Vexed in the city: Femme Failure in the World of Carrie Bradshaw and the “ Long-Winded Lady ”

Abstract

Carrie Bradshaw, heroine of HBO’s Sex and the City, remains a talking point of pop culture. Tutued flâneuse, Bradshaw succeeds a long line of unconventional, feminist pathfinders, of whom Maeve Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady is arguably an early archetype. In her New Yorker dispatches, Brennan’s semi-autobiographical ‘dandette’ enacts a repudiation of the patriarchy by staking a claim to the public space of the city. This paper traces the resistant legacy of femme failure from Brennan to Bradshaw as single, non-reproductive women. Drawing on recent femme scholarship, it further explores the concept of paradoxical visibility in the lives of these fem(me)inine icons.

Introduction

In a mid-season episode of HBO’s hit “dramedy” Sex and the City, Carrie Bradshaw is pictured sitting alone by the pool of her Los Angeles hotel. An out-of-towner in LA, she frequently runs afoul of the local smoking ban, which fails to strike a chord with her hardened New York sensibilities. Approached by an attractive stranger about her own age, she quickly stubs out a half-smoked cigarette (a reflex from the many admonishments she has already suffered that day). Yet, instead of reproaching her, he asks if she would like “some company” (Coles, 2000). She gives a faint, negatory shrug. Rephrasing, he asks, “Are you sure you want to be left alone?” to which she replies, “I am”; adding by way of voice-over narration, “As soon as I said it out loud, I knew that that was just what I wanted, and needed” (Coles, 2000). With those few words, Bradshaw makes the audacious choice to remain alone in a public space, a privilege that, according to Ortberg is exceedingly “rare for women throughout human history” (2015). “A woman alone is a beautiful thing” (2015), Ortberg opines, and indeed Bradshaw’s response can be seen as an act of self-validation and a repudiation––however temporary––of the male gaze.

This seemingly trivial gesture unites Bradshaw with a line of unconventional, feminist pathfinders who inhabited the twentieth-century urban milieu, of whom Maeve Brennan’s peripatetic flâneuse the “Long-Winded Lady” is a notable archetype. Indeed, both characters share a similar genesis: Bradshaw was conceived in the mid-90s by writer Candace Bushnell for a humorous column she produced on dating and friendship for The New York Observer, while Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady emerged through a series of mock correspondences that ran in The New Yorker throughout the 1950s and 60s on the ways and means of negotiating the city as a quintessentially voguish Manhattanite.

While the social mores of Brennan’s New York at mid-century were a far cry from the libertine culture that pervades Sex and the City, it is nevertheless important to consider the resistant legacy of femme failure (i.e., “the failure [or refusal] to reproduce patriarchal feminine norms” Hoskin and Taylor, 2019: 285). Arguably, Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady exemplify femme failure as non-reproductive cis-hetero women, alongside forerunners Dorothy Parker, Edna St Vincent Millay, and (across the Atlantic) archetypal “street haunter” Virginia Woolf (Elkin, 2016: 86).

In this article, I conceive both Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady––Brennan’s real-life approximation––as Femmes. Femme theory (Dawson, 2018; Hemmings, 1999; Hoskin, 2017; Schwartz, 2018a; Hoskin, 2021) allows for creative engagement with systems of heteropatriarchal oppression, by challenging established gender paradigms that equate femininity with weakness, powerlessness, and frailty. Specifically, I build upon the concept of femme failure as the simultaneous occurrence of personal growth, or private accomplishment, as a consequence of a public failure to conform to normative standards (Halberstam, 2011; Scott, 2021). I argue that, in staking a claim to the public space of the city, as both protagonists do, Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady achieve a level of public visibility quite at odds with their status as single, childfree women, who necessarily fail by the standards of patriarchal femininity to which they otherwise adhere. In failing to embody the reproductive element(s) of idealised womanhood and through their paradoxical visibility (i.e., the concurrence of power and powerlessness, of “hypervisibility and invisibility;” Scott, 2021; Story, 2017: 408), a fem(me)inising of (public) space becomes possible, which Hoskin & Taylor theorise as, “[a] conceptual space to critique and resist such [patriarchal] norms” (2019: 284). Using femme theory and femme failure then, I examine the adjacent patterns of feminine knowledge production, the feminising of public space, and non-reproductivity to explore the ways that both protagonists conformed to a version of fem(me)ininity that nevertheless occurred under essentially different social conditions.

