Bachelor Girls: The Secret History of Single Women in the 20th Century
by Betty Israel
Aurum
£12.99, pp284
What's so scary about single women? Whether demonised as home-wreckers, ball breakers and job stealers (and that's just the good stuff), or patronised as frustrated career women with no home life, the single woman is everyone's favourite caricature. What would the Daily Mail do without us? The new single has given birth to an entire publishing industry (Amazon.com lists nearly 800 titles) while 'smug marrieds' can't stop dishing out the advice. Any minute now we'll all be buying Rachel Greenwald's dating phenomenon, Find A Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School. Sorry, but I'll be in washing my hair.
These days, I'd argue, singlehood is a state of mind. Sometimes you're in relationships, sometimes not. Which is why Betsy Israel's new study is such a tonic. Drawing on films, novels, newspaper stories and adverts of the past 150 years, Israel shows how society has always found the single bird threatening - whether it's the free lovers and bohemians of the Roaring Twenties or Carrie Bradshaw teetering on her Manolos. After all, if you believe a woman's true destiny is marriage and babies, the unmarried woman upsets the apple cart.
'A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature,' railed one British MP in 1922. 'Unmarried women pose a grave danger... our great civilisation could decline... the larger health of the nation is at stake.' Blimey, I just thought I was stockpiling meals for one. Israel's book is written in a chatty, informal style. But soon you're bowled over by the breadth of scholarship. Did you know, for example, that the first 'spinsters' appeared in thirteenth-century France - literally as spinners and weavers of cotton and wool? The term denoted a respectable employment category - as unwed girls, orphans and widows forged a life outside the family home. Terrified of a single population explosion, Victorian pundits recommended rounding us up and shipping us overseas; while twentieth-century sexologists invented a whole new pathology for us ('the invert'). Not that single women took it lying down. My favourite cri de coeur comes from an advice novelette Israel uncovered entitled Even God Is Single: So why Are You Giving Me Such A Hard Time?
Bachelor Girls is not all gloom and doom. In Victorian times, many middle-class spinsters enjoyed a life of 'single blessedness' (among them Florence Nightingale and Louisa May Alcott). Some taught, some claimed a religious calling, others set up all-female households. These special friendships would be regarded as loosely lesbian today, but no one worried much about female crushes back then (homophobia kicked in only in the 1920s as a way of discrediting the 'new spinsters').
Israel is especially good on literature's obsession with the single - think of all those magnificent nineteenth-century doorstoppers, Jane Eyre, Villette, Portrait of a Lady. Her take on cinematic representations (everything from George Cukor's The Women to Cameron Crowe's Singles) is brilliantly eclectic. Instead of being horrified by today's middlebrow concept - the 'slacker spinster' (Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal), Israel rejoices in their self-possession and mounds of dry cleaning. 'They believe in the possibilities of love, though it's not clear they fully believe in the beautiful possibilities of marriage,' she says drolly.
As Bachelor Girls points out, social upheaval - war, cheap travel, the rise of capitalism brought unexpected benefits for the lone girl. During the Second World War, the entire female population was, in effect, single (suddenly it was a glorious and patriotic state). Having tasted independence, many found it difficult to readapt to married life.
Meanwhile, the new breed of militant shop girls lobbied for the right to wear skirts that didn't cripple, take legal breaks and use the store's indoor lavatories. And cheap bedsits finally gave women that key Bloomsbury fantasy - a room of one's own. Until the early twentieth century there were no apartments for women (three women living together constituted a brothel). For today's thirtyish never-weds in swish condos picking out a new Smeg fridge, it's a humbling thought.
