Bachelor Girl (30 page)

An entire litany of single female names would follow, perhaps most famously Kitty Genovese, a twenty-nine-year-old bar manager who’d decided, in a highly unusual move, to stay in the city when the rest of her large Italian family made the move from Brooklyn to Long Island. She was stalked at 3 A.M. after exiting a Queens train and stabbed repeatedly en route to her apartment; notoriously, neighbors all around the complex heard her shrieking but none called the police. The one man who considered it later confessed that he’d seen her stumbling and, thinking her drunk, changed his mind.

Two years later, in Chicago, Richard Speck pushed his way through the front door of a student nurses’ dorm, dressed like a disheveled James Dean—a tattoo, BORN TO RAISE HELL, on his arm—and demanded money. No one, he swore, would be hurt. Twenty-four student nurses lived there, most of them Filipinas. About half were home at the time and he forced them all to a room, had them lie down, and tied them up with strips of torn bedsheets. Girls were returning home every few minutes, and as each came in, he tied her up. Then he lifted one or two at a time and dragged them into another room. He’d return, take another five. Another three. Until the room was empty, and he fled. He’d missed one, however, a small young woman who had managed to roll herself under a bed and stay hidden. She’s the one who found the carnage—her friends, strangled, mutilated, stabbed in the eyes and breasts. Somehow, still tied up, she crawled out onto a fire escape shrieking.

“The nurse under the bed” became a set piece in scary games girls played during my childhood. The message was clear: If you live by yourself without a husband, you’d better learn how to hide.

By the seventies, and the full blossoming of the bar scene, single murders began to fall into a category of their own. This kind of dispatch was commonplace: In October 1973, Carol A. Hoffman, thirty-one, a publishing assistant, was stabbed and then brutally strangled with panty hose in her apartment. The most shocking aspect of the Hoffman case was that she had let the killer into her apartment because she’d
felt sorry for him.
He had appeared at her door in distress and told her he was looking for another resident of the building who’d raped his wife. While the man was there, elaborating on this story, Ms. Hoffman’s boyfriend happened to call. He advised her to get the guy out quickly and even spoke by phone to the distraught visitor. He raced over, but by the time he arrived she was dead. Building residents were horrified—but not, it seemed, all that shocked. Here was a “mostly singles” apartment, no doorman, with a history of muggings. One neighbor, identified as Marti, a graphic designer, recalled bringing home a strange man who, after three hours of conversation, attacked her. She’d escaped by racing down the hallway, banging on doors. “How could I report it?” she asked the reporter. “What was I going to report? Oh, hi, I brought a man home with me, and look what he did!”

The women who wrote these stories—Gloria Emerson, Judy Klemesrud, Charlotte Curtis, Nan Robertson, among others—were on their own emerging as singular voices. They had come up the usual journalistic route: from file clipper or researcher, then moving, after a few years, to the 4F sections or pullouts. (4F: “food, furnishings, fashions, family” was still the journalistic female ghetto). Some of them had been quiet forces in the sex desegregation of the
New York Times
help-wanted ads in 1967 and had been active in the landmark class-action sex-discrimination suits brought against the
Times, Newsweek,
and other news corporations during the early seventies. (Without these actions, it’s unlikely their bylines would ever have appeared anywhere outside the 4F cookie/sweater slum.)

Their stories of singular peril began to take on an eerie similarity. Imagine modern Bowery gals, a group of friends dressed up to go out one
weekend night, to a place that seemed like a wild carnival midway. It was loud and friendly, but there was also an unmistakably dangerous undercurrent. Patrice Leary, Roseanne Quinn…their names blurred with their stories and photos. Just regular young working girls, in their twenties, hair parted down the middle, found dead after leaving a bar alone or with a man they did not know. Their friends, who resembled them, would be photographed huddled together outside the bar. Sometimes their words made up the captions: “
There is no such thing as too cautious.” “To be realistic in this city means to be paranoid.” “I sleep with a baseball bat next to my bed.” “The uglier I look, the safer I’ll be.”

An acquaintance of mine recalls:

As journalist Lucinda Franks wrote of young women in the early seventies, “Anxiety had slipped around their lives like a back brace.”

It seems in the spirit of the times that Jane Fonda won the Oscar for
Klute
(1971), in which she played a prostitute stalked by a crazed john. Another hugely popular film,
Play Misty for Me,
flipped the roles, updating the noir B movie
Detour
, in which an inexplicably demented woman stalks a man she’s casually met, here a radio deejay played by Clint Eastwood.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, based on Judith Rossner’s 1975 novel, concerned a seemingly plain Irish-American schoolteacher who, in response to upset
ting events in her past, starts to pick up men in bars, night after night, year after year, until finally one of them kills her.

But despite its seeming death sentence, single life in New York City continued to thrive. New Yorkers, after all, like single women living anywhere, had been forced to cultivate and maintain a sense of humor—satiric, or sardonic, and that adjective so often stapled to the single woman, masochistic. The most perfectly preserved example of sardonic female masochism may be found in the Gail Parent novel
Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living in New York
(1970). Sheila, who’d moved from Franklin Square, Long Island, to the city, has, after several years, decided that she has no hopes of marriage. Every girl in New York City has the same apartment she has, the same hairstyle, has read the same books and has the same recipes and goes to the same kinds of events to meet the same men. In the movies, Doris Day had moved to the city and day one found a spacious brownstone she paid for with her unemployment check. The next day she ran into Cary Grant, who accidentally spilled coffee on her, gave her a job, and eventually married her. As Sheila observes, her life has taken a slightly different course. Thus she’s decided to kill herself and spends most of the novel both looking for a mate and shopping for a nice, reasonably priced coffin.