Whilst the Long-Winded Lady arguably paved the way for Bradshaw’s own version of heteropatriarchal disruption, refracted through a post-feminist lens, there appears to be a sense of inexorable regression in Sex and the City (Hoskin, 2017b: 99) suggested by the characters’ “disorderly behaviour” (Greer, 1999: 12) and their unfettered personal consumption. Despite the self-fashioning bodily agency exhibited by the show’s white, middle-class, heterosexual heroines, the kind of liberation they achieve ultimately emerges as rigidly delimited. Drawing on Femme scholarship, this article explores the concept of femme failure in the lives of two late-twentieth-century fem(me)inine icons by assessing the analogous versions of singleness they experienced as women in the urban sphere. ¹

Femme theory

Given the degree of normativity to which both characters outwardly conform—white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual—it may seem counterintuitive to pursue this analysis through a critical framework originally conceived by “working-class lesbian communities of the 1950s” (Schwartz, 2018b: 70/71). Despite the limits of its inceptive ambit, femme theory has become a broad church applied to women, men, and nonbinary people, queer and straight, who engage with the politics of femininity through their “values and style” (Schwartz, 2018a). They do so in order to problematise patriarchal femininity: paradigms of normative feminine behaviour (submission, seductiveness, and invisibility) that serve the ends of the patriarchy before, or indeed instead of, the fem(me)inine body itself (Hoskin, 2021: 10).

Femme theory has been reimagined in recent decades as a compliment and response to the perceived limitations of Queer Theory. Femme theory’s ability to “mobilise and problematise [queer theory]” (Dawson, 2018: 85) is instructive in the formation of “queer femme temporalities,” which are themselves a response to, and a reaction against, such perceived “unqueer” movements as “the normalisation of gay lives” (2018: 89). Here, the term “unqueer” emphasises “traditional family structures and the future [––] the ‘biological clock’, martyrdom and the daily routine” (2018: 85)––over non-normative, fem(me)inine “multiplicities” that subvert the hackneyed clichés of feminine “vulnerability,” messiness, and frailty (Kafai, 2021: 182; Dawson, 2018: 85; Hoskin and Taylor, 2019: 294; Hoskin, 2021: 10). ²

If Queer theory as such has come to represent what may be considered normative, perhaps even a hegemonic queer logic, Femme purports to incorporate the invisibilised, non-conforming queer elements that include the disabled, the “ugly” (Schwartz, 2018b: 72), and the often obscured cohort of lesbians who adopt feminine practices “that [are] not aimed at men” (Hoskin, 2021: 3). Indeed, femme theory has come to include those “unapologetically sexual straight women” (Hoskin, 2017b: 99) who themselves initiate the fem(me)inine gaze, asserting, “I am looked at, but I can also look” (Varda quoted in Elkin, 2016: 242). Today, femme theory “is not tied to any specific sex or sexual orientation” (Schwartz, 2018a, para. 1). Rather, “femme refers to […] deviations from patriarchal norms of femininity” (Hoskin, 2021: 10), allowing for the possibility of a more expansive, more inclusive alternative, less embedded in masculine ways of knowing than its Queer counterpart.

