Spinster (16 page)

Obviously this flood of proudly self-sufficient workers couldn't be contained by the term
spinster
—and so a new one emerged: the New Woman. She was, by definition, independent, and often a suffragist, but not necessarily. Henry James initially popularized her moniker in the late 1870s and early 1880s with Isabel
Archer and Daisy Miller—fictional heroines who were ultimately punished for their independent spirit—but it was quickly reappropriated by its real-life paradigm and used respectfully by the public, men included. In a 1913 letter to a friend, the political writer Randolph Bourne described New Women as such:

So thoroughly healthy and zestful…. They shock you constantly…. They have an amazing combination of wisdom and youthfulness, of humor and ability, and innocence and self-reliance…. They are of course all self-supporting and independent; and they enjoy the adventure of life; the full, reliant, audacious way in which they go about makes you wonder if the new woman isn't to be a very splendid sort of person.

Theoretically, the New Woman was free to be sexual, though in practice Victorian social censures and frank classism proved hard to surmount. One of the ways in which non-bohemian privileged women laid claim to the “respectability” that differentiated them from the immigrant and working classes was to present themselves as “passionless,” a fiction that must have seemed particularly necessary to new members of a middle class uncertain about their social status. Too, I suspect it was difficult enough infiltrating a male-dominated labor market without bringing your sex life to work. This connection between class and sex continues today, of course: often a woman is driven less by “morality” than by not wanting to be considered a slut, and so she rounds down the number of men she's slept with, for instance, or even, in the case of a promiscuous childhood friend of mine, audaciously tells her fiancé that she's a virgin. In this way women continue to police themselves and other women.

Emancipation from the domestic prison was an inarguable good for everyone. But it came at a price. In a male-dominated workplace, a woman had not only sexism to contend with but
the strange predicament of being regarded as a novelty, an immigrant in her own land, forcing her to find a way to reconcile her gender with her ambition. Some went ahead and brought sex to work, playing up their womanliness and incurring whatever favors might follow (exploiting her “erotic capital,” as we'd put it now); others tried to adopt the ways and mannerisms of men. As we know, this negotiation continues today.

For those women who also had literary and intellectual ambitions, this reality was even more complicated. Like Neith, many were hired quite literally
for
their otherness. Newspaper publishers, fast on the scent of a growing demographic, sought to attract female readers by adding special new “women's pages” peddling fashion, décor, and cooking tips. As Mrs. M. L. Rayne put it, “Household departments, fashion letters, such as Jenny June furnishes to a dozen papers simultaneously; children's column, market articles, art criticisms, book reviews—these are nearly always the work of women.”

On the one hand this was good news—more jobs and more authority. On the other hand, it shunted the majority of women to a “pink ghetto” that wasn't (and still isn't) taken seriously. Even a young and formidable Nellie Bly was demoted to this beat at
The Pittsburgh Dispatch
before sending herself to Mexico as a foreign correspondent.

Even more paradoxical was being a New Woman with her own first-person column—a plum gig with a catch. Her task, in essence, was to explain herself to a public that was still trying to understand who she was.

On the surface, this was a positive, even liberating exercise. The New Woman is rare in the world of neologisms for being descriptive and aspirational, rather than, as is the case with many stereotypes, limiting and derogatory. The term arose in tandem with a specific demographic in real time, providing those within its ranks an enlarged sense of self; the job of the columnist was
to tantalize the rest with an expansive new role to fantasize about that wasn't Wife or Mother—or defined in terms of
not
being a wife or mother, as with “old maid.” (And, thanks to the prevailing fashion for pen names, her true identity was often secret.) Writers such as Neith pioneered a radically new way of being female in public—without them, Maeve Brennan might never have become The Long-Winded Lady.

The catch? On an individual level, it's impossible to quantify the cost of mining your own life for sellable anecdotes, even—or especially—when your audience is large. But on a much grander scale, the New Woman was unwittingly building a sort of gilded cage: by putting her own life up for display, she was perpetuating the sexist tendency to equate women with “merely” personal matters, and even collaborating in her own objectification. Today, nearly every female writer I know has had to decide at some point whether or not she'll accept an assignment to write about her dating life, a conundrum that is almost never presented to men.

