In fairness, one professor who’d expressed concern about a relative female morality also urged caution in too quickly judging women. Considering female freedom, he had found at least one “salutary” side effect. “A woman free to find fulfillment in marriage and work” was far more likely to “be self-motivated. Autonomous… This is the kind of woman who makes the ideal teacher.”
It was, after all, still 1962 or 1963. Most of the single women inspiring such terrorized discourse were still in fact teachers, secretaries, or something else safely within the canon of female careers. A 1960s board game for girls, “What Shall I Be: The Exciting Game of Career Girls,” laid out the possibilities. Along with teacher and secretary one could work toward “stewardess,” “model,” “nurse,” trying to avoid two old-maid-ish cards known as the Duds, either a fat middle-aged actress with runny makeup or else an unmistakable spinster.
Interestingly, the spinster as a type had floated back into the national discourse, this time as the subject of an obituary. So many millions of girls automatically married that the society for some time had lacked traditional spinsters. But lamenting the lost spinster—that toothless, brutally bunned stick in black—was actually a handy way of denouncing the new single. In cartoon panels and staged photos, our suddenly beloved spinster was juxtaposed not with the baby housewife who had replaced her, but with a Pill-taking stew or a wealthy single babe, a socialite with décolletage stretching down to her navel. In 1963 The New York Times Magazine ran a spinster eulogy that refined the identity of the primary “spinster killer,” who was none of the above—not the baby bride, the pill-taking girl, or the rapacious socialite. She was, rather, the average unmarried working girl who could easily beome any one of the above. She applied cosmetics, hair dye, and as one caption put it, “overnight, she’s a new girl, with a new look, a new personality, a new life.” Whatever direction it took, she was very unlikely to end up a traditional and suddenly beloved auntie spinster.
I’M FEMALE, FLY ME
According to the Labor Department, single women in the sixties worked in greatest numbers as secretaries, titles that after several years might be renegotiated, fluffed up, and rechristened “assistants to.” That is, if the girl in question remained a girl and didn’t marry. There was still a deep mistrust of the married working woman, who would, wrote one insurance-company employee in Glamour, “naturally get herself pregnant at the first opportunity and abandon her precious files one afternoon, just like that.” (United Airlines enforced what were perhaps the most blatant restrictions. Until 1969, all stewardesses had to be provably single; if they married, they “retired.”)
But the finest of the young career breed—the white, the virginal, the unwed—were often canonized in Look and Life spreads, as they had been twenty years before. The jobs, or the companies at least, had cachet—CBS, the UN, Christian Dior. The girls, however, still took shorthand.
As Life exclaimed in 1962, “Glamor, Excitement, and Romance and the Chance to Serve the Country—How Nice to Be a Pretty Girl and Work in Washington!” And there she was—Nancy Becker of Columbia, Missouri, at her desk, chin at rest on manicured hands, her pearls, her pencils precisely arrayed, her eyes “full of stardust.” She worked, filing, for the Justice Department. On the following pages young women with similar jobs were seen at Georgetown dinner parties, playing touch football (just like the Kennedys!), and shopping for antique rocking chairs. “It’s the perfect opportunity and so honorable to be here,” said a twenty-three-year-old interviewed for the piece. “But I think we most all agree, most of us are going to be marrying and seeing where that takes us, even if that’s Kansas.” They’d always have Washington.
In New York City the working girls weren’t so sure. In a 1961 Mademoiselle piece, “The Great Reprieve,” young Joan Didion wrote of Manhattan as an Emerald City that held out to its most tentative residents
this special promise—of something remarkable and lively just around the corner…. They do a lot of things but girls who cometo New York are above all uncommitted. They seem to be girls who want to prolong the period when they can experiment, mess around, make mistakes. In New York, there is no genteel pressure for them to marry, to go two-by-two…. New York is full of people on this kind of leave of absence.
By 1963, the year The Feminine Mystique crash-landed, many reported “feeling bugged,” bothered about “all the intense spying to see what I am up to,” to quote an airline ticketing agent in Glamour. “I expect to look up and see my brother standing there, 600 miles from home, just dropping by to examine my ring finger.” One of Didion’s subjects refused any longer “to parry delicate questions about my plans.” They had left home, gone off, transformed themselves. They were trying.
“It was an outrageous dare,” says “Sally-Jo,” age now “fifty-plus.”
I remember getting off the bus from Wisconsin. It was in 1964. Beatles time. And I was waiting for my luggage—I’d brought a big round hatbox and a big suitcase-sized makeup kit—and I was standing right by the exhaust pipe. I remember feeling dizzy and thinking—Yes! This is it! I inhaled deeply. That’s how thrilled I was!… Asphyxiated, wandering off to find a subway, not a clue where I was going, holding a freaking hatbox.
Just as they had in the fifties, and in the thirties, and in the time of the Bowery gal, officials likened these “girls” to unwanted immigrants. It was as if the shirtwaisted shop girl had reemerged in Marimekko separates, gotten drunk at lunch, and been spied on her break doing the Watusi. No one knew what to do about her or it or them: gangs of fully developed females who’d finished at school and now seemed to be on quixotic scholarships of their own design. An excerpt from a 1964 inquiry published in the Sunday New York World Telegram:
Every day they come. They come from Oregon and Iowa, from Utah and Illinois, from Ohio and California. The come from small towns and medium-sized cities… from colleges and communities where they were important, special, secure. They come to a city that is dirty and difficult and massively indifferent to them. A city that will charge them outrageous rents and pay them shamefully small salaries at first… it is a city bursting with thousands who are equally talented and gifted. Who are they? These women ignoring the fears of parents, the advice of friends, the gloomy prediction of city planners?… How many will there be this week and the next? How many will there be in five years?
One soothing remedy from the past was to count them. According to New York’s YWCA, there were about 100,000 more in 1964 than there had been the year before and an employment agency specializing in the now popular “communications” jobs (advertising, TV, magazines) reported its “applicants from out of town going up, up, up—8 percent more this year [1964] than last.” There were 350,000 total, reports read. One heard that 25,000 were hiding out in the Village, 300 of them appearing semiweekly in Babe’s Beauty Shop and close to 400 working or volunteering in museums. Odd random surveys, to cite one, revealed that 500 girls interviewed on the subways had once been Girl Scouts, though most—93 percent—did not think their scouting skills helped much in their lives as city girls. And it seemed they now wanted jobs that demanded more than a proven ability to whip through “A-S-D-F-J-K-L-semicolon.” Glamour in its 1963 “Happiness Index,” reported, “Happiness is an $8 raise; the boss’s compliment; not having to shave your legs.” A contemporary issue of the Saturday Evening Post proclaimed: “The girl who comes to New York is no longer just the young actress or ballet dancer yearning for a chance… Madison Ave. has replaced Broadway as the street of dreams… the new girl is more likely to see herself writing sparkling copy or holding a clipboard for a television producer.”