Inhabiting the margins of urban space, Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady belong to a neglected fem(me)inist tradition of “informal, feminized forms of knowledge,” which continues to be subordinated to the “masculinized, scientific […] knowledge” of hegemonic academia (Brightwell and Taylor, 2021: 20–21). By disavowing objective, “hard-hitting” journalism in favour of experiential, subjective life-writing, femmes enacts a subtle form of resistance to (hetero-)patriarchal normativity. Femmes challenge the “god-trick” of omitting the speaking ‘I’ which repudiates the typically feminine “personal narrative” as a “rich [site] of knowledge and cultural production” (Brightwell and Taylor, 2021: 21; Hoskin, 2021: 6). ³ The disparity within gendered knowledge production obscures and often excludes women’s narrative voice, which Walter describes as, “the chief lens through which explorations of women’s experiences [are] viewed” (2013: 37). It is this intimacy, moreover, and the modest confidence of the fem(me)inine register in which they wrote, that characterise Bradshaw’s confessions and the Long-Winded Lady’s journalistic vignettes. Written as “a parody of ‘girl talk’” or doublespeak, such vignettes allowed for the conveyance of what Brennan’s biographer sees as “highly subversive messages” (Bourke, 2004: 189). Through the lens of the protagonists’ personal experiences––of singlehood, childfree-ness, and the urban sphere––readers are offered insights into such unsanctioned modes of fem(me)ininity, which they, too, might replicate.

Maeve Brennan and the “Long-Winded Lady”

While it is reasonably safe to assume that most readers will have heard of Sex and the City and/or its chief protagonist Bradshaw, less safe is the assumption that readers will be familiar with the writer Maeve Brennan. An Irish-American who died only a few short years before Sex and the City’s first airing, Brennan may be viewed in very specific terms as a real-life approximation of the (semi-)fictitious Bradshaw. Brennan became a staff writer at the pre-eminent New Yorker magazine in 1949. There, from the mid-1950s, she produced a series of wry commentaries under the playful pseudonym “the Long-Winded Lady,” offering readers a uniquely feminine perspective on life in the “half-capsized” metropolis (Brennan, 2016: 1). Initially promoted as fashion and lifestyle advice for The New Yorker’s now majority-female readership, the earliest missives from the Long-Winded Lady concern the purchase of a fur collar, and an earthenware teapot. Such seemingly trivial reflections, however, can be sublimated to greater, more complex meaning; as Bourke writes, “highly subversive messages can be passed in safety if the words appear sufficiently frivolous” (2004: 189). Even stories such as these concerning minor retail misadventures serve as, “pointed commentar[ies] on the way[s] men and women respectively [pay] attention to what women say” (Bourke, 2004: 189). While patriarchal femininity––ever-“synonymous with infantilization”––encourages “weak,” “vulnerable,” “childish,” and “immature” character traits (Hoskin, 2017a: 7), the Long-Winded Lady’s character bespoke confidence, pragmatism, shrewdness, and a prodigious capacity for astutely reading the zeitgeist.

At a time when a “particularly virulent form of the ‘feminine mystique’” persisted (Bartky, 1990: 13), the scale of Brennan’s achievement in gaining access to an audience that numbered in the millions was “more daring than it looked, for she was unique in making a woman’s voice heard regularly in that forum” (Bourke, 2004: 190). Indeed, an early episode (March 1955) concerning a visit to the beauty parlour already sees the Long-Winded Lady probing the limits of her ciphered speech, transcending the outward trivialities of the middle-brow magazines she sits reading while having her thrice-yearly “permanent wave” (Brennan and McKelway, 1955: 23). A subtle indictment of the neuroticism of domesticity and the interiority of women’s lives, she writes of a clock that, if not carefully circumscribed by bevelled glass, might otherwise torment the already-harried housewife whose every action it governs: “With a rounded half globe of thick glass for a face, it’s a clock that doesn’t sit incessantly telling you the time [but] tells you the time when you ask for it” (Brennan and McKelway, 1955: 23).

Appearing in “The Talk of the Town,” the magazine’s flagship section, Brennan’s contributions remained strictly anonymous. Through the careful suppression of facts, the Long-Winded Lady could be made to appear as a model of the kind of patriarchal feminine standards expected of women, trapped in the gilded cages of their suburban homes (Yagoda, 2000: 336–337; Keyser, 2011: 8; Traister, 2016: 64). The reality of Brennan’s singledom was carefully and consciously elided from the version of the author promulgated as the Long-Winded Lady; for instance, the numerous liaisons she likely enjoyed (or, perhaps, endured) with her male colleagues, her childlessness and occasional homelessness, the series of breakdowns she suffered later in life, and the extent of her success at what was perhaps the most celebrated magazine in the world at the time.

