But though still misunderstood and—thanks to writers and directors—still so often maligned, single life is no longer what we for years have enjoyed calling a half life. There are still archetypes, easily applied methodologies for organizing and controlling the way we think about single women. Then there are the unavoidable live women themselves as opposed to the images.
During the nineteenth century, many real women (as opposed to spinsters and shrews) found it easier and more satisfying to choose women friends over men and/or family for their essential life “partners.” And it’s this long-discouraged practice that accounts for the true appeal of Sex and the City. A simple reading presents a very clever, witty drama concerning a variety—almost every variety—of relationships with men and sexual issues (premature ejaculation; strange bathroom habits; trying to make lovers out of sex toys and humans out of men who are angry, et cetera). But the real action and pleasure and love is among the four girlfriends, who spend all their available time together, discussing all of these other relationships. It’s like life on an imaginary cruise ship—the four separate briefly, go off and have their various trysts in their various rooms, then return to the dining room, where they review the day, drink, and split dessert four ways. The real conflict occurs right there, among the women; it’s in the way they push one another, tell one another the embarrassing absolute truth, hitting on weak spots and self-defeating patterns. And the amazing and perhaps fantastic element is how they don’t walk out on one another. If they do, if there are hurt feelings, everyone participates in the reunion, which will typically involve baskets of homemade muffins and/or blender drinks and new shoes.
And it is now distinctly possible that another generation is going to miss the cues of single-illness, or uncomfortability, altogether. Recently I took a bunch of ten-and eleven-year-olds to see the movie Kate and Leopold, starring Meg Ryan as a thirty-fivish career woman who dresses like and has the body of a good-looking young man. In fact, her boss at the marketing company to which she’s devoted her life compliments her by telling her that she’s not really a woman. She’s like, and this is the good part, she’s like… a man. Her ex-boyfriend, like that of every other alleged spinster character—like Bridget Jones and Ally McBeal—has let her down. She gave him “the best seven years of her life.” He replies: “Those were the best?”
He’s much too preoccupied, anyway, with finding fissures in the space/time continuum and, as the movie starts, has found a portal into the nineteenth century. A handsome duke and inventor somehow follows him back into the present and home to his apartment. Two hours later, Meg, who still lives upstairs from this unfortunate boyfriend, is given every single working woman’s dream choice: Go back in time and be rich and beautiful and beloved by a handsome duke, or stay here and be great at your job. Of course, she goes, by throwing herself off the Brooklyn Bridge, the site of the portal, and landing in the nineteenth century, wearing a blue dress.
I asked the ten-and eleven-year-olds what they thought about it, assuming they would vote for portals and dukes and fancy dresses and any way out of wearing those blah “work clothes” plus having a horrible boss. But they surprised me. One told me there were no “jobs for women except secretaries” and so who would want to live then? Although, hedging, she added that Kate’s life “now” was “totally boring” and her blue dress was “extremely pretty.” A girlfriend of hers suggested that Kate could move to a better apartment and, because she’d been promoted, she could buy all new clothes! She could get “someone who wasn’t a weird geek for a boyfriend!” The first girl then added something that she’d learned in schooclass="underline" “Most people in those times didn’t even live to be thirty.”
Which led to a moment’s reflection. Another girl who had favored Kate’s going back now said, “If she really went back to then, then now, when it’s time for her real life, she’d already be dead.”
She should live well in her own time and, as they said when I was single, “On her own terms.” And no one should say anything more about any of it. There have been too many epitaphs for the single woman, and almost every one of them is pathetic. She is not.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
A study of single women relies heavily on the accomplishments of women’s historians. These academics and agitators have taken what was, twenty-two years ago, during my student years, a loosely organized post-sixties discipline and turned it into a recognized field of remarkable scholarship and theory. The body of historical works is at this point so vast that it is physically impossible to list all the books and articles I have consumed over the years and that have influenced my thinking about single women. But I include in the following notes the primary texts I consulted for each section of Bachelor Girl, any document I’ve quoted from, and a few related works that I think, or hope, will be of interest.
There are many excellent overviews of women’s history. I used the following: Sarah Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York: Free Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Womanhood in America: From Colonial Times to the Present, 3d ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1983); William Chafe, The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century, a 1991 reworking of his earlier The American Woman: Her Changing Social, Economic, and Political Role, 1920–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Nancy F. Cott, ed., Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women (New York: Dutton, 1972); Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977); Nancy F. Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own: Toward a New Social History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
A few more finely honed time periods: Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980); Margaret Fuller, Women in the Nineteenth Century (1855; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
On the history of feminism:
The standard reference and most frequently assigned women’s history text is Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959; New York: Atheneum, 1970); Rosalind Rosenberg, Divided Lives: American Women in the Twentieth Century, American Century series, Eric Foner, ed. (New York: Hill and Wang/Noonday Press, 1992), is invaluable for its analysis of the parallel struggles of black and white women, individuals, and activists; Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; New York: Schocken, 1971); Elizabeth Cady Stanton/Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches (New York: Schocken, 1981); William P. O’Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969); Mari Jo Buhle, Women and American Social ism, 1870–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976). And for all those ages twenty-one to twenty-eight who, like my re search assistants, never took a women’s history class (usual recollection: It was “gay”; “it had this stigma”; “it was passé”), here is a brief beginner’s reading list of the second twentieth century feminist outburst, a movement that, like it or not, continues to shape all female lives.