But let’s put aside all the feelings of terror and doom and look at some of the more common low-grade anxieties that plagued the 1970s single pioneers. The best depiction of this ill ease, the widespread state of singular dislocation, may be found in a little-known film called
T. R. Baskin
(1971), starring Candace Bergen. Here is a young single woman, well educated and interesting, ready to experience life, yet self-protective and a little shy. Her circumstances, that is, the 1970s, don’t favor the self-protective and slightly shy. She has just moved alone to Chicago, has her own apartment, works at an anonymous office job, and on the weekends attempts to go out with her friends—but it’s always a struggle. In groups they go to restaurants and clubs or to apartments far more garishly decorated than her own. The parties always start up quickly. Never is she really a full participant.

By the early seventies, the singles culture had reached the point where men very often assumed that single women they met wished to have sex
with them. That’s the atmosphere here—uninvited male hands suddenly everywhere. Men attempting to feed our heroine Kahlúa, whiskey sours, and spilling the drinks down her shirt. More than once we watch T. R. struggling out of a male hold and explaining to friends, who tease her, call her a prude, so
uptight
(then practically a curse word), that she must go. Like a lot of reserved young women, T. R. is uncomfortable in the anonymous new single world. I think of the old shop girls and how the same questions applied: Will the heroine maneuver out of the dreary job and away from all those awful people? How can she avoid parties like sexualized rackets if they scare her? And what about the friends determined to find her a one-night guy? Why, as T. R. might have said, do I have to be this age and single right now?

THE BIONIC SINGLE

In many ways it was an excellent time to be young, single, never-married, or even divorced. Penny, a science writer, now forty-nine, says,

Consider that in 1957, 53 percent of the American public had believed that unmarried people were “sick,” “immoral,” or “neurotic,” while only 37 percent viewed them neutrally. During the early seventies, a similar study found that just 33 percent of a large sample group had “negative attitudes and expectations” of the unmarried. Fifty-one percent viewed them “neutrally” and 15 percent approvingly.

There was even a weak but nonetheless official endorsement of single womanhood from the
New York Times
. In August 1970, the
Times
ran an editorial announcing the emergence of “the Liberated Woman.” It began by providing necessary context.

That was not to incite all solo girls to rush out and change. As the authors went on to note: “The family has proved to be a durable human institution in many social settings…. The revolution in the status of women will change much and will leave much else unaltered.”

One of the biggest changes would be in mass perceptions of unwed women.

During the next few years the single woman would enjoy her own widely endorsed public honeymoon.
Newsweek
reported the following year that “singlehood has emerged as an intensely ritualized—and newly respectable style of American life. It is finally becoming possible to be both single and whole.” There were stories on dropout wives, and some sociologists and economists predicted that we would eventually find ourselves in a “totally singles-oriented society.” Frozen dinners for one. A rebellion against the terms “double-occupancy” and “family discounts.”
The Mary
Tyler Moore
show was in its prime, Rhoda and Phyllis still popping in to complain before fleeing Minneapolis for their own single sitcoms. In 1974 the
New York Times
wrote, “In all respects young single American women hold themselves in higher regard now than a year ago. [They are] self-assured, confident, secure.”

For the first time in decades, perhaps for the first time ever, single women began to think about establishing adult, fully furnished lives by themselves. Landlords, who’d clung to the image of stewardess-with-dead-plants (or, not that it was said out loud, “dead stewardess”), began to see a new kind of single female tenant—older, meaning thirtyish, more established and serious. In the words of one young woman, “Do not dare call me a swinging single. I’m an unmarried grown-up.”

“Women’s lib,” as it was still called, had started to change things. “I never in a gazillion years thought I would rent, much less
buy
a house without being married or at least living with someone,” says one never-wed art appraiser, “age—deliberately vague.” But, she says, by the time she’d reached thirty, “I was tired of living out of the big version of a suitcase—not having the nice things in the style I wanted them in because, goddamit, I was supposed to have these things selected from my registry, or to pick them out together with my husband, with whom I was to establish a real, permanent home…. I didn’t even have a nice car. Everything was on hold and I was just too far along in all the other areas of my life to live without a decent shower curtain or wineglasses.”

One marketing executive called it learning to “think singly.” And everyone, even the very married, was advised to learn the dance steps.

By 1975, one in four households were headed by single women, the combined results of so many women waiting to wed and so many others having their marriages unexpectedly end. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act of that year made it much easier for women to buy condos and entire houses and to have aligned in their wallets as many credit cards as they chose. (Before that, in many states, it was impossible for a woman to get credit except under her husband’s name.) And many were using them “to buy very ‘nice things’ like Limoges china and Baccarat crystal,” as
The Christian Science Monitor
reported in 1975. “They don’t feel that a woman’s home life begins when she marries.”