For all these omissions, what remains of the at-times threadbare narratives is no less powerful, no less daring. In many of her missives, “self-fashioning and the cultivation of personal style [take] on an altogether positive value” (McWilliams, 2016: 43), which would be repeated and reimagined through the “post-feminist ‘self-fashioning’ associated with [Sex and the City]” 40 years later (Nash and Grant, 2015: 987). Indeed, both Bradshaw and Brennan were transients, making of Manhattan their adoptive home. Both practiced rigorous self-fashioning, in habit and appearance. The two shared a degree of proficiency in the worlds of fashion and journalism, embracing flâneuserie, (i.e., the art of walking in urban places) to stake a claim to the city, thereby enacting a fem(me)inisation of public space. As flâneuses, both protagonists embody paradoxical visibility within the city sphere, which retains the capacity to elevate or eliminate the single woman through a dialectic of urban visibility/anonymity. At once invisibilised and hypervisibilised, she is subject(ed) to the geographies of gender and racial division (Blunt and Rose, 1994: 4; Scott, 2021; Story, 2017). Yet, as the city proscribes femininity the flâneuse, in turn, inscribes her resistance through personal narrative accounts that are themselves an inscription of narrative space.

While Hemmings (1999) disputes the possibility of the femme-as-flâneur—citing the femme’s very contingency upon the masculine gaze as conflicting with the necessary autonomy of flânerie—the distinct, and distinctly feminine flâneuse is “not merely a female flaneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own” (Elkin, 2016: 22). Unlike the passante – the one “who passes by, as well as the one who passes” (Hemmings 1999: 459)—the flâneuse is not negated outside of the “exchange of masculine–feminine gazes” (Hemmings, 1999: 459), but persists seen and unseen, herself initiating the fem(me)inine gaze while insisting, “I am looked at, but I can also look” (Varda quoted in Elkin, 2016: 242). The flâneuse’s viability is self-determined, in defiance of, and in the absence of any “masculine presence” (Hemmings, 1999: 458). And it is this ability to subvert the contingency of feminine presence which connects Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady as flâneuses and as archetypal fem(me)inine pathfinders.

Through her flâneuserie, her “aimless” strolling through the city, the Long-Winded Lady recorded a series of impressions, or what she termed “moments of recognition” (Brennan, 2016: 3). Like Charles Meryon’s Nineteenth-century etchings of a Paris that would soon be irrevocably remade under Haussmann, these “moments” consciously capture the minutiae of New York City in the teeth of an urban renewal that would transform its neighbourhoods into freeways, and its low-rise, vernacular homes into faceless “office space” (Buck-Morss, 1991: 96). ⁴ Indeed, the depth of social consciousness that underlay much of the narrative gloss in the Long-Winded Lady’s journalistic missives touched upon a variety of issues that would later preoccupy fictional columnist Bradshaw. Like Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady, Bradshaw would also become synonymous with the cultivation of style and self-fashioning, women’s persistent objectification (and occasional subjectification), and the enquiry into appropriate (and safe) spaces for single women in the urban metropolis.

Single, childfree and suspect

For the single, childfree or non-reproductive woman, ascriptions of “deficit or deviance” have long persisted (Simpson, 2016: 386). At odds with normative femininity—“bound up with marriage and motherhood” as it is (Simpson, 2016: 386)—women who find themselves without the sine qua non of “conventional family arrangement[s]” (Reynolds et al., 2007: 333) continue to be stigmatised. They struggle for accurate, impartial representation in the media, which often portrays them as a kind of lived illegitimacy (Simpson, 2016: 397); like Bradshaw and her friends in Sex and the City, they grapple with the “desire to ‘unsingle’ themselves” (Simpson, 2016: 386). Indeed, within a culture of persistent and insistent “pronatalist” discourse (Gillespie, 2003: 124), there is a sense that the single woman continues to be “called upon to explain [her] status” (Simpson, 2016: 391). She is conspicuous, or paradoxically visible, precisely for her inability to embody the reproductive and/or nuptial elements of normative, idealised womanhood. Thus rendered suspect, Bradshaw and Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady nevertheless achieved a very public form of failure that presents a challenge to hegemonic authority and offers a counternarrative to prevailing narratives of conventional womanhood.

