By FRANK CROWNINSHIELD
Social changes come quickly in America. In the nineties, for example, it was thought demeaning for a Lady to go into business in New York. The stigmata of trade were too intolerable for her to endure.
It is true that, before 1900, a few ladies had dared enter the professions, and that was shocking enough. Julie Cruger and "Pussy" Wharton were writing novels; Cora Potter and Clara Bloodgood were acting plays. Mary Cassatt and Lydia Emmet were painting pictures, while Mary Putnam, of all things and of all people, was practicing medicine.
But in 1900 a series of detonating cataclysms rent the foundations of New York society. Four ladies of birth and position suddenly, dramatically and simultaneously went into trade. "Do die" Osborn went into dressmaking; Elsie de Wolfe became an interior decorator; Kitty Gandy took up millinery, and Bessie Marbury started a Broadway dramatic agency. At the news of such goingson, the Social Register, then in its teens, shuddered and went white. Nothing since the assassination of Marie Antoinette had so threatened the fortress of Society.
For a year or so, the four brazen ladies continued to be classed as outcasts, pariahs and figures of shame. But courage was their watchword; they persisted and prospered. The result of their highly successful martyrdom was that I am now daily confronted, on Fifth and Madison Avenues, by thousands of prosperous lady milliners, lady dress designers, decorators and agents of various sorts, not to mention the ten thousand other ladies ot breeding who are scattered among the city's fashion magazines, small shops, travel bureaus, picture galleries, publishing houses, tea shops and department stores.
And-as fashions have a way of percolating downward-those four early martyrs were eventually followed by two hundred thousand other young women who were, perhaps, not exactly social in their heritages-in the sense of being recognizable in the golden horseshoe at the Metropolitan-but who were, none the less, women of intelligence, education and taste.
In short, New York has witnessed, during the past thirty-six years, the mustering of an entirely new kind of army, a host composed of a quarter of a million capable and courageous young women, who are not only successfully facing, and solving, their economic problems, but managing all the while to remain preternaturally patient, personable and polite about it.
It was in that way that Business, assisted by its handmaid Emancipation, flooded our city with a never ebbing tide of working and-frequently-solitary women. The problem of the solitary woman is, of course, infinitely more intricate than that of the solitary male. The lonely male, however unprepossessing, really has no problem. He just looks for an unattached female-usually equally unprepossessing-and goes on looking until he finds one.
One might think that the female would simply reverse the process and search assiduously for the unattached male. But it isn't as easy as that. In the first place, she mustn't appear to be looking: she is forced to go into ambush, always a complicated business. And then the lonely male is an elusive creature, once he realizes that he is being fished for. He is too shy or too cunning to be caught, or else, once hooked, he proves to be so unbelievably dreary that he has to be thrown back again.
The problem of the solitary female has, in any case, been settled with such wisdom in the following pages that I can hardly hope to add anything worth while. For instance, when I ask myself the really fundamental question - "What is a woman like when she lives alone? What are her Freudian torments, raptures, triumphs, humilties and frustrations?" - the answer could hardly be called satisfactory. I don't know.
There are solitary women whose loneliness occasionally and reluctantly inserts itself between telephone calls, coiffures, lunches, bridge parties, dinners, first nights and dances, and whose few leisure moments are presumably spent in sleep. There are solitary women (new-fashioned girls, subsisting mainly on old-fashioned cocktails) who seem only to appear at bar openings, drinking parties, and the popular night clubs, and whose solitude is undoubtedly dedicated to sobering up. There are women who hope to disperse their melancholy by inviting unwary males to dinner at little tea shops and feeding them dainty repasts chiefly composed of diced watermelon, the lesser vegetables, like the lettuce and the watercress (with a very thin mayonnaise), a prune whip and a yellow peppermint to top off with. Curiously enough, this sort of treatment is often quite effective-mostly because the women who do it are extremely feminine and appealing, or else they wouldn't dare. Then, finally, there are the women who really like to be alone.
For those rare creatures, a few suggestions have occurred to me. Hobbies, for instance. There was a time when a hobby was absolutely de rigueur, though it bore the name "accomplishment." In Victorian days, when suitors were expected to keep about two feet away, young ladies used to sew, crochet, and embroider while they were courted, and a very pretty appearance they must have made. But hobbies are anti-social now; modern men don't like to be sewn and knitted at; and the mere whisper that a girl collects prints, stamps, tropical .fish or African art is, alas, likely to increase her solitude.