There's no shame in being single: when it comes to being a bachelor girl, women have long been stuck with a stigma. Author Betsy Israel explains how to defy it. (On My Mind).(Brief Article)

It seems that everywhere yon look these days, there are loud, insistent images of single women. Movies and TV are filled with intriguing singular icons: Bridget Jones, Ally McBeal, and the Sex and the City foursome--all of them beautiful, sexy smart, and accomplished (or in Bridget's case, trying hard). The news media relentlessly covers the woes of their real-life counterparts. But now and then, it's hard not to wonder: Why all this extreme attention to single women? And why is no one ever quite so fascinated by single men?

While researching my book Bachelor Girl, I discovered that single women have always been the targets of intense public scrutiny. Throughout the 19th century, unwed women of only 25--and sometimes 23!--were dubbed spinsters, female rejects doomed to "dry, shrivel, and fade," as one novelist put it. According to a U.S. senator in 1883, "The woman who fails at the supreme female task of marriage fails at life. She is both a bizarre curiosity and ... a danger. She threatens the very fabric of our society." Single men, of course, did not threaten anyone; they were heroes--homesteading pioneers, not to mention successful novelists and senators.

This stigma continued through the 20th century, particularly after World War II and into the 1950s, when a woman's place was definitely at home tending to her husband. But even as late as the 1990s, single women were being portrayed as sorry losers. In 1991, an article appeared in The Washington Post (written by a man) that began: "I shall invent a woman." And he did--a lawyer named Alice, who had a good salary, was fairly attractive, and at 30, was still unwed. It was "dawning on Alice that she [might] never get married.... Alice is tired of celebrating the milestones of others. Sometimes her life is a wearying round of parties and weddings, showers and more parties. She is asked to celebrate what she is coming to see as reminders of her own failure: the engagements, weddings, and ...