One early episode of Sex and the City (“The Baby Shower”), depicts Bradshaw making a (reluctant) visit to an old friend, Laney Berlin, now ensconced in suburbia. Turning onto an imposing, tree-lined avenue, she remarks, “I was struck by how a place so filled with nature could look so unnatural” (Seidelman, 1998). Later, surrounded by young mothers who appear both manic and hostile, she confesses: “I had to escape. The party had turned into a preview; a preview of a life I didn’t know if I was ready for” (Seidelman, 1998). The unsubtle implication is that motherhood and its retreat to suburbia is less a question of if but when. What follows the bewildering trials of free-agency––women’s single life, which appears at once a blessing and burden––is the inevitable sacrifice of that agency in the transition from singledom to marriage and children, or what might be termed mater-dom. Indeed, such are the discrepant attitudes evinced over the course of the series by its four protagonists to the conditions of singleness and maternity, that it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty whether the show’s attitude to childfree, single women was radical or downright hostile.

Later in the same episode, when Laney tries but fails to relive the hedonism of her latterly relinquished youth (flashing her breasts, she finds, is not easily done in a maternity support vest), she confesses, “Nobody told me that was gonna happen. I mean somebody should warn you: one day, you’re gonna wake up, and you’re not gonna recognise yourself” (Seidelman, 1998). In fact, Laney’s admission—part-lament and part-admonition—precipitates the first of many ambiguities to occur across the six-season run, including a missed period that forces Bradshaw to confront the possibility of that same obliteration of self. Congruously, we see her spend “the entire […] day, sitting at a park bench watching children play” (Seidelman, 1998). “If I had to,” she reflects, “could I do this? Would I be any good? Would I somehow manage to stay me?” (Seidelman, 1998). The question is a bold, even dangerous one. Bradshaw is made to confront a kind of internalised misogyny via “femmephobia”––a “policing or devaluation” of her own fem(me)inine agency (Hoskin, 2017a: 3) and a corollary of the systems of patriarchal femininity, which actively subjugate the unruly or non-conforming fem(me)inine subject. Perhaps bolder still: when asked why she is willing to sacrifice motherhood for a commitment to a man she “hardly know[s],” Bradshaw rejoins, “Why should I give up a man for a baby I hardly know I want?” (Engler, 2004).

Bradshaw’s questioning and possible rejection of a crucial stage in the “dominant coupledom narrative” (Reynolds et al., 2007: 333) suggests an important albeit subtle advance in media depictions of women’s (bodily) autonomy (Lotz, 2001: 108). Yet, the mere expression of doubt, it seems, necessitates an immediate and countervailing concession to maternity. As she sits alone on the bench, a characteristically winsome little girl approaches and Bradshaw is instantly charmed. Despite her obvious reticence—and the episode’s arguably jaundiced portrayal of motherhood as an alienating force—Bradshaw is ultimately made to appear innately nurturing, motherly; in short, non-threatening. In this instance, she treads the indistinct line between conformity to, and dissent from, normative feminine values.

