filed in Myths and stereotypes, featured
Goodbye to the Spinster
I first glimpsed unmarried life while watching my great aunts, Ruth and Evie, my grandmother’s single sisters who, coupled by default, became a pair. Ruthandevie. Names said in tandem, as if they were a unit, with no identity apart from that as spinster. After the family deposited them at holiday gatherings, they would sit around the table, gab and eat like the rest of us. But they were not the same. No husband, no kids. No status. Not for me.
While Ruth and Evie were the only single ladies I knew close up, giant-sized spinsters glared at me from movie screens, and smaller black and white versions moped around on TV. These women didn’t dominate my attention when I was ten, but they did plant a thought. If a husband never came along for them, how were my parents so sure he would come along for me? What if my Prince never finds his way?
Now, forty years later, I’ve gone looking for clues, digging up the “spinster back-story” to discover why her grip on me remains tight. It’s easy to conjure her: Coke-bottle glasses, pinched face, tight bun, frigid. But did she ever exist? Who was she? Was she me?
The word spinster began as description, unadorned of judgment. It meant an occupation. A yarn spinner. The first proof of it in the printed language was 1362, the most benign spot it would occupy in the more than six hundred years since. Most yarn spinners were female, and eventually the word became a legal term, a designation for all unmarried women. In England from the 1600’s through December 4, 2005, when its official use was banished from the courts, I could have been referred to in documents as, Wendy Braitman, spinster. I hate the sound of that. I dread the sound of it. I worry that there are relatives and friends who have whispered to each other: Wendy Braitman, spinster.
In the Middle Ages, to remain single and by implication, a virgin, was respectable. It was a calling, a worthy alternative to marriage. Spinsters weren’t objects of ridicule yet, because they weren’t even imagined as a distinct category. Not like today when we’re viewed as a robust percentage of all American women or an important voting block.
Before the 16th century, unmarried women were hardly remembered. Often at an economic disadvantage, and living on society’s margins, they had no heirs to pass down their stories, and were easily overlooked. For better or for worse, the spinster’s anonymity was about to change.
In the autumn of 1517, the German monk Martin Luther published an incendiary paper attacking abuses by the Pope and the Catholic Church. His publication coincided with the newly minted printing press, which helped spread his ideas throughout Europe in a matter of months.
Luther had come to believe there was no biblical foundation for celibacy and renounced his vows, married a former nun, and fathered five children. “One cannot be unmarried without sin,” he insisted. His impact on the Church was devastating. Convents and monasteries were abolished. Catholicism started to splinter. As the Protestant Reformation took hold, marriage became the one true way to serve society and God.
Elizabeth I swaggered into this climate, made no apology for never marrying, and was loved by her subjects in spite of it. “Better beggar woman and single than Queen and married, ” she declared. Elizabeth hadn’t envisioned her singleness as starting a trend. But for a moment on the world’s stage, this imperious exception was proof of what a talented woman could accomplish without a husband. The Virgin Queen, who ruled England in the late 16th century, would take her place as one of history’s most influential monarchs.
In 1666, the commoner Mary Astell was born. Left without a dowry by her father’s early death, she moved to London to make her way as a writer. “What poor woman is ever taught that she should have a higher design than to get her a husband?” she wrote. Refusing to marry beneath her stature, she found financial and social support from a circle of wealthy lady friends. Despite no formal schooling, Astell became a philosopher and respected writer (A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest, and Some Reflections on Marriage) and is known today as the first English-speaking feminist. She urged her countrywomen not to marry just because a “man could keep himself clean or make a bow,” voicing what my college-educated mother, three hundred years later, couldn’t yet grasp. It’s okay to be picky.
While a handful of extraordinary single women were living on their own terms, the position of the everyday spinster was plummeting. And it’s no coincidence. When wars thinned the ranks of eligible bachelors, and marriage and populations ebbed, the spinster got the blame. She was the perfect repository for cultural anxiety, a failure to Church and State. In the span of a hundred years, the spinster transformed from invisible to pitiable to menace. In 1673, Richard Allestree, a noted divinity professor summed her up: “The old maid is now the most calamitous creature in nature.”
By the 18th century, she was cropping up ugly and everywhere, in poems, essays, plays, novels, paintings, engravings, and pamphlets. A brief exception was the weekly magazine, The Old Maid, which offered a more nuanced tone, because it was written by Frances Brooke (under the pseudonym, Mary Singleton, Spinster) who was one. That is, until she married a clergyman and the periodical folded.
In 1795, Fermin Didot, a French printer coined the word “stereotype.” The word didn’t initially mean what it does today (something continued or repeated without change.) It was a technical term for the printing block he invented, enabling the duplication of text without the original. Whether or not there had ever been an ‘original’ spinster no longer matters. Her stereotype had hardened into a mix of undesirable traits, and they would cling to the image of the unmarried woman for the next two hundred years.
