Call it, after the movie, the song, the theory in generaclass="underline" Where the Boys Are.
According to the Census Bureau, UPI reported, women outnumbered men in every section of the country except in the wild “western” areas. Thus one typical newspaper headline read, “Go West Young Woman, if You Want to Wed!” The text continued, “Droves of bachelors are on the great open range begging to be roped and branded… in Wyoming and Nevada there are seven unmarried men for three single women… for the girl willing to migrate for marriage, the best trails lead west.”
In “Memo to the Girls,” Look undertook “a massive man-hunt missive,” noting, “there is a surplus of bachelors… but husband hunters should know where to look.” The winning locales were the same as those cited elsewhere, as if a consortium of media and governmental bureaus had conspired in a campaign to reinaugurate the mail-order bride.
Life editors found two bachelor girls who’d moved themselves to Caspar, Wyoming, then had them, for the benefit of the photographers, throw an impromptu bachelor-girl party. Panel by panel, we follow the action: The girls make last-minute “on-the-spot” calls to boys. The girls prepare the beverages and then, the triumphal sequence, “the boys respond to the call.” Twelve men, big hefty guys, thirtyish and single, have all crowded into their living room. The caption read: “They bagged twelve!” But “bagging” out in Caspar didn’t require throwing a “do.” We also see the “lucky” Barbara Mills receive a “quadruple escort” just by walking through the business district. It was noted that had she lived in Montana, the number of escorts might have been up around nine.
GETTING THE GIRL BACK IN LINE
As in the nineteenth century, the plans for mass removal of single women to isolated areas did not catch on. Young women continued to move to New York and to Washington, and others—older women, especially—continued to express their concern. In 1956 Mademoiselle published a remarkably progressive piece, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” intended to highlight the views of young women who’d gone off on their own and were loving it. But the most shocking, radical aspect of the “Ambition” story was the response it provoked—both in letters and in stories published in other magazines.
“They make me nervous,” said one married woman of girls cut loose in major cities. “I could shoot the first woman who went to work in a man’s job. My ambition is to please my husband in every womanly way.” Another outraged wife said, “These girls come back from a day in the outside world with something to talk about and what is that? Men. She’s been out all day with men. Other women’s husbands…. [she] is a threat to every self and family-centered homebody.” Another said that she’d “be content to liquidate [this] army of competitors who have forgotten the true functions, duties and gracious giving pleasures of the mature woman—creating for others, not for herself. There is something unnatural and frightening in this behaviour…. It is against order and I really think humanity.”
Training young women to capture husbands now underwent a vast CinemaScopic fifties-era renaissance.
In 1955 alone there were more than three hundred promarriage, antisingular tomes. From one foreword: “It would seem that some have come to view marriage in its current state as… disappointing for women, and especially those who have taken the higher degree.” As if it was 1910, the author concluded: “The lure of the city and its many pleasures will make of many potentially fine and worthy wives unnatural defeated spinsters… sick and lonely women.”
As always, commentators dragged the discussion back to education and the eternal topic—“what should we teach our women?” One home-economics professor from a college in Virginia wrote in the Reader’s Digest: “Unless there is a direct application to the home, or the conflicts and issues that will confront her in the home, in [dealing with] her husband or children, it is not valid education; it is unfair to the girl and confusing.”
One 1956 home-ec textbook provided a quick-study list of thirty-five tasks to perform before a husband returned from “his labors.” Here’s a small sampling of what the fifties singles studied:
1. Have dinner ready: Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal—on time. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most are men are hungry when they come home!
2. Minimize the noise: At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Have them properly dressed to give their greetings.
3. Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him. Arrange his pillow… speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
Whatever her interests, the single girl picked up a magazine, went to the movies—got into a conversation with just about anyone—and heard about what single girls had heard about since 1860: how to catch a man and make him stay. For example, a February 1952 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal provided a “quick inventory for bachelor girls”: “What about your… hair, complexion, clothes? Are you a good talker, dancer, listener? Do you have a sense of humor? Hobby? Outside interests?… If anything is lacking you must go to the hairdresser, psychiatrist, whatever is needed. Only then are you prepared to face the world.”
These articles and books prescribed ways to achieve a kind of robotic period perfection, “a rigorous ideal that is… to be desired by any woman who cares about her future.” But in fact the physical attributes of 1950s “perfection” were intensely difficult to attain. The dictates of the female ideal were repeated and reprinted as if they were a paper doll’s mantra: “I am 5 feet 4 inches tall, 122 pounds, with brown hair, blue eyes, a 25½-inch waist, 34-inch bust, and 36-inch hips.” Famed anthropologist and frequent commentator Margaret Mead found it startling—and not necessarily “good”—that the average 1956 girl was fifteen pounds lighter than her counterpart thirty years before.
New products appeared to assist in her transformation, most dramatically, hair dye that one could use safely at home without burning the scalp or turning hair purple (both incidents documented in a 1922 diary). Shirley Polykoff, a female advertising executive who, along with Estée Lauder and PR magnate Eleanor Lambert, were the professional “exceptions” to every rule, brought hair dye into the average bathroom or, for many single girls, into the kitchen sink. Her idea was to convince women that by changing their hair color they could change themselves. Wives would become more interesting to their husbands. Single women, suddenly more assertive and more feminine, would attract more men. As one promotional piece explained this proposed alchemy:
By changing the color and hue of your hair, you can change your entire way of being. It frees you to behave and act in ways you would never have dreamed possible when you were your former self…. And you can do it in secret. People will notice you and think, “She seems different.” “And her hair!” “How did she get it to look so lovely?” “Is it a wig?” “Is it dyed?”
Paraphrasing a question her mother-in-law once asked in Yiddish, Polykoff put forth her own query: “Does she or doesn’t she?”
Playboy magazine, then in its mysogynistic glory days, was quick to point out that hair color didn’t matter, not for a wife of all people, and certainly not for that inherently slutty single girl. In the “Playboy Coloring Book,” a popular monthly feature, the reader was presented with three single chicks he might place inside his make-believe bachelor pad.