Women who choose to remain childfree must confront “entrenched […] industrial, urban, and rural” attitudes to motherhood that portray their choice as both “deviant [and] unfeminine” (Gillespie 2003: 122,124). As a non-reproductive woman, Brennan too experienced a form of erasure that positioned her outside of cherished ideals of “happy and conventional family arrangement[s]” (Reynolds et al., 2007: 333). Unhappy, unconventional, and inefficient, the non-reproductive woman becomes the essence of the “Namenlose,” (i.e., the woman “without a name, without an essence […] without identity […] without a soul” (Buci-Glucksmann, 1994: 115) and at heart merely the suspect product of the (named) male desires that shape her. ⁵

If, however, by the late 1990s, Bradshaw’s celebration of individualism can be seen as having partially reclaimed that visibility denied Brennan/the Long-Winded Lady, it does so through the distinctly “heteronormative, white, privileged lens” of post-feminism (Nash and Grant, 2015: 978). Rejecting orthodox feminist ideals as “out-dated common sense” (Whelehan quoted in Nash and Grant, 2015: 978), post-feminism seeks to “[redefine] oppression and structural disadvantage as personal suffering while reframing success as an individual accomplishment” (Genz, 2006: 343). Bradshaw’s singularly individualistic focus engenders a form of self-fashioning, or “active consumption” (Genz, 2006: 343), which “valorizes” (Lebovic, 2019: 118) feminine (self-)empowerment through the capacity to spend, whilst renewing/refashioning her self-image in the (false) colours of success. Fashion, writes Lebovic, “reveals not only who has power but who lacks it; who represents the dominant society and who is defying that dominance” (2019: 117). In the mid-1950s, Brennan’s “uniform” little black dress—a constant in the face of fashion’s endless cycles of renewal—became her Baudelairean “livery of grief […] for an age in mourning” (Yazan, 2012: 104); her stand against the ravages of urban renewal, if not modernity itself. ⁶ Yet, as the archetypal post-feminist subject, “white, economically successful, young, attractive[,] (hetero)sexual” (Nash and Grant, 2015: 981), Bradshaw arguably enjoyed the balance of what power there was to be had––notwithstanding fashion’s ability “to reduce women to objects, rather than enabling their full humanity” (Wolfendale and Kennett, 2011: x).

There is an important distinction to be made here between the subjection of white, middle- and upper-class women to the ideal of womanhood as both domestic(ated) and maternal, and that of black and brown women. It was typically women of colour who provided the low-paid, unskilled labour that made possible the personal freedoms enjoyed by these pioneering women, by freeing them from the strictures of family- and home-life. As Traister writes, “the actual scrubbing of the hearth was often done by poorer women, immigrants, and African-Americans who were in no economic position to depart the work force and attend to the cleaning and uplift of their own homes” (2016: 180). The gains achieved by second-wave feminists in the latter half of the 20th century overwhelmingly benefitted women who looked and lived like Bradshaw and Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady. By contrast, women of colour undertook the preponderance of the menial, domestic work upon which many such gains were founded (often, indeed, on pain of being dubbed “welfare queens”; Bartky, 1990: 13; Traister, 2016: 180). ⁷

Self-fashioning

Bradshaw possessed the ability to adapt her look to a particular mood, hers or the city’s. Indeed, she “looks like her cherished New York, which forms its elusive and potentially ever-evolving character of the disparate elements that compose it” (Doudaki 2012: 15). In a similar fashion, the Long-Winded Lady used style “as a deeply meaningful form of creative expression and an important channel of personal agency” (McWilliams, 2016: 52). In “A Shoe Story,” Brennan’s narrator accidentally breaks her heel while crossing Park Avenue. Furious, she decides to take a cab to the store that sold her the shoes, but stops short with the thought, “I realized that I could make a much more effective stand […] if I walked in in a pair of brand-new, expensive shoes from some other shop” (Brennan, 2016: 27). That other shop, we learn, is Bergdorf Goodman, a luxury department store also favoured by Bradshaw whose self-professed addiction to shoes––by season four, she has already spent $40,000 on footwear (Doudaki, 2012: 13)––is (exc)used as a means of reinforcing her strength of personal image. A fetish symbol of desire, the shoe becomes a palliative for Bradshaw’s habitual boredom (read: alienation), and a surrogate for the string of sexual/romantic disappointments she experiences throughout the series. Indeed, one season-four episode famously sees her greet a pair of shoes with the epithet, “Oh, hello, lover” (Coolidge, 2002).

