, setting aside domestic destiny, graduated or just left home with something else in mind besides a wedding. Stashing their marriage prospects into imaginary safety deposit boxes, middle-class girls traveled to Europe. Traces of these temporary runaways can be found in fifties films such as An American in Paris, Three Coins in the Fountain, Funny Face, Marjorie Morningstar, in some of the Gidget movies, and, most memorably, in Breathless, in the form of Jean Seberg’s morally ambiguous girl/boy reporter.
Others left home for New York and jobs in theater, dance, publishing, or just to cut themselves off from suffocating fiancés, dull jobs, or like Holly Golightly in Truman Capote’s novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, lives so desperate and dreary one can only guess at the details.
Starting in about 1953, at the height of “togetherness”[12]—a magazine-inspired concept advocating the total centrality of nuclear-family life—there seemed to be a rise in the number of single young women settling in New York City. The intensity with which reporters tracked this alleged rise, interviewing employment agents, Realtors, or clerks at all-girl hotels, demonstrates how terrorizing the single female was as mere concept.
“It was still such a radical notion,” says one my subjects, Simone, now sixty-six.
In fact, to get away was like testifying before a miniature version of the HUAC committee: Were we now and had we ever been inclined to hurt ourselves by deliberately ruining ourselves?… Leaving home was supposed to be very, very dangerous…. But we were girls who were not ready for the Donna Reed life. Poor Donna Reed! Even she wasn’t Donna Reed! She was an Oscar winner!… At home, everyone, in that J. D. Salinger sense, was required to put up a false phony self and it just got so tiring…. So you confronted your parents, and they acted as if you’d just announced you’d become a Communist or a Nazi and a slut. But your bags were packed. Like a spy, you had the details worked out in advance. Now, you had to hold your ground under interrogation.
Many editors, professors, and psychiatric professionals fixated on this “lone female” escapee, studying her like a lab animal who’d been wired to do one thing and was now atypically doing something else. In the press there was the formal bow, or military salute, made to the good-sport all-American wife out in the ’burbs. But the real fascination was with these city types—the astonishing 34 percent who, by 1954, had made it to age twenty-four without marrying. She or “it” was debated, as an entity, in every publication from the Reader’s Digest to the Atlantic Monthly. Sometimes she appeared as a caricature—a dazed-looking girl, hitchhiking, a bridal gown in one hand and a suitcase in the other (no one picks her up), or a young woman watering plants on a sooty fire escape juxtaposed with a woman, in sun hat, cutting flowers in a large country garden. Humorists created bestiaries of lone-girl types, for example, the “Can’t-Help-It-Drabbie,” “The Mammary-Deprived,” “The Marginal Wallflower,” the “Office Matron,” “the Premature Auntie Griselda,” “the Thespian Manqué.”
The Kinsey Report on Female Sexuality, published in 1953, shocked readers as much as had the original male report several years before—and seems to have fed fears about these amorphous but threatening gangs of female strays. (One of Kinsey’s troubling statistics: More than half of all college-educated women, plus 20 percent of noncollege girls, had engaged in at least one same-sex erotic experience. If that was true, what was likely to occur in “pervert’s-ville” New York City?) Post-Kinsey, the language used to urge girls back into domesticity, into marriage (as if all that many had actually left!) turned apocalyptic.
For a while, in 1954 and ’55, writers bypassed the gray and rainy adjectives common to sad-spinster stories and rushed on toward the nuclear arsenaclass="underline" “Atomic Red Alert for Romance!” “From Here to Oblivion—Marry Now or Marry Never!” “Snag Your Space of Shelter, Girls, Before You’re Crowded Out!”
Despite a birthrate like a third world country’s—and despite the fact that more eighteen-year-old girls got married some years than went to the prom—the perception spread that Young White Single Females had to be reined in. In the form of the helpful how-to “service” story, magazines revived one of the world’s older single propositions: to move single women in herds from dry areas (Washington, D.C., ranked worst overall; New York and Boston ran close seconds) to places where men were plentiful. In pieces that included maps, arrows, and literal directions, editors set out to pinpoint where on earth men were most heavily clustered.
12
“Togetherness” grew from the work of famed sociologist Talcott Parsons who, along with other academics, wrote long tracts on “modern personality” as it related to the structure of families. As that translated, the modern family unit had to shed the old-fashioned day-to-day contact with the extended family. “No home is big enough for two families,” Parsons wrote. “Particularly of two different generations, with opposite theories on child training.” As one magazine put it in 1954, “The modern family, as a singular unit, pools brains, looks, activities and thinks like an army platoon and competes against other platoons in the neighborhood.” Single women, through with school, momentarily adrift in life, were sometimes invited back to stay a while with the platoon. But like traditional spinsters, they were often given specific tasks to carry out in exchange for board.