Who was she?
ANGULAR
CLUMSY
NEARSIGHTED
AWKWARD
CRABBY
DOUR
UNDULY CRITICAL OF OTHERS
NOSEY
ENVIOUS
GOSSIPY
IN FLIRTATIOUS PURSUIT OF A HUSBAND
Across the ocean, Abigail Adams warned her husband John, “If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion.” And so they did. When feminism’s first wave coalesced in the mid 1800’s, some prosperous and educated women, eager to contribute to the world, defiantly chose single life over marriage. For a period, this era’s spinster was admired, even envied as an emblem of accomplishment and independence. Louisa May Alcott, who never married, wrote in 1868: “Liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”
As more single women entered the workforce, the spinster became the bachelor woman, the new woman, the career woman. In cities, she was able to live alone in designated hotels and apartment buildings. (Emily Post would disagree, deeming it unacceptable for girls under thirty to live without a chaperone. But after 30, who cared? What girl was marriageable anyway?) The New York State Supreme Court ruled in 1900 that a bachelor woman had the right to stay out until midnight, without her landlord locking the front door. The sign of her independence? A latchkey. By 1903, there was enough interest from its readers that the New York Times began running a regular column, “A Bachelor Girl Reflects” by Minnie J. Reynolds, in which she wrote, “If a girl shows signs of brains, marry her off young. It will probably be difficult later.”
As the single woman fortified her stature, the media pushed back. Gilbert Saroni, a vaudeville performer built a career as a female impersonator playing unattractive, frustrated, old maids. In his 1901 film, “The Old Maid has her Picture Taken,” Saroni portrayed a woman so ugly that when confronted with her image, objects exploded. According to the film’s promotional material, audiences “convulsed with laughter” when it premiered.
In 1931, in a humor piece written for the New Yorker (titled simply, Spinster), Wolcott Gibbs squeezed the canon of clichés into a few, short paragraphs and readers understood the code: An anxious gossip, living vicariously, with a bland taste in clothes and food, rumored to have had a romance a long time ago. She was the official repository of other people’s secrets, because of course, she has none of her own.
Magazines spread more cautionary tales. “LIFE calls on Seven Spinsters,” appeared in Life Magazine in 1953, featuring ghoulish photographs of the Timmermann sisters, a brood of plain, middle-aged, identically dressed, unmarried women from Geronimo, Texas, who still lived at home with their aging father. As if one spinster daughter wasn’t enough, seven were a freak show. 
In 1954, the Ladies Home Journal, ran a four-part series, “How to be Marriageable,” about the desperate-to-be-married “Marcia Carter” (a pseudonym; consider the shame). At 29, her chances for marriage growing slim, she had one last hope. Despite objections from her family, Marcia left home, traveled half way across the country to Los Angeles and signed up for the “Marriage Readiness Program” at the American Institute of Family Relations. There, she was administered the Johnson Temperament Test, and assigned a counselor (married, of course) who began schooling her in the art and science of finding a husband.
Paul Popenoe, a former eugenicist, believed that any “normal young woman who wishes to marry and is willing to try, can succeed.” He created the Institute as a way to help “fit” people get married and stay married. Upon entrance, it was clear that Marcia had an array of handicaps: She didn’t care much for cooking or decorating. She was too serious, pulled her hair back too tight, wore unflattering eyeglasses and hand-me-downs. Could this woman go from unmarriageable to marriage? Marcia’s counselor created a plan that included trips to a beauty shop, clothing store, optometrist, dentist and family doctor, as well as dance, music and cooking classes. “Curiously enough,” Ladies Home Journal noted, “aggressive traits are even greater handicaps than timidity in attracting a husband.”
According to the Institute, it would take about a year for most unmarrieds to face their unlovable traits and begin achieving “lovability.” After transforming her hairstyle and wardrobe, learning how to relax, and become more domestic, Marcia Carter triumphed over her fate as a spinster, and got what she had longed for: a husband. The Journal series ends with Marcia in her sunlit kitchen, laying out toast on two plates, declaring, “from now on, we would always be two, traveling to the same goals, never to be lost or parted.”
JOHNSON TEMPERAMENT TEST, 1941 (sample)
While Marcia Carter’s success was trumpeted for my mother’s generation, the single women who first caught my attention were on television. Scariest television spinster ever? Elva Keene from “The Twilight Zone,” circa 1964, one of the most watched programs of its time. The idea of ending up like Elva still gives me the creeps. Elderly and isolated, her wrinkled face in a permanent snit, she spent her days confined to a wheelchair, knitting. “You don’t know what it’s like to be alone,” she barked to her sole companion, a patronizing housekeeper. Elva had had a fiancé a long time ago, but he died in a car crash after she insisted on taking the wheel. Pushy women on television paid a price.
