On weeknights residents filled the restaurants and movie theaters; on weekends, they filled the bars—Maxwell’s Plum, Mister Laffs, TGI Friday’s—a collection that stretched out along five crowded blocks of First Avenue. By midnight on Saturday, it seemed that someone had thrown a frat party without realizing a street fair was already under way. Newsweek called it “the body exchange.” Others likened it to a zoo, a “place made up of hands, hands, HANDS grabbing at you.” Or waiting on you. It became one of the city’s much-repeated mating tales that J. Walter Thompson employees actually competed for waiter and bartending jobs after hours. As one explained, “Where else am I going to meet chicks?”
The bar strip was also ground zero for journalists assigned to this generation’s singles beat. The standard device was to catch bits of conversations between couples who’d “connected,” as if on The Dating Game, and had invariably misheard each other’s names. The strategy, then, was to follow the strangers—one long-haired eyelinered female, one preppy male wearing bell-bottoms—as they moved in on each other and, if the reporter got lucky, left the bar together. But there were other scenes and other stories, and many girls could not stand the meat market that was the Upper East Side. Some preferred Village bars or jazz clubs or the scenes at Max’s Kansas City, Cheetah’s, or the Electric Circus, where there was less date making than dancing and for the shy a lot of visual distraction—Warholian performance art; the first of the sparkly-ball light shows—also much potential single-girl sex. Sometimes right there.
“Wherever you went out in the 1960s, and I went, just went, wherever—it was very dark,” says Julie, now forty-nine, divorced, and the mother of two kids she adopted on her own.
It was the bars that were labeled “singles” bars that were the creepiest, I thought. Little red candles, all those guys with the open shirts and this glob of hair sticking out. People dressed alike. I liked places where there was more of a circus-y diffused scene… these bars really were meat markets…. I can remember at Maxwell’s, or one of them I got dragged to this one time, being afraid of going to the bathroom because I had inadvertently made eye contact with this manly-man kind of guy at the bar and I was afraid he would misinterpret my walking toward the bathroom as a cue…. It seemed so predatory.
WHERE HAVE OTHER SINGLES GONE?
At the time, of course, an enormous slab of the American single population was not in singles clubs of any kind, but still in college. Some would avoid the singles scene by getting married the day after graduation. But the MRS. degree had already begun its slow fade from the curriculum. “When I started school in 1965, we wore plaid skirts and had proper dates and had parietals,” says Sally Hoffe, a fifty-four-year-old lawyer, never wed and now a single parent. “By the time we left we were dressed in flowing scarves and ragged jeans and many of us had no makeup on except maybe a crescent moon on our forehead. We had thrown out hair dryers…. Sex—we just had it. And unless you got pregnant or caught VD, the tone—at least with certain people anyway—the whole subject was casual as can be.”
In March 1966, Time devoted its Education section to a story on the younger “free sex movement,” what was largely a Berkeley phenomenon that had been around in some form since 1960. Printed below an extremely dark and blurry photo: “As they do at countless collegiate parties everywhere, the couples wriggled to the watusi and gyrated to the jerk, while recorded drums and saxophones resounded in the dimly lit apartment of a University of California student in Berkeley. Unlike most parties, however, the boys and girls were naked.”
“That sounds about right,” says Sally Hoffe.
Very Berkeley, but I’d be lying if I said in the Midwest I did not attend my share of like events… there was a lot of loosening-up of what you wore and who you were. Or who you thought you were that week… [but] not everyone participated. There were many girls who still had on the sensible Butterick sew-it-yourself shifts…. There were the wedding announcements and the “bride elect”! I always remember that phrase, bride-elect, the chosen. But what was it she chose?… My radicalization was to see this engagement ritual as a kind of sleepwalking…. Didthey really want to get married, or had they run out of ideas already?
At about this point in time it becomes more difficult to write about single women as a unified class. There were so many variations on the single state, so many stops along the singular spectrum. For example, in 1967 half of all women in their thirties were married mothers who remained at home full-time. But of these women, 17 percent were legally separated, or temporarily apart from their mates due to the Vietnam War. Thousands of women were already choosing to keep rather than give away out-of-wedlock babies—and to live with friends, sisters, boyfriends. The number of women who reported cohabiting or “having recently cohabited” was at about 550,000. Some single women lived in Upper East Side apartments or at the Y. But an equal number lived in communes or feminist collectives or in coed group housing. And many were developing unique new views of singularity. A graphic artist and illustrator recalls life on “the commune of the Feminine Mystique, Brattleboro, Vermont”:
Everyone was equal and everyone was beautiful and cooked. Of all the memories of that time, I still see mostly the bowls and bowls of spaghetti. And I remember what they looked like the next morning, when I came down and, as one of two women, found them waiting for me… I was never really able to have roommates after that. If there was one night and things didn’t get put away, I became this insane despot…. I think it’s true about a lot of single women—they have their weird baggage. They’re pretty much always there, living alone, for a reason. And that reason is usually other people, no matter how many times they make the mistake again and again…. I think most of us end up where we want to be.
In Mary Gordon’s first novel, Final Payments (1977), we meet a young woman who’s devoted her entire adult life to caring for a pious father. Like a nun, she leaves the house for a walk just once a week; the rest of the time she organizes his papers, infuriating the local widows who desperately want the job. After his death, the widows seek their revenge, joining with the church leaders of this small Catholic community in trying to sell her off to some other old person in need of a secular nun. They manage to give her a hideous spinster haircut. But she is rescued by a trio of childhood friends who have watched over this stunted single life for years. One day they force her into the car, into the city, into a life of her own.
One asks if she wants to get married.
No, she doesn’t. “I want a terrific pair of high-heeled shoes… like Rosalind Russell… I want a very small apartment and I want people to refer to me as a bachelorette.”
“The term now is swinging single,” one of them tells her.
“And they call that progress,” she responds, knowing that they could have called it anything and called it an improvement.
SINGLE SLASHING
If singles were an increasingly diverse group, there was still one stereotype that reporters loved most of all—the “swinger”—that college grad with fake eyelashes and daiquiris or the faux hippies holding joints and daiquiris. By 1968, New York’s famed “singles ghetto” had been renamed the “girl ghetto.” And its residents came under unkind, often vicious, scrutiny. Tired of writing about bar etiquette, reporters began to meet subjects at their apartments to get the inside view, often the morning after a singles night out. Many of these apartments were in upscale buildings—three and a half rooms, the rent at about $225 per month, making a three-way share just affordable. No matter how lucky they might have felt, whatever it was they’d got away from, girls could never quite convey to male reporters just what it was they found so thrilling about their own interpretation of single life. That’s because reporters did not want to know.