Bachelor Girl by Betsy Israel Read Free Book Online

Lowell, Massachusetts, reported that her first proposal left her with hives for a week. Florence Nightingale seems to have turned them down weekly, pausing to consider just one man so exceptional, famed, and intelligent that only the mostbeautiful and brainy of the famed Nightingale girls would do. She spent six months writing furiously in her journals to explain her refusal, a grueling narrative alternating between rage and self-loathing, a suspicion of mental illness, and a tenuous pride in following the secret pledge she had made to her herself about her duties. My favorite terrorized-fiancé story belongs to Jane Austen, a young woman said by one of her closest friends to “shift,” to be charming and decorous and yet to possess “eyes the color of a viper’s.” Once, while visiting friends, she listened warily as a young suitor made so passionate a case, she stunned herself by accepting, then left for home. But not long into the ride she began to feel queasy. One hour later, she had her driver turn back, despite bad weather, to rescind her agreement. After seven hours of additional traveling she arrived home physically ill but relieved.
    As more unattached women seemed to be working, giving speeches, or just out walking around at odd hours, the Massachusetts governor once again proposed direct action. This time he hoped to ship the state’s twenty-one thousand redundant women to Oregon or California, where wives, as always, were in short supply. (As historians would later point out, so were prostitutes, although this particular need the governor did not publicly address.)
    The proposal died, but not the paranoid views of single women. What seemed to be changing was the way some single women, the “blessed” in particular, responded. In public situations, even the youngest had been trained to ignore nasty epithets and walk proudly. College women took an eager part in debates, for example, at Oberlin, “Is Married Life More Conducive to a Woman’s Happiness than Single?” or “Is the Marriage Relation Essential to the Happiness of Mankind?” True, for girls at coed schools it was hard, in almost any situation, not to run off crying. But there are records of girls who braved the taunting (“The Co-ed leads a wretched life/She eats potatoes from a knife!”). In an 1863 diary one college girl remarks that she is developing “a natural armor, which seems attached and fastened tight on to my body and brain. I hope someday I may step out of it.”
    Professional women out on the road needed an even stronger suit ofarmor and perhaps a sword. The original abolitionists were typically booed off stages. Men called them hags who’d never had men and wanted to free the black “species” only so they could snag themselves a black male. Social workers and nurses typically slept in the worst parts of a city, sometimes among people who had contagious diseases. Others, traveling for pleasure, to see friends who’d married or gone to teach at far-off schools, suffered nasty comments along the way. Still, a trip for the single woman was a test, an adventure that would have been unimaginable to her as a girl; some stayed on the road for up to six months. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding feminist and the mother of seven, once wrote jokingly to her single and suddenly absent colleague, Susan B. Anthony: “Where are you? Dead or married?”)
    Back at home, Theodore Roosevelt, an up-and-coming public figure, accused them of committing “race suicide,” meaning that they were failing to produce healthy white babies amid the many (I paraphrase) filthy, copulating immigrants. But as single women saw it, that was the vision of a paranoid man who happened, by chance, to be a politician. Ignoring him, they continued their school studies, their work, and their travel. Clara Barton’s sister, Mary, had an idea for them all. Like everyone else, she had “viewed from a safe distance the exquisite happiness of marriage.” In