“Women Without Men”: Look Magazine Surveys Single Women

Background: The 1950s saw an ideal, perpetuated in books, magazines, movies, television, songs, and ads, that depicted the white, middle-class woman who could be fulfilled only by a happy marriage. In the following article from a popular magazine of 1960, journalist Eleanor Harris offered a sociological survey of the more than one-third of adult American women whose lives did not fit the domestic norm. Harris detailed the “frenzied” mating efforts of women who have tried, but failed, to marry, as well as the adverse psychological effects of being single.

. . . a little more than one third of the 62,827,000 women in the United States are getting along without steady male companionship. How do they adjust to this fact of life? How do they like their manless lot? What do they do about changing it? Do they want to change it?

To find the answers to these questions, I have interviewed scores of widows, divorced women, bachelor girls, men, gynecologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, managers of women’s hotels, executives of women’s organizations and Government statisticians.

1. Despite the assumption by many males that women cease looking for sex, men and marriage after the age of 50, the fact is that, as one gynecologist put it, “they remain interested in all these things until cremation.”

2. Many unattached women of “nice” background are as much drawn to sexual relations with men as married women are, or perhaps more so; relentlessly, they go about most of their lives trying to find sexual fulfillment. . . .

Almost to a woman, those I interviewed said the same thing: “I have only one problem. I would like to be married, but I find it impossible to meet eligible men no matter how I try—and nobody can say I don’t try. . . .”

In general, the married women are dissatisfied with their marriages. “The problems of the single, divorced and widowed women are more difficult,” an experienced psychiatrist says. “But probably a common denominator in this group is that they feel they are not getting much out of life—not accomplishing as much as they are capable of. This holds for their jobs, studies, social activities, any area of their lives—a general dissatisfaction applies to all of them.” He adds, “In the younger age group, the dominating symptom among the unmarried is likely to be anxiety; in later years, it’s depression.”

However depressed they may be, most of them continue the frenzied man hunt.

Source: Eleanor Harris, “Women Without Men,” Look, 5 July 1960, 43–46.