Bachelor Girl by Betsy Israel Read Free Book Online Page B

trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But the rewards! A justifiable life outside the house! A job, a place, procured on her own! Most thrilling was the chance to be judged for one’s skills and bravery and not one’s ability to please a man.
    Some communards were tremendously influential. Annie Macpherson, a young Scottish woman, established a fund to take in Arab street kids who’d been abandoned all over London. Working with a small team, she arranged for their safe transport and adoption by families in Canada. That’s how I describe her achievement. One of her male contemporaries saw it differently. Here was yet another woman blindly ignoring her responsibilities. Instead of marriage she was determined to “explain the world to swarthy students.”
    She had her American counterparts. Single abolitionist Fanny Wright, along with her spinster sister, established an all-women commune on some uncleared land in Tennessee and called it Nashoba. Their goal was to educate freed slaves, but the effort was cut down by charges of free love and unfair labor practices; poor finances ultimately forced the school to close. As if in penance, Wright at thirty-six entered a loveless marriage.
    But another sort of British commune, this one originally male, would have a serious and lasting impact on American spinsters. That was the settlement house, a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement are the most famous, and their “houses,” of course, are still in business. But there were many others that did the same—offered to poor women, and especially immigrant women, necessary services, whether medical referrals, English-language classes, or specific items such as blankets, food, and clothing.
    And their sights were set higher. Senior staff trained young women “of promise” (meaning girls with a clean appearance, a serious demeanor, and a college diploma) and sought out others with political backgrounds. House leaders formed alliances with one another to construct what scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls “a delicate web of interlocking social justice organizations.” Over time, settlement leaders and their allies campaigned for child-labor legislation, women’s unionization, and the founding of the NAACP (despite all the justified charges of early white feminist, specifically suffragist, racism). And many settlement causes, suffrage for one, eventually became U.S. law. Some of their residents would later move into positions of power, especially during the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt tapped them to run New Deal agencies that dealt with women.
    As professionals, these women had a uniform, similar to that of academics: shirtwaists, high-collared white blouses that buttoned down the back and stood up stiffly, worn with long skirts, hair pulled back from the face in a bun. Spectacles, keys, crucifixes hung like necklaces. It was a presentation of self that read: I am serious, not girlish and frilly but so somber, so plain I can mean nothing to you sexually; I have a cause. This warrior wear may be viewed as the sartorial ancestor of the early dress-for-success professional gray-out.
    Using their somber appearance, their impressive credentials, and their emphasis on feminine good works, the settlement women gained national respect. The causes they worked for did not have anything to do with the rights of women to live alone or in groups. But their group-house experiment, so exotic and yet so sensible, influenced thousands of girls to sign on. Thousands of parents and would-be fiancés dissolved in panic.
    THE GIRL GROUP AS TERRORIST CELL
    Suspicion of women living in groups shows up in the earliest of Western