Both protagonists experience paradoxical visibility by wearing high-heel shoes. Indeed, Scott (2021) contends that the hazards of walking in stilettoes on cobbled university campuses (i.e., the pain of wearing them and suffering their daily imposition of immobility), are counterbalanced by the sense of power they give her, and the sense of authority that their “click-clack” sound instils in her waiting students, as she makes her way along the corridor. Scott writes: “The experience of wearing high heels while wielding the power of wearing them, illustrates that the powerfulness of femininity does not exist without powerlessness” (2021: 6). Within this paradigm of patriarchal femininity, both Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady experience a similar paradox whereby the shoes that spotlight them, affording them a visibility that obscures perceived feminine subordination, coincidently threatens to marginalise, or invisibilise them. They are literally impoverished by the objects that expose them to the hazards of physical pain and social opprobrium. ⁸

The Long-Winded Lady substitutes the (apparent) absence of any inherent feminine authority with the bogus authority of fashion itself; her “new, expensive shoes” conferring a sense of agency in the decision to buy, and the ability to purchase. This, in turn, leads to an empowered/disempowered dichotomy that extends to both characters’ relationship to the city—a space at once inimical to, and a validation of, their very existence. Single and childfree, Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady undertake a fem(me)inisation of the urban environment by (physically) inhabiting it, and by reproducing/reconstituting it in a distinctly fem(me)inine register.

Romancing the city

Despite persistent claims that women’s fear of cities outweigh that of men’s (Spain, 2014: 588), Wilson holds that “industrial life still drew [women] into public [space], and they have survived and flourished in the interstices of the city” (1992: 8). In the mid-twentieth century, the Long-Winded Lady used the city for both play and protection. Like George Sand before her, Brennan passed through unnoticed—“an atom lost in [the] immense crowd” (quoted in Elkin, 2016: 109)—acquiring the “invisible presence” expected of all early flâneuses “in the urban public space-place” (Kreuiter, 2015: 5). Although throughout the series Bradshaw remains suspect––repeatedly forced to justify her decisions to eschew motherhood and, to a lesser extent, conventional monogamy––she is arguably free to advertise her unorthodoxy, if only irresolutely so. ⁹ In “They Shoot Single People, Don’t They?”, Bradshaw refuses sex with a stranger as a way of validating or even expiating her singlehood. At the close of the episode, she confesses: “I decided instead of running away from the idea of a life alone, I had better sit down and take that fear to lunch” (Coles, 1999). When the waiter asks if she is waiting for someone, Bradshaw replies, “It’s just me,” concluding: “So, I sat there and had a glass of wine alone. No books, no man, no friends, no armour, no faking” (Coles, 1999). The inference that Bradshaw’s actions are otherwise governed by the “armour” and “faking” so singularly absent here, perhaps reveals the extent of her internalised misogyny. Yet, once again, the refusal to conform, the failure here, offers transformative potentialities—however slight. If, in the 1950s and ‘60s, the Long-Winded Lady felt the need to observe the “hurly-burly” of city life from a secluded place (Jacobs, 2011: xv) above the margins of her book, through the diner window, beyond the restaurant terrace, Bradshaw’s greater visibility arguably marks a small but noteworthy departure in the public life of the single woman in the metropolis.

By shifting the image of the woman alone—Ortberg’s “beautiful thing” (2015)—from the confines of home to the urban terrace, it undergoes a subtle sublimation from disempowered to empowered. From a femme perspective, the shift to the public arena presents a challenge to normative patriarchal ideals. In fact, women’s complex interplay with the city has arguably led to a “radical, progressive revision” (Traister, 2016: 87) of marriage and domesticity. With its “walkable access to multiple entertainments, [to] trains and subways and buses and trolleys that can get you to jobs and friends and family cheaply” (2016: 87), the city arguably obviates the need for traditional partnerships, serving as surrogate spouse, and as Bradshaw says, “sometimes, [even] true love” (2016: 87).