Another pushy, single woman of the same vintage was Sally Rogers from The Dick Van Dyke Show. Awkward and crabby (sound familiar?) bouffant hair held stiffly in place with a schoolmarm bow, she lived alone in an apartment with a cat. What a contrast to Laura Petrie, the graceful, attractive and happy-in-her-suburban-ranch house married lady who was the show’s female lead.
When I first watched Sally on my family’s black and white Zenith, I was carefree and eleven, never anticipating her sad sack story would intersect with mine. But now I wonder, did she really have it so bad? She was a fast talking writer, in charge of her life, who didn’t have to wait for a man to buy her a mink. As one of the first female characters with a profession, Sally Rogers became a television pioneer. But The Dick Van Dyke Show was rooted in the starched conventions of the fifties, where a woman couldn’t be happy without marriage. (As for men and marriage, it was, as always, another story.) So I pitied Sally in her husbandless life, as she grumbled to anyone who would listen.
The Dick Van Dyke Show, airdate: February 19, 1964
Set of a late night talk show. Sally Rogers has been waiting impatiently to be interviewed.
SALLY: The only time I can remember waiting longer was in a chapel in a wedding dress.
HOST: I thought you weren’t married.
SALLY: I’m not. But I like to sit in a chapel in a wedding dress. That way people think I got close enough to getting stood up.
HOST: Come one Sally. I can’t understand an attractive girl like you having trouble with men.
SALLY: Oh, I don’t have any trouble with men. I don’t have any men to have trouble with. That’s my trouble. (Leans flirtatiously over to Host) Are you married?
HOST: Yes. I’m married.
SALLY: That’s the story of my life. Every nice person I meet is either married or a girl.
**********************
Just as the fictitious (and no doubt celibate) Miss Rogers was whining for a husband, real women were on the march for sexual freedom, better pay, and equal education. The social order was toppling.
In 1960, the FDA approved the first oral contraceptive, and a decade later, I would put my prescription to good use in New York State. But it would take twelve years and two Supreme Court decisions for “the pill” to be legally available to women regardless of where they lived or their marital status. In 1961, reflecting a cultural shift, the staid Readers Guide to Periodical Literature, eliminated spinster as an organizing category, redirecting users to “single woman.” The following year, Helen Gurley Brown, one of the highest paid copywriters in the U.S., authored Sex and the Single Girl, an instant bestseller, in which she proclaimed the benefits of premarital sex, anointing the single woman as “the newest glamour girl of our times.”
Was it only six years earlier that “Marcia Carter” had found lifelong bliss cooking breakfast? The myth of the contented housewife was about to be shattered, with the 1963 publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. By the early seventies, a full-fledged woman’s movement had delivered us “Ms.” A new word, a new magazine, and the promise of an identity no longer defined by absence.
Married, single, divorced, gay. As we swam in the same pool then, sisters, united in our oppression by men, the spinster was sidelined. On May 8, 1988, feminist critic Molly Haskell made it official in “Paying Homage to the Spinster,” her sentimental sendoff in the New York Times, recollecting those agnostics of romantic love with eyeglasses as thick as goggles. Yet, centuries in the making, the spinster’s image was hard to shake off, even for a feminist. Even for me.
It’s not surprising we’ve internalized the awful stereotype. But what will it take to be done with it? As I’ve nestled in with the biography of the spinster as cranky, frigid, nearsighted, badly coiffed, persnickety and (we only need to say this once) unlovable hag, I’ve been reassured by the glamorous company who have proved it otherwise: Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Astell, Susanna Wright, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Adams, Elizabeth Peacock, Clara Barton, Gertrude Ederle, Ida Tarbell, Coco Chanel, Hazel Bishop, Molly Ivins. These brazen women in far more confining circumstances, remained single without disclaimer.
Isn’t it time I did the same?
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Wendy,
Brava! I lover it. Very upbeat and fun to read. I like your actual examples which give short but detailed information.
Barbara Wachs
[...] The agent had a point. Spinster has had a bad rap for hundreds of years, so I relented, and said goodbye, [...]
Oh, my. I should have read on.
(Actually, I’m at work and I just skimmed this, but I can’t wait to get a moment to savor it.)
I guess we might have to agree to disagree (and I have the UTMOST respect for you, your opinions, and your writing). I still like calling myself a spinster!
I think there’s a website that even makes coffee mugs and T-shirts with that tongue-in-cheek logo.
Great post! I’m so glad to have found your blog. I’ve been wondering why I never see anything meaningful and intelligent written on this subject. I’m eagerly devouring your previous posts and loving every minute of it.
Cheers!