The new spinster:
We know the former flapper “new spinster”—her frustrations, joys, successes, snipey conversations with wives, and wardrobe changes—from articles published in magazines and newspapers. Primary information about her sex life—and she apparently had one—is found in Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-two Hundred Women (1935, a privately funded study, Vassar College) and in Daniel Scott Smith, The Dating of the American Sexual Revolution, part of the collection The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, Michael Gordon, ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973). Also Ellen Rothman, Hand and Hearts: The History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984); and portions of Beth L. Bailey’s highly enjoyable From Front Porch to Backseat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); there are wonderfully frightening images of the late flapper down and out in two Jean Rhys novels: After Leaving Mr. MacKenzie (New York: Harper & Row, 1931) and Quartet (1928; New York: Vintage, 1974).
Periodicals:
Grace M. Johnson, “The New Old Maids” (Women Beautiful, May 1909); Elizabeth Jordan, “On Being a Spinster,” Saturday Evening Post (Apr. 1926); Dorothy Dunbar Bromley, “Feminist—New Style,” Harper’s (Oct. 1927); Lillian Bell, “Old Maids of the Last Generation and This,” Saturday Evening Post (Dec. 1926); “Feminism and Jane Smith,” Harper’s (June 1927); Lorine Pruette, “Should Men Be Protected?” Nation (Aug. 1927); Lillian Symes, “Still a Man’s Game: Reflections of a Slightly Tired Feminist,” Harper’s (May 1929) and “The New Masculinism,” Harper’s (June 1930); “And Now the Siren Eclipses the Flapper” New York Times Magazine (July 28, 1929); Margaret Culkin Ban ning, “The Plight of the Spinster,” Harper’s (June 1929); Mrs. Virginia Kirk, “A Tale of Not So Flaming Youth,” Literary Digest, no. 105 (Oct. 10, 1930).
CHAPTER 4: THE SUSPICIOUS SINGLE
Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Joan Hoff-Wilson and Marjorie Lightman, Without Precedent: The Life and Career of Eleanor Roosevelt (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984); Anne Hirst, Get and Hold Your Man (New York: Kinsey, 1937); Don Congdon, ed., The Thirties: A Time to Remember (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962); Ben L. Reitman, Sister of the Road: The Autobiography of Box-Car Bertha (New York: Sheridan House, 1937); Susan M. Hartmann, The Homefront and Beyond: American Women in the 1940s (Boston, Twayne, 1982); Karen Anderson, Wartime Women: Sex Roles, Family Relations and the Status of Women During World War II (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981); Sherna Berger Gluck, Rosie the Riveter Revisited: Women, the War and Social Change (Boston: Meridien, 1987) includes oral histories of women in all areas of the war industries; Maureen Honey, Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda During World War II (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (New York: Harper & Row, 1947); Elizabeth Hawes, Anything but Love: A Complete Digest of the Rules for Feminine Behaviour from Birth to Death, Given Out in Print, On Film, and Over the Air, Read, Seen, Listened to Monthly by Some 340,000,000 American Women (New York: Rinehart, 1948).
Periodicals:
Mabel Barbee Lee, “The Dilemma of the Educated Woman,” Atlantic (Dec. 1930); Genevieve Parkhurst, “Is Feminism Dead?” Harper’s (1935); “Anxious Ladies: To Be Wed) or Not to Be,” Mademoiselle (1938); Juliet Farnham, “How to Meet Men and Marry,” book excerpt, McCall’s (1943); “Somebody’s After Your Man!” Good House keeping (Aug., 1945); “In Marriage, It’s a Man’s Market!” New York Times Magazine (June 17, 1945); “Your Chances of Getting Married,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1946); “U.S. Marriage Rate Zooms to All-Time High,” Science Digest (Oct. 1947); “How Feminine Are You to Men?” Women’s Home Companion (May 1946); “No Date Is No Dis grace,” Women’s Home Companion (Nov. 1946); George Lawton, “Proof That She Is the Stronger Sex,” New York Times Magazine (Dec. 12, 1948); “The Unwilling Virgins,” Es quire (May 1949); “The High Cost of Dating,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Sept. 1949).
Advice/conduct guides:
Steven Hart and Lucy Brown, How to Get Your Man and Hold Him (New York: Dover, 1944); Cora Carle, How to Get a Husband (New York: Hedgehog Press, 1949); Jean and Gene Berger, Win Your Man and Keep Him (Chicago: Windsor Press, 1948); Judson T. and Mary G. Landis, Building a Successful Marriage (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1948).
On the emergence of bobby-soxers, see This Fabulous Century: 1940–50 (New York: Time-Life, 1969).
CHAPTER 5: THE SECRET SINGLE
Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); David Reisman, The Lonely Crowd, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951); Mirra Komarovsky, Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Dilemmas (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953); Lawrence and Mary Frank, How to Be a Woman (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1954); Norman Hamilton, How to Woo and Keep Your Man (New York: William Fredericks, 1955); Robert O. Blood, Anticipating Your Marriage, the classic marriage text (New York: Free Press, 1957); Nicholas Drake, The Fifties in VOGUE (New York: Henry Holt, 1987); Rona Jaffe, The Best of Every thing (1958; New York: Avon, 1976); Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Young Woman’s Coming of Age in the Beat Generation (New York: Washington Square, 1983); Herman Wouk, Marjorie Morningstar (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955); Winnie Dienes, Young, White and Miserable: Growing Up in the 1950s (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992); J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961).
Periodicals:
“What You Should Know About Women, Even if You’re a Woman,” Collier’s (Nov. 1951); “No Right Age for a Girl to Marry,” New York Times (Oct. 19, 1952); Patty DeRoulf, “Must Bachelor Girls Be Immoral?” Coronet (Feb. 9, 1952); “Her First Date,” Look, (Dec. 1953); Juliet Tree, “When a Girl Lives Alone,” Good Housekeeping (Mar. 1953); “Life Calls on Seven Spinsters,” Life (June 8, 1953), in which Life went out and found spinsters as it might earlier have found the Dionne quints (seven sisters, thirty-eight to fifty-one, all wait on Dad and dress alike—quirky Mousketeer sensibility or psychopathology?); “How to Be Marriageable,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Mar. 1954); James A. Skardon, “Room, Board and Romance,” a series on new coed board inghouses in San Francisco, New York Herald Tribune (Oct. 20, 1954); “Is Marriage the Trap?” Mademoiselle (Dec. 1955); Anita Colby, “In Defense of the Single Woman,” Look (Nov. 29, 1955); “The Date Line,” Good Housekeeping (Oct. 1956); “Some Persons Should Stay Single,” Science Digest (May 1956); Life Magazine Special Issue on “The American Woman,” Life (Dec. 24, 1956); Polly Weaver, “What’s Wrong with Ambition?” Mademoiselle (Sept. 1956); “Will Success Spoil American Women?” New York Times Magazine (Nov. 10, 1957); Gael Greene, “Lone Women,” series, New York Post (Nov. 18–Dec. 1, 1957); Earl Ubell, “Pressure and Tension Beset the Lone Woman,” New York Herald Tribune (Dec. 6, 1957); James H. S. Brossard, “The Engagement Ring: A Changing Symbol” New York Times Magazine (July 14, 1958); Gloria Emerson, “The Lives of a New York Career Girl” Holiday (May 1958); “If You Don’t Go Steady, You’re Different,” Ladies’ Home Journal (Dec. 1959); “Bachelor Girls—They Play by Their Own Rules,” five-part series, New York Daily News (Apr. 1959).