Read Online All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation by Rebecca Traister - Free Book Online Page A

because, she felt that, in the predominantly black northern Manhattan neighborhood, “more than anywhere else, the Negro woman is free from the cruder handicaps of primitive household hardships and the grosser forms of sex and race subjugation. Here, she has considerable opportunity to measure her powers in the intellectual and industrial fields of the great city.” McDougald describes Harlem women working in previously impenetrably white, male fields: as probation and corrections officers, in libraries and bacteriology labs, in the garment industries and branches of the public health system. But McDougald notes, “. . . even in New York, the general attitude of mind causes the Negro woman serious difficulty. She is conscious that what is left of chivalry is not directed toward her. She realizes that the ideals of beauty, built up in the fine arts, have excluded her almost entirely.” 9
Noisy and Bold
    Letty Cottin Pogrebin graduated from Brandeis in 1959, and came to Manhattan in search of a bohemian life, settling into an apartment across the street from playwright Edward Albee. When her car was stolen, she bought a motor scooter. One of her boyfriends bought her a pet duck, whom she named “Moses,” and then, because she took to it so quickly, a pet rabbit, Buckety. In her teens and early twenties, Pogrebin worked herway up in the publicity and subsidiary rights departments of the publishing industry, eventually earning a salary that was “unheard of” for a young woman, and in charge of promoting Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl , among other best sellers.
    She was a Jewish girl from Queens whose mother had left an abusive first marriage, worked in the garment industry, and then had become a middle-class housewife before dying of cancer when Pogrebin was a teen. Yet in Manhattan, Pogrebin didn’t have to be defined by her family or personal history. She could reinvent herself, tool around with ducks and rabbits and motor scooters, have lots of sex, and move ahead in a job that allowed her to tape pill capsules to press releases for The Valley of the Dolls . “I just had the most magical sixties,” Pogrebin said of her days as a young single woman in the city. “Quite simply, I wanted to be Holly Golightly. And I felt I was doing really well at it.”
    Today, as always, women arrive in cities in search of work and money. But they also come, then stay, for the fun.
    In metropolises, women are more likely to find a deep and diverse pool of romantic and sexual prospects, and to encounter a combination of community and anonymity that unburdens them of centuries of behavioral expectations. Cities have come to stand, in the cultural imagination, for sex and excitement and power. That they draw women toward these things makes them a catalyst for women’s liberation, and for a reimagining of what it might mean for women to have full lives.
    Urban landscapes often physically force people of different classes, genders, races, and religions to mix and to meet in the public spaces that they share with each other. At the end of the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century, crammed tenements often became so fetid with disease that healthy residents exploded out of them by necessity, gathering on sidewalks, hanging out of windows and on stoops, socializing in public thoroughfares. Young people, often living with multiple generations in a single flat, sought relief from airless rooms by meeting up with each other in large groups on the Bowery.
    Kathy Peiss writes of the working-class leisure activities and marketplaces of early twentieth century New York, noting that “Streets served as the center of social life in the working-class districts . . . Lower EastSide streets teemed with sights of interest and penny pleasures: organ grinders and buskers played favorite airs, itinerant acrobats performed tricks, and baked-potato vendors, hot-corn