Independent Perspective News

By PHOEBE HOBAN

Contemporary culture has never lacked for compelling images of the single woman. They've run the gamut from glamorous to Gidget, from the original Cosmo girl to Carrie Bradshaw and company on "Sex and the City." And while such thoroughly modern millies as the singleton Bridget Jones or the sex-addict Samantha are hardly real-life role models, they represent the idea of the single woman as a viable and even enticing entity, one that needs no more justification or documentation, say, than the domestic habits of the dedicated bachelor. But apparently this female demographic still requires a bookshelf all its own.

It has been nearly 40 years since Betty Friedan attacked the conventional notion of the role of women in marriage in "The Feminine Mystique," ushering in the first wave of feminism. According to the Census Bureau, single women over the age of 15 now represent 48 percent of the female population. But recently the literature seems to have regressed.

Consider two books on the subject that have just come out this month that try to validate this lifestyle both historically and anecdotally, as if it were a fringe phenomenon rather than a rapidly growing segment of society: Betsy Israel's "Bachelor Girl: The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century" (William Morrow) and "Solitaire: The Intimate Lives of Single Women" (Macfarlane Walter & Ross) by Marian Botsford Fraser, a Canadian journalist. Both suggest that single women are still perceived as a special-interest group, although, according to Ms. Israel's book, they number a staggering 1.95 million in New York City alone. (The Census Bureau puts that number at 2,060,000.)

"Single women have always been portrayed and depicted in the mass culture in a negative and nasty way that influenced the lives of many women, and at the same time was competely untrue, and these images, some of them 150 years old, are still being played out and the ideas are just being recycled," says Ms. Israel.

"Bachelor Girl" traces the trajectory of the single woman in America, from the turn of the 20th century to the present, from the spinster — working immigrant women who literally spun for a living — to "outspoken and very cool-looking single celebrities" of the 1960's and 1970's like Gloria Steinem. There are thumbnail sketches of poster girls for singlehood like the Brontë sisters, Louisa May Alcott and Florence Nightingale. (Who, despite her status, was not exactly a role model for single living. After revolutionizing military nursing standards during the Crimean War, she took to her bed more or less permanently at the age of 40 with a mysterious malady.) Rife with Dickensian detail, Ms. Israel's book provides a useful (if depressing) history of single working girls and new women of all stripes, from the shopgirl to the Gibson goddess to the swinging single.

Ms. Fraser's book calls single women "a potentially powerful socio-economic group" but one that is "still widely perceived as disadvantaged or insignificant, subordinate or invisible." As evidence she collects oral accounts of 150 women she interviewed across Canada, from a nonagenarian living alone in a trailer on a remote farm to young professionals at work and play in Toronto, to the hospice care of a terminally ill woman by her coterie of friends. The collective voice of these single women is decidedly ambivalent.

"I think it's human nature for there to be ambivalence about stuff like this," Ms. Fraser says. "I think people want the freedom, the autonomy, the independence and in some cases the greater security of being single, but they also want to be in relationships. No matter how well you put your life together, it's still nice to have sex now and then."

It's hard to imagine their male counterparts being subjected to similar treatment, a history of single men, say, or a book about bachelors that didn't celebrate their sexual prowess with Rat-Pack-style martini glasses or a winsome picture of Hugh Grant or some other signifier of this debonair demimonde on the cover, excerpted, perhaps, by Esquire or GQ.

Next page >