The Singles Scene: The Evolution of the Unattached Woman From Frumpy Old Maid to Empowered Single
Old Hollywood movies from the 1940s and 50s (with some exceptions) seemed to believe that once a woman hit age twenty-five that there were two types of unmarried she could be: a frumpy old maid or a femme fatale of the loose woman variety. Take Effie Perine, the secretary in The Maltese Falcon (1941). She is good at her job. She’s dedicated to Spade and Archer, and she’s on top of her work - in any other time she might have been a detective in her own right - but not in 1940s America. In the film, dedicated, hardworking, good-at-her-job Effie is portrayed as nothing more than an unmarried woman who wears sensible shoes, comes to work in the dead of night when her male boss calls her in, and goes home to Mother every evening. It’s very important for the film to mention many times that dear, old-maid Effie lives with her mother even though she’s a grown adult, lest she be mistaken for a femme fatale of, say, the Brigid O'Shaughnessy variety. At least dear Effie doesn’t have to worry about looking immoral like the other unmarried woman in this film, Ms. O’Shaughnessy, whose immoral exploits get her into deep trouble many times before the curtain falls. Then again, at least crafty Brigid gets kissed.
The notion of a single woman who was either doomed to a life of ill repute or living with Mother and her cats was perpetuated during post-WWII America right on through the 1950s. However, in the early 60s a new buzz word started to breeze through New York City nightclubs and Los Angeles bars, a term that, when applied to an unattached woman, freed her from the choice of either old-maid or femme fatale. An unmarried woman was no longer ‘alone’ or ‘on the prowl’ she was savvy, sexy and now alluringly, single.
The term ‘single’ as it refers to a woman’s relationship status started to be used colloquially in the early 1960s. It was popularized in or around 1962 when Ellen Gurly Brown wrote a best selling book called Sex and the Single Girl about her experiences as an unattached woman in Los Angeles. While Sex and the Single Girl did not single-handedly create the term single, or the sexually liberated movement that followed it, this book and Gurly Brown’s use of the word ‘single,’ began a conversation and helped define a movement which led to unmarried girls going out into the world, living on their own, dating well into their twenties and (gasp!) thirties as they strove to find their places outside the realm of wife and motherhood.
This new single woman could come home from work and slip into more comfortable clothing, she could stay out all night and crawl into bed at an ungodly hour with no recourse. Sexual morality and the politics of it became looser as well. A naked ring finger past high school graduation (or college graduation in some wealthier circles) was seen not as a curse but something to be enjoyed before settling down.
By the early ‘60s the culture was changing and the notion of Women’s Liberation on many fronts, cultural, sexual, professional, was starting to take hold in America. In 1962 Gurly Brown, a former secretary at an advertising agency in Los Angeles turned-copywriter and then writer, published Sex and the Single Girl, a partial autobiography of her own life as a single, working girl with a healthy social calendar and part how-to manual on how any woman could have a job, live on her own and look damn good doing it. (For example, Gurly Brown instructs women to never wear their nice, expensive clothing at home unless they are entertaining because they will wear their clothes out more quickly. Instead, wear old clothes, even rags, or hell, walk around naked, to make sure you’re not wearing out your nice clothes when you’re not being seen). Though Sex and the Single Girl was thought by its first publishers to be just another woman's book, the explosive popularity of the book showed just how badly alternative definitions of womanhood were needed. It was published in over 28 countries and stayed on the Best Seller List for almost a year. Sex and the Single Girl struck a cultural chord and its influence reached far beyond informing women on how best to get a date to pay for a new pair of stockings (she suggests asking for cab money, then taking the bus home and pocketing the money to buy new stockings later). Her advice wasn’t just about surviving (and thriving) as a single woman, it was about living on your own and enjoying yourself.
Sex and the Single Girl was part of the zeitgeist of the 1960s, or as some would call it, the Swingin’ Sixties, but Ellen Gurly Brown wasn’t the only person championing these ideas. There were singles bars and clubs sprouting up in many metropolitan areas and entire clothing lines cropped up to cater to the new single girl aesthetic. This new independent woman was pretty. She could be flashy, but she wasn’t trashy or “loose” (as she might have been called in a previous generation). The entire Singles Scene was in full swing and with it came liberation for women, liberation not only to have a career and take care of herself but liberation to live unwed until she was ready to settle down. No longer did a girl have to race to find a husband before she hit twenty-five, or bear the wrath society placed upon the Old Maid.
Ellen Gurly Brown’s brand of feminism wasn’t for everyone. Sex and the Single Girl came out the same year as Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a much more hard hitting, serious look at the role of women in society from the lens of women in the workplace. Critics of Gurly Brown noted that the way she sold sex and unattachment was hurting the feminist cause and perpetuating the idea that women were merely sex objects. However, what Brown wanted was to show women that there was another path, it was not just marriage or old maid-hood. And at the end of the day, the single girl in Gurly Brown’s book is a career woman who wishes to live her own life on her own terms without judgement. While Friedan did not come around to Gurly Brown entirely, they did have many conversations about their respective brands of feminism and they did come to a place of mutual respect.
While she had her critics, Gurly Brown strove to level the playing field for women through the term ‘Single’ and all the flash and playfulness that went with it. She worked as an author and later as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine where she championed female writers who tried to challenge the stagnant role of women in culture and society. Like men, women wanted to play the field, meet a few people, and make the right decision about who to settle down with. In fact, she was 37 years old before she married the film producer David Brown.
Jessica Stilling is a Hugo nominated author of young adult and literary fiction. Her last novel, The Beekeeper’s Daughter, explores issues women face with mental health through the lens of the life of the feminist poet, Sylvia Plath. Her next literary novel The Weary God of Ancient Travels follows a woman as she tries to piece her turbulent past together after she loses her memory. Jessica has published articles in publications like Ms. Magazine, Bust Magazine and The Writer Magazine. She lives in southern Vermont with her family.