When it comes to job hunting, things aren't so terribly different now than they were a century ago: it was a family connection that introduced Neith Boyce to Josephine Redding, the first editor of
Vogue
. Founded only four years earlier as a weekly,
Vogue
catered expressly to the New Woman. Here is Redding describing types like Neith in an 1895 editorial:

What women are concerned in is developing their own individuality, and hence they refuse to call any man master, be he husband or spiritual guide. Personal freedom is more precious to them than the protection of the best men. The women they envy are not those who are simply wives and mothers, but those
who by honest intelligent work have attained distinction in any line of effort, and whose creed has been self-reliance.

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Redding took a shine to Neith, who not only played the part but also looked it, always a convenient accident, and perhaps even especially so when the popular images of the New Woman perpetuated by the media—tall and fit, smartly turned out in her crisp cotton shirtwaist and ankle-grazing skirt, forever striding confidently along the sidewalk—was so appealing.

It took some doing to see that unfettered vision in the 1903 portrait Carol DeBoer-Langworthy had posted on her website. Standing against a gray background, Neith looks suspiciously like the stolid matrons she mocked. Her outfit—a black high-waisted skirt and matching embroidered jacket, black fur stole draped around her shoulders, black-gloved hands tucked into a black fur muff—is formal and contained. Her thick, wavy hair is smoothed neatly beneath a very respectable black hat.

But her large, drowsy eyes and curved lips give her face a sultry, intelligent expression that hints at a far less conventional woman. Ditch the furs, lose the hat, loosen the corset, and it's easy to see how she'd catch the eye of a forward-thinking editor. Almost immediately upon her arrival in New York she started contributing freelance articles and short stories to
Vogue
.

A freelance gig wasn't enough to live on, however, so Neith stayed with her parents and, though she was temperamentally reserved and not especially interested in socializing, astutely accepted Mrs. Redding's invitations to the dinner parties she hosted at her apartment—“networking,” we'd say today.

It was during one such evening she met a man who helped her land a full-time job reporting for a daily newspaper called
The Commercial Advertiser
. With a new weekly salary, just enough
to cover room and board, Neith was able to leave her parents' watch and moved farther downtown, into The Judson Apartments, a residential hotel on “Genius Row”—the southern edge of Washington Square Park—named for all the artists it harbored. (A few years later, Neith's contemporary Willa Cather would move into the boardinghouse next door, eventually known as The House of Genius, thanks in part to her presence.)

Without knowing it, I'd been walking past Neith's building on my way to class each day. Her actual living space no longer exists as it once did (today it houses the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University), but I didn't need to actually see her place to imagine it: high ceilings, a few pieces of furniture—mahogany, I decided—including a wardrobe fitted with a full-length mirror so she could make sure her shirtwaist was smooth and buttoned correctly before she left for the office each morning. A place as clean and uncluttered as a finely made decision.

That Neith Boyce was the first real friend I'd made in New York might sound odd, but she gave me the conversation I'd been hungry for, and not a moment too soon. Since I couldn't exactly walk back through time and knock on her door, I did the next best thing, staying later and later at the Bobst Library each night, reading about her and the people she knew. I liked to go to the high-up floors and work at a table near the giant plate glass windows overlooking Washington Square Park.

There was something so surreal about…everything. This park that had outlasted so many people. All the many iterations of femininity it had seen. How even I, “a dutiful daughter,” as Simone de Beauvoir once described her young self, was living a life so different from my mother's; when she was my age she was married, about to become pregnant with me. I was beginning to think
that this habit of mind—constantly tracing myself back to my mother, to where she'd begun and left off—wasn't idiosyncratic, but something that many if not most women did, a feature of the female experience.
Did men do this, too?
I wondered. It still didn't seem possible that I lived with a man my mother had never met. What would she make of my strange desire to be on my own? Was the voice in my head telling me to quit my spinster fantasies and grow up already hers, or mine? Or was it the voice of something larger, the culture itself?

One afternoon in early January I spent several hours in the library basement finding and printing out the last installments of Neith's column. By the time I finished and walked outside, day had turned into evening; snow blanketed the park, erasing the cars, filtering the glare of the stoplights so they glowed like gas streetlamps. The arch glittered and shone. Nights like this it was even easier to pretend that Neith's park and mine really were one and the same. I felt my cell phone vibrate in my pocket. Cell phones seemed surreal. Ordinary civilians equipped with portable communications devices, like secret agents. My mother had never seen a cell phone or even had an e-mail address.