A story of spinsters
A LOOK AT HOW SOCIETY DOWN THE DECADES HAS TREATED THE WOMEN WHO HAVEN’T PUT A RING ON IT
Spinster, career woman, old maid, bachelor girl: of the many ways to describe single women, very few of them are complimentary. (The equivalent male list is shorter: bachelor, or perhaps the funsounding playboy.) That alone indicates some of the ‘concern’, let’s call it, with which the status of single female has been treated. Whether criticised, pitied, sometimes courted, they’ve always been singled out.
THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE
The term may now have negative connotations, but the original spinsters, spinners of cotton and wool – usually young girls, orphaned relatives and widows – were considered a respectable category of employment, earning a respectable income. Later, in France, it became a more descriptive term, simply women on their own, for whatever reason, who needed an income. But, with laws tying a woman’s value to her husband, their economic freedom was curtailed. The spinsters suffered with the industrial revolution, which pushed them into factories where they no longer controlled their own work. Jane Austen charted the pains and perils of their middle- or upper-class sisters at the end of the 18th century – foisted on uncaring relations, expected to be uncomplaining carers and companions. (Though it’s hard to think of being part of one of her illsuited, squabbling couples as a better option.)
Single women became a matter of public (therefore predominantly male) debate when the 1851 census recorded 405,000 more women than men. What to do with these so-called “superfluous women”? Working in an office was out the question because, according to one commentator “to stamp envelopes … would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage”. Prospects were reduced to the kind of options seen in the Brontë books (all written as single women): think of Charlotte’s governess Jane Eyre, or Lucy Snowe of Villette, first a caregiver, then nanny.
NEW WOMEN AND NEW LAWS
As well as women who remained single through circumstance, more women were choosing not to marry. Notable examples were Florence Nightingale and the novelist Louisa May Alcott who wrote, “The loss of liberty… and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honour of being Mrs instead of Miss.” The end of the 19th century saw the emergence of the “New Woman”: educated, independent and speaking up. As well as campaigning for reforms in property rights and divorce laws, she was closely associated with the women’s suffrage movement. In 1913 more than 60% of the Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union were spinsters.
SURPLUS AND SOLITARY
Concerns about “surplus women” were raised following the First World War, when the 1921 census showed women outnumbered men by one and three-quarter million. According to a British MP in 1922, “A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature. Unmarried women pose a grave »
“A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature”
danger… the larger health of the nation is at stake.” Or, as the Daily Mail put it, “the superfluous women are a disaster to the human race.” Particularly cruel for a generation of women who had been raised to believe that their life’s role was to be wives and mothers. But the period did see some new role models: it was the age of both Miss Marple, the spinster sleuth, and the flapper – the likes of Clara Bow on the silver screen. Canny marketers realised that more working women would mean more women with disposable incomes and set out to woo these newly christened “bachelor girls”.
In depression-era America, the marriage rate hit an all-time low, as the divorce rate rose and, in 1936, Marjorie Hillis’s Live Alone and Like It, a guide for single women, became a bestseller. Marjorie, an editor at Vogue, could make the case for solo living being “the epitome of intelligent chic”, according to Joanna Scutts, whose book
The Extra Woman looks into the ‘Live-Aloner’ phenomenon. With alluring chapter titles such as ‘Solitary refinement’ and ‘Pleasures of a Single Bed’, Marjorie appealed because “she spoke to women who loved their jobs and financial independence, and she treated them as complete and whole people, who deserved happiness, whether or not they had a family,” according to Scutts. Her advice has fared well through the subsequent decades ( Live Alone was reissued in 2005). Scutts continues: “She insists that there’s nothing wrong with surrounding yourself with beautiful objects and filling your life with the things you enjoy.”
SAD SALAD AND THE SINGLE GIRL
It was a different story after the Second World War. Focus was back on family, with a woman’s aspirations expected to stop at husband and children. There was little compassion if that hadn’t happened. While Marjorie Hillis made solo living appealing, no one envies spinster Mildred Lathbury’s “melancholy lunch” in Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952): “A dried-up scrap of cheese, a few
“You have to choose the kind of life you want and then make it for yourself”
lettuce leaves for which I could not be bothered to make any dressing, a tomato and a piece of bread and butter.”
But things were stirring in the suburbs. 1963 saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl, which both – in their own ways – questioned the status quo. The 1960s are known for the progress of the women’s liberation movement, creating more options for women other than traditional heterosexual coupledom – although gay rights had a long way to go. Women wanting mortgages, however, still required the signature of a male guarantor, making a “room of one’s own” unobtainable for many – it wasn’t until 1980 ( yes, 1980!) that women could apply for a loan or credit in their own names.
SMUG SINGLETONS
Today, more women are living financially independent lives for longer. There have been a few smart, funny, successful single women on screen, with the likes of Sex and the City, and even Bridget Jones (who doesn’t side with Bridget when faced with the smug marrieds?), although coupling up is still often portrayed as the ‘happy ending’. Come back, Marjorie Hillis. “It’s hard to resist the pressure of family, society, and your own expectations,” says Scutts. “Marjorie’s basic lesson is, ‘ You have to choose the kind of life you want, and then make it for yourself.’ That means that you have to resist the influence of other people who want to tell you how to live.” And perhaps a new era is coming. Like the New Women of the 19th century, Rebecca Traister’s book, All the Single Ladies (2016), shows how today’s spinsters are becoming a US political force to be reckoned with. Joanna Scutts reckons Marjorie would approve. “She knew that happiness was a valuable and fragile thing, and that it was something worth fighting for.”