In season five (“Anchors Away”), she says of New York: it is “dismissive and abusive, and it [makes] me feel desperate” (McDougall, 2002). Yet, minutes later she avows, “If […] you only get one great love, New York may just be mine” (McDougall, 2002). Bradshaw’s wilfulness/willingness to romance the city, personified here as a tempestuous lover—even to pit its constancy against that of traditional relationships—is evident throughout the series. In season two (“The Caste System”), she admits, “It’s easy for me to say ‘I love you, New York’. It’s not so easy to say ‘I love you, Mr. Big’” (Anders, 1999). And again in “The Freak Show”: “Somewhere out there is another little freak, who’ll love [and] understand us [….] And in the meantime, we always have Manhattan” (Coulter, 1999b). By romancing the city, which is to say the city as substitute for the normative institutions of marriage, motherhood, and/or domesticity, Bradshaw effects a fem(me)inisation of urban space that subverts the patriarchal order—social and civic.

The Long-Winded Lady’s occasional panegyrics on the city involved similarly romantic imagery. Literally feminised, Brennan’s New York is almost human in its idiosyncrasies. “New York City,” she writes in “The Ailanthus, Our Back-Yard Tree,” “is very big and […] has no heart. She is not charming. She is not sympathetic. She is rushed and noisy and unkempt.” Yet, Brennan concludes,

“New York City does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realise why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why” (Brennan, 2016: 141-142).

In defiance of the sometimes-inimical metropolis—the city that invisiblised and distrusted them by turns—Bradshaw and the Long-Winded Lady find a solace in its crowded streets and avenues. By staking a claim to urban space, and plunging therein, they experience a kind of paradoxical visibility, and a sense of emancipation which, the narratives imply, is harder to come by within the strictures of normative attachment.

Conclusion

Bradshaw and Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady maintained an ambiguous relationship to urban space. Single and childfree, they enjoyed paradoxical visibility as the city that thwarted and bedevilled them became the stage for their flâneuserie, and a site of transformative, resistant potential. By offering an alternative to patriarchal femininity, and by failing to satisfy the demands of patriarchal femininity, these fem(me)inist pathfinders carved out a space of critical resistance through which a fem(me)inising of public space became possible. It was precisely their inability to embody the passive model of femininity, indeed their failure to remain invisible, that made possible new, fem(me)inine ways of being; new ways of living outside the norms of patriarchal hegemony.

The Long-Winded Lady’s missives are at their most powerful when they speak of “survival and of ordinary things” (Brennan, 2016: 141). Likewise, Bradshaw’s accounts of urban, single life are rooted in the ordinary ways of survival, as unremarkable as they are remarkable by their very improbability in the muted history of women in urban spaces. Certainly, there are obvious disparities here: if the Long-Winded Lady could be seen to have railed against the inequities of the urban reconfigurations she witnessed at mid-century, Bradshaw, in the late 1990s, has apparently made peace with the New York she inherits. For one thing, it is comparatively less antagonistic to her life as a single woman; for another, she is rich—and white—enough to afford a privileged existence in the resolutely chic Lower-East Side. While the deliverance of normative attachments was not manifestly within the purview of the Long-Winded Lady (nor of Brennan), Bradshaw persists with the infrangible conviction that, sooner or later, she will secure a man to deliver her from her (already-privileged) lonely straits. Conceivably, the entire series is a caution against the perils of being “left on the shelf.” Partnering is a must, the narrative goes (unless you want to get eaten by your cat), ¹⁰ but children—though an admirable and natural aspiration—are no longer obligatory. The shift in the narrative, though slight, is no less audacious for all that.

Despite her regressive individualism, and her post-feminist co-option of commodity fetishism, Bradshaw belongs to a vast cohort of “ordinary practitioners” of city living (de Certeau, 2011: 93). And, it is precisely in that ordinary, “daily life, looking around for restaurants and shops and for a place to live” (Brennan, 2016: 141) that she usurps convention, and exceeds normative authority by aligning herself with Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady, and a longer, still-more-important lineage of single fem(me)inine women failing, surviving, struggling, and thriving in the city.