Within two years of its introduction, at least 750,000 American women were on the Pill and an estimated 500 more began taking it every day. The Complete Book of Birth Control, published by the Planned Parenthood Federation, reported on who they were and went on at some length. I quote it briefly: “More education and better income… tend to shift the responsibility for birth control to the wife. Informal studies indicate the same shift among unmarried girls.” Unlike the diaphragm, the Pill could be prescribed for a number of nonsexual causes—menstrual irregularities, control of ovarian cysts—and thus there were convenient excuses for anyone to take it.
Gloria Steinem, starting here to sound like Gloria Steinem, wrote that “the development of a new autonomous girl is important and in numbers quite new…. She expects to find her identity neither totally without mennor totally through them… She has work she wants to do and she can… marry later than average, and have affairs if she wishes, but she can also marry without giving up her work.”
This new female “type”—still, of course, years from reality—so excited authors and sociologists that they began to examine the possible specimen right away. What many saw was a normal girl, a future wife who had, amidst this onrush of divorce, become cynical, a wary spectator at what Phyllis Rosenteur in The Single Woman (1961) called the “quickie in-and-out affairs that often masquerade these days as marriage.” She called her the “intuitive woman” and charted her development in this way:
Out of childhood, into adolescence, a girl begins observing for herself, and what she sees and hears and feels runs counter to conditioning. Many become confused and, more than that, suspicious…. Nothing is accepted as blindly as before and some may even actively rebel against some of the rules. Others merely back away from both the “normal” path to marriage and the ranter’s route to stormy singleness; in some private corner of themselves, they plot an independent course, and then pursue it just as silently as people will permit.
The following year, researchers at Stanford announced that women with deep insight into established male/female roles were less likely to make an early “uninformed” marriage. Science Digest reported that a University of Michigan study of twenty-five hundred singles had found unwed women to be happier overall than their male counterparts—no matter the persistent belief that men idealized their bachelor years and left them reluctantly. With the exception of divorced women, who were uniquely stigmatized, researchers concluded, “the single woman who lives alone… [was] not usually a frustrated old maid. And among those who live alone, women are not the weaker sex. Generally, single women… experience less discomfort than single men…. They are more active in the working through of the problems they face and appear stronger than single men in meeting the challenge of their position.”
Helen Gurley Brown, newly appointed editor of a revivified Cosmopolitan, hated that language—“discomfort,” the “challenge” of one’s sadly “compromised” position, or the word frustrated as it applied to anyone single. She had just married for the first time at thirty-seven. And, using her own slang (“mouseburger,” for example, meant a quiet, spinsterish girl) and dousing it with exclamation points, she’d published the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl (1962). Here we meet a new variation of the single girl, this one a tornado of competence—pretty, slim, but also smart, “up” on the news, well-read, and given to sewing and cooking while at the same time cramming in some art history or Russian literature. She worked hard at a job in the arts and lived by herself in a sleek, sexy apartment. She was enormously popular but seemingly choosy, selective; very hard to get.
As Helen Brown says of her own single days, “The phone just rang incessantly. It was terribly annoying if you were trying to get something done. There were nights, I tell you, when I just carried the phone over and put it into the freezer.”
She’ll go on to tell you of the radical impact she made with this vision of a single aristocrat. (“It was the first time anyone suggested that being single was not the same thing as having a social disease!!”) But even though this girl “lived by her wits… sharpened… honed… coping with people trying to marry her off,” she was still an elaborately decked-out slab of bait. Brown devoted whole chapters to mascara, clothing, and bizarre seductive technique (“any unusual jewelry is a come on, but it should be beautiful or you’ll look too Ubangi!”). Just as nineteenth-century girls had been encouraged into smashes, their affectionate behavior good practice for the marital arts, so this new single girl was honing herself to be a unique modern wife or, in the spirit of Helen Brown, a delectable, frothy, and fabulous wife!
Still, all silliness aside, Brown was advocating a time-out for self-improvement before marriage. Gloria Steinem’s autonomous girl calmly went out, or so it was said, and had sex. And the vision of all those cabinet-repairing amazon divorcées! Put together, the new sixties singles began to sound slightly alarming.
Esquire in particular became obsessed with a female uprising. There were long essays on ball-busting new types, for example, the “American Witch,” a spoiled, selfish bitch who deliberately failed to share male enthusiasm for football and did not leap at commands for food. One parable told of a distant time when little Caroline Kennedy, grown and now president, oversaw a program that allowed every American woman to grow a penis. Men, psychological eunuchs, took refuge in bars.
Others objected along more familiar lines. Author Pearl Buck, returning to the States after years abroad, wrote that of all changes “the new ethics of sex” was most amazing, “so abrupt, so far reaching that we are all dazed by it.” But she believed that an insufficient few had stopped to consider the consequences—the many unwanted children that would still, even with the new “technology,” result in “rows and rows of tiny unattended cribs.”
Several professors from universities such as Stanford, Princeton, and Tufts foresaw in these loosened sexual constraints a dissolving national morality. If women, like men, could engage in whatever sexual practice they chose, when they chose, in short, without any external controls, they were more likely to develop a reckless spontaneity in other of their actions. From a letter to the New York Times: “Women, like some men, now find it fashionable to behave and conduct themselves in whatever way they choose, in consideration only of their own feelings. Too bad if there are children.” To quote one Harvard psychologist, “This sudden emphasis on individual choice, a morality of one, is… dangerous.”
Occasionally one heard a measured voice. Sylvia Porter, in her New York Post column, “Your Dollar,” took on the new female single as a social development that required a practical, not moralistic, response. She called on manufacturers to package smaller meals and scale products down to suit the family of one. The housing industry, she believed, would need “to develop centrally located… inexpensive, small apartments.” As she reported, “According to a census spokesman… there will be more and more [single women] as the years go on.”