What was going on when I was born?

AFTER years of camping out in the city, living in that awful one room, making do with second-rate furniture, eating from dishes that don't match, all the while waiting for Mr. Right to appear and take them away from all this, single women in their 30's and 40's are beginning to feather their solitary nests in a style that would have been unthinkable for most women of earlier generations - without a man to pay the bills. As Faith Colish, a lawyer, put it, ''It makes no sense to wait around for Prince Charming before setting up a household with all the good stuff - the china, the crystal, the linens, the rugs and the rest.'' No, the moment has come in the lives of single women with a measure of security, both professional and personal, to put down roots. For some women this means buying cooperative apartments or condominiums, hiring interior decorators and acquiring the trappings of the good (and often married) life - art, Oriental rugs, sterling silver and such. For other women, it simply means moving to a larger apartment with a real dining table and a bed that doesn't fold up in the morning. For Carol Bellamy, the City Council President, it means building bookcases for a library long stored in cartons, and especially growing tomatoes and tulips.

IN 1968 at an upstate New York auction, Marcia and William Goodman paid $22 for their first piece of American art pottery, a green and cream-colored jardiniere pedestal decorated with molded red apples. On the bottom it bore the mark ''Weller,'' but so little was known about the pottery that it took almost a year for the Goodmans to identify it as a pattern called Baldin, made about 1915 by the Weller Pottery in Zanesville, Ohio. It took the Goodmans even longer to find the matching bowl, but find it they did: four years later at a New York dealer's for $200. Now the bowl sits atop its matching pedestal in their Manhattan living room, a focal point of the Goodmans' collection of American art pottery bowls, vases and jars that dominate the large living-dining room. Part of a growing group of American art pottery collectors, Mr. and Mrs. Goodman are ''attracted to these pieces not only for their beauty, but for their tactile quality,'' Mr. Goodman said. ''The clay itself, the glazes, the feel of the pieces are what make them special,'' he said.

The Bethlehem Steel Corporation is preparing a far-reaching trade suit that would place a ceiling on imports of basic steel below current levels. Bethlehem, the nation's second- largest steelmaker, has been circulating papers among other major steelmakers in an effort to get them to join a trade suit, officials of other companies said yesterday. In the papers, Bethlehem claims that the industry is suffering serious injury as a result of imports, and argues that they should be limited through the establishment of mandatory quotas for each country that sells steel to the United States. The suit would reduce basic or carbon steel imports to well below the 20 percent share of the 85 million tons expected to be sold in this country this year, steel industry executives said.

A high Defense Department official charged tonight that ''the death squads of the violent right'' in El Salvador are actually benefiting the leftist guerrillas and ''more must be done'' to restrain them. In a major policy statement, Fred C. Ikle, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, asserted that by assassinating and intimidating members of the democratic center in El Salvador ''the violent extremists'' on both left and right ''are in fact working together.'' ''Both must be defeated,'' he said. His speech, cleared by the White House, followed a new effort by the United States Embassy in San Salvador to single out important right-wing officials responsible for death squad activities. It was the most forceful statement by a senior Reagan Administration official on the issue.

Israeli fighter planes today bombed an eastern Lebanese training base reportedly belonging to pro-Iranian Shiite militiamen suspected of involvement in recent suicide attacks on American, French and Israeli military barracks in Lebanon. The state-run Beirut radio said four Israeli warplanes, spewing thermal balloons in their wake to confuse heat- seeking surface-to-air missiles, attacked two training camps and an ammunition dump in the eastern valley known as the Bekaa. The camps and dump, which were said to belong to the pro-Iranian Islamic Amal militia, are just outside the town of Nabih Chit, 37 miles east of Beirut and only 3 miles from the Syrian border. According to one witness, at least three large buildings in the camp were blown up in the raid at 9:19 A.M., including an ammunition store that continued to explode for several hours, making rescue efforts extremely hazardous.

