“Doing a Jenny Fields”

“Doing a Jenny Fields” names the public afterlife of Jenny Fields’s choice to live without a sexual attachment: young women took that choice as an example and began planning pregnancies of their own. The phrase captures the distance between Jenny’s personal understanding of her life and the political meaning others attached to it.

Origin and Meaning

Jenny’s book was received as a timely statement of women’s independence. John Wolf had warned her that she might be treated either as the right voice at the right time or as entirely wrong. The response proved favorable: the media welcomed the book, and reviewers described its central claim as the possibility of a full life without sexual attachment. At the same time, some serious journals criticized the writing itself, separating the book’s literary execution from its public argument.

The expression emerged amid that reception. Young women at Florida State University in Tallahassee stirred controversy by plotting pregnancies of their own, and for a time in New York this pattern among women determined to follow their own course was called “doing a Jenny Fields.” The phrase therefore referred not just to admiration for Jenny, but to the appropriation of her example as a basis for action.

Jenny’s Understanding of Her Choice

Jenny was uneasy with the label feminism. Sitting in her nurse’s uniform at a restaurant where Wolf took his favorite writers, she said she had only thought she had made the right choice about how to live, and that an unpopular choice had prompted her to defend it. She did not present herself as the author of a political doctrine, and she never fully understood how political her book was or how it would be used.

Her own account emphasized practical care rather than ideology. Trained as a nurse, she described helping people who were ill or unable to help themselves as the first work she had wanted to do; she said she had approached writing in the same spirit. Her position on women’s choices was more explicit: women, like men, should be able to make conscious decisions about the course of their lives. If that made her a feminist, she said, she supposed she was one.

A Personal Choice Becomes a Public Model

“Doing a Jenny Fields” marks the conversion of an individual life into a repeatable public example. The young women’s plans made Jenny’s choice newly visible, but their action also gave it a meaning beyond the one she had claimed for herself. The expression thus holds together two distinct things: Jenny’s insistence on personal decision and the broader movement of women who treated that insistence as permission to determine their own lives.