MARCH 9, 2020 PART I: OLGA DREXEL DAHLGREN AND THE BACHELOR GIRLS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER

Part I – Olga Drexel Dahlgren and the Bachelor Girls
by Doug Capra © 2020

March 9, 2020

ABOVE – Olga Drexel Dahlgren, 1926. Photo by Edward Steichen. Photo Source.

BELOW – From the March 20, 1898 Chicago Tribune.

JUST ABOUT A GENERATION

The difference between an “old maid” and a “bachelor girl,” dear nephew, is

 just about a generation.

         March 25, 1921 Baltimore Evening Sun

The bachelor girl of the present day…earns a good salary, is financially independent and is respected by all. No stigma attaches to her state of single blessedness. I’m rather inclined to think that many of the married women regard her with envious eyes and wish they had her money and her freedom!

         Nov. 12, 1914 in the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger

While researching Rockwell Kent’s life during the mid-1920’s, I stumbled upon two interesting topics – a person, and a change in social mores. The person is Olga Drexel Dahlgren (1898-1969) with whom Rockwell Kent had a mysterious relationship. I have found no definitive evidence their connection was sexual in nature, but there is some of Rockwell’s erotic art involved. Olga came from a large family of wealth and social status. As I’ll show later, she may have known Kent’s first wife, Kathleen, and was a friend of his second wife, Frances. At the time of her association with Rockwell, Olga is living in her own apartment in NYC. In later years she lives with a partner, a female friend. I first found the mention of Olga in the writings of Rockwell Kent scholars Jake Milgram Wien and Don Roberts.

The social change is the emergence and evolution of what was called the “Bachelor Girl.” Is Olga one of these Bachelor Girls?  And how is all this connected to the life Kent is living during the 1920s? The “Bachelor Girl” is not unknown among scholars, though the story has mostly been lost to history. I first read of it in Christine Stansell’s American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a  New Century (2009). It appears that the term Bachelor Girl eventually morphed into the idea of the “flapper.” If you google “Bachelor Girl” you’ll find – after sloshing through all the bachelor reality TV shows sites – a reference to a novel published in 1922, La Garconne (The Bachelor Girl) by Victor Marqueritte. The title could also translate as The Tomboy. The novel scandalized many enough to lose its author his Legion of Honor status because it portrayed a lifestyle for women open to free love and with multiple partners.

By the time the book came out, the Bachelor Girl was already well established in the U.S. among the wealthy upper class. After World War I, and when women got the vote in 1920, a version of the lifestyle seems to have evolved to include middle and working class young women as well.

How can we define the Bachelor Girl of the 1920’s? One method I’ve learned to solve this kind of complex question is to seek out newspaper advice columns. Dear Aunt Ada, one such column begins (in the March 25, 1921 Baltimore Evening Sun), and continues: I have noticed in various places and at various times the term “bachelor girl” used. It would please me very much if you would explain to me the difference between a “bachelor girl” and an “old maid.” Your nephew, E.S.

Here’s the response: The difference between an “old maid” and a “bachelor girl,” dear nephew, is just about a generation. Time was when to be an “old maid” was considered almost a disgrace and girls trained from infancy to take this view grew up with the idea that it was either marry or be objects of pity and often derision. With no other possible future in view, they naturally paid small attention to the world at large, but spent their youth in planning and dreaming of the time when the right man would come along and save them from the drab alternative. However, times have changed and the average girl of today, while usually quite ready to greet “Mr. Right” when he arrives on the scene, is, as a rule, so interested in current events and so very busy most of the time that she has little time for dreaming. If it is ordained that she shall live a life of single blessedness, there are so many interesting things to do and see and usually so much to occupy her time and thoughts, that she goes on her way rejoicing and, not infrequently when she meets with married women who were friends of her youth, she even congratulates herself on her bachelor existence. Taking into consideration the change in the past generation, it looks as though the man of today has got to be pretty wide awake if he wishes to make the life of a “bachelor girl” look less attractive.

There are a few somewhat obscure references to bachelor girls in early 1880s newspapers, but by about 1889 I begin to find the lifestyle common enough to be noticed. These female bachelors are young and come from wealth, so they can afford to flaunt some social conventions and strike out on their own. They refuse to morph into old maids and will not accept the loveless, subjugation of common upper class marriages often required among the elite. They want the kind of freedom they won’t get under a husband’s rule.

ABOVE – A portion of an article from the Aug. 4, 1889 St. Louis Post-Dispatch

BELOW – A portion of an article from the Dec. 12, 1889 Buffalo Times.

Olga Drexel Dahlgren came from an extremely wealthy and socially prominent Roman Catholic family, and in 1912 her parents went through a very public and scandalous divorce. Olga was 14-years-old at the time. She had five sisters and two brothers, and the newspaper society pages covered the Drexel Dahlgren’s extensively through about 1920 – especially the girls as they entered society and became eligible for marriage.

Rockwell and Olga probably meet about 1925-26, soon after he obtains a divorce from Kathleen and marries Frances. Although there may have been no romantic involvement between Rockwell and Olga, that didn't stop Kent. As  David Traxel in his 1980 biography of Kent writes: Remarriage had not stopped Kent’s interest in other women. In fact one of the attractions of marriage seems to have been that it set boundaries to be transcended; it also served as a refuge from which he could sally forth to explore new territory. Much to Frances’s surprise he continued to conduct affairs with a wide range of beauties. He usually did not try to hide these but would bring the ladies home and expect no complaints about it. After his return from Alaska and his emerging fame, these were the years he willingly and enthusiastically entered the New York City world of the Roaring Twenties – and Greenwich Village had plenty of women who endorsed various elements of the free love movement. As a researcher I neither approve nor disapprove of Rockwell Kent’s sex life. What I’m trying to do is describe it and put it into the context of the times. He was not unlike many men and women during this time of rapid social change.

NEXT ENTRY

PART 2

OLGA DREXEL DAHLGREN

AND

THE BACHELOR GIRLS