-based airline company, announced yesterday that it had ordered 20 newly developed, short-haul jets for $300 million from British Aerospace to compete more effectively in the West Coast market. Paul C. Barkley, president and chief operating officer of PSA, the parent company of Pacific Southwest Airlines, said in an interview that the plane would not only strenghten PSA's position on hard-fought California routes but would also reduce fuel costs. PSA offers ''no frill'' flights and emphasizes keeping its costs low. It and other smaller carriers are engaged in an intense battle with the full-service United Airlines, which has increased flights in large markets such as Los Angeles and San Francisco, between which two million passengers flew last year. Full- service carriers offer drinks, meals and other amenities not usually provided by their no-frills competitors, which charge less for tickets.

Governor Kean announced today that he would ask the Legislature for $5 million to help the state's six biggest cities meet salary increases being won by police officers and firefighters under binding arbitration. The cities - Newark, Jersey City, Paterson, Camden, Elizabeth and Trenton - house about one million of the state's 7.3 million residents. The announcement followed a meeting at which mayors of four of the six cities told Mr. Kean of their financial problems and their plans to furlough or demote uniformed personnel to balance their budgets. Mr. Kean said that he could not allow any erosion of public-safety services in urban areas and that he was confident suburban legislators would support the request to help the cities.

William Everdell was sketching the outlines of West Germany on a chalkboard in a classroom at St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights, talking to his students about the Pershing 2 missiles to be deployed in that country starting next month. ''The Russians are very concerned about the Germans,'' Mr. Everdell said. ''They have been invaded by the Germans many times, going as far back as the Teutonic knights of the 11th and 12th centuries.'' He said Russian history had a different perspective than that of the United States. ''So, when and if the U.S. changes the deployment of nuclear weapons in Germany, it's foolish not to expect the Soviet Union to respond,'' he said.

Syrian-backed Palestinian rebels fought their way today into the muddy streets of the Beddawi refugee camp just northeast of here and said they had taken Yasir Arafat's last stronghold in Lebanon. Correspondents who made their way into the lower reaches of the hillside camp reported that fighting was continuing. But aides to Mr. Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said that his guerrillas were outnumbered and that it was now only a matter of time before the rebels won control of the entire camp. Mr. Arafat drove into his headquarters here in early afternoon, but made no public statement. A few minutes later he left in the company of Khalil Wazir, his senior military commander.

SHARING ideas was not something new for the New York architects Megan Walker and Michael Lipkin, as they had been classmates at Yale University's Graduate School of Architecture. But last year when Miss Walker and Mr. Lipkin bought raw space across the hall from each other on the same top floor of a building on the Lower East Side, they found themselves working together again - this time practicing design theories for themselves. ''While we began with nearly identical-size spaces and budgets, our strategies could not have been more different,'' said 33-year-old Mr. Lipkin, who is a partner in the architectural firm of Lipkin, Averitt & Barclay. The two apartments show how for practically the same amount of money - each cost under $30,000 - totally different designs are possible for very similar spaces. Mr. Lipkin's first observation was the sex stereotyping that occurred, perhaps unintentionally, as their schemes evolved. ''My space is masculine, it's bold and aggressive,'' he said. ''Megan's is feminine, homey and refined both in scale and appointments.'' Her walls are painted a peach pink, his a gray blue. Both architects were clear about their priorities. ''Once I took the plunge to buy my own apartment I wanted a plan I would not easily outgrow,'' said Miss Walker, 32, who is a senior designer at Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates, a New York-based architectural firm.

House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a series of measures to tighten supervision over international lending of American banks as part of a bill that would increase the American contribution to the International Monetary Fund by $8.4 billion. These provisions could reduce bank earnings by cutting permissible fees from loan rescheduling and by requiring new reserves to be set aside against possible losses on third world loans. But the more stringent provisions of House-passed legislation have been diluted in the compromises, reached An I.M.F. report tying apartheid directly to economic problems in South Africa is fueling the debate in Congress. Page D6.

''If I had been a white middle-class man with an ex-wife who had come up and said, 'This man is a murderer,' and if this woman was a deranged alcoholic, I would not have been prosecuted.'' - Ginny Foat after her acquittal in murder trial. (B9:1.)