Spinster (4 page)

Each of us is a museum that opens for business the moment we're born, with memory the sole curator. How could a staff of one possibly stay abreast of all those holdings? No sooner does a moment occur than it's relegated to the past, requiring that it be labeled, sorted, and filed into the appropriate cabinet. Given this ceaseless deluge of paperwork, it's no wonder we have such a tenuous handle on the present. And so the curator toils alongside us in the dark, bereft of the information needed to truly understand who we are; the individual is inseparable from context.

Take the topic at hand: the Single Woman. In the museum of your mind, your conscious ideas about her are on prominent display. It's a very smart exhibit, with an auditorium for viewing old film and television clips (
Ally McBeal, Living Single, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Murphy Brown, Sex and the City
), a collection of yellowed magazine advertisements mounted on the walls, headphones for listening to audio recordings of all the relevant conversations you've had with friends, and (once you've read this book) a neat row of glass cases in which facts and figures are typed on placards set beside diaries and letters that date all the way back to the founding of America. Impressive!

Except the curator forgot to check the vault in the basement, the one where all the cultural attitudes about single women you've inherited from everyone you've ever known, particularly your parents, are spilling out of the cabinets and papering the floor. And that's not all. On the front desk is an unopened report that just arrived from a think tank collating all the current statistics about
single women in America,
*
²
which means you need a new glass display case.

The graph depicts a V, with the year 1890 sitting atop the left arm and the year 2013 atop the right. The overall number of single women in America starts at a high of 34 percent in 1890, slides down one percent per decade, all the way to the bottom point of the V—17 percent in 1960—and then climbs back up and up, 2 percent per decade, to 53 percent in 2013.

Every year I try to reread Doris Lessing's slim 1987 polemic (originally a lecture series),
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
. In the book, this “epicist of the female experience,” as the Swedish Academy put it when awarding her the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007, reminds us how difficult it is to detach ourselves from the mass emotions and social conditions of the age we're born into; all of us, male and female, are “part of the great comforting illusions, and part illusions, which every society uses to keep up its confidence in itself.”

A few pages later she writes, “Very few people indeed are happy as solitaries, and they tend to be seen by their neighbours as peculiar or selfish or worse. Most people cannot stand being alone for long. They are always seeking groups to belong to. We are group animals still, and there is nothing wrong with that. But what is dangerous is not the belonging to a group, or groups, but not understanding the social laws that govern groups and govern us.”

To further thwart self-knowledge, there's a theory that we as humans lack the imagination to “remember” any further back than the generation or two that directly precedes us, limiting our historical memory to the eras of our parents and grandparents. This may be why the so-called “golden years” of the 1950s and
early 1960s loom so large in our contemporary consciousness, bullying many of us into believing that the institution of marriage was always thus, and will be evermore. We simply can't see through that dense hedge of norms and expectations to the decades that came before.

The flip side of this collective assumption is that the single woman has always been stigmatized as a lonely old spinster with too many cats, for example. Certainly she was reviled in the 1950s, in the way all minorities are stigmatized, to ratify the choices of the majority. But that was just one of the spinster's iterations in her constantly evolving reputation. Perceptions of her have fluctuated so wildly across the decades that she's never merely a living, breathing being, but is also a lightning rod for attitudes toward women in general. She's selfless: Lady Liberty, Florence Nightingale, Mother Teresa. She's charmingly eccentric: Mary Poppins, Holly Golightly, Auntie Mame. She's powerful: Rosie the Riveter, Wonder Woman, Joan of Arc.

Which is also to say that in spite of her prevalence the single woman is nearly always considered an anomaly, an aberration from the social order. Piece together all her guises and you get a Lernaean hydra, bristling with countless projections and assumptions. (In 2006, social psychologist Bella DePaulo, PhD, coined the word
singlism
to mean “the stereotyping, stigmatizing, and discrimination against people who are single.”)

As I thought about Edna Millay and her mother, I found I wasn't even sure what a single woman is, exactly. Unmarried, obviously. But we were three unmarried women (including myself), in one neighborhood, in different eras, at various ages and life stages—were we all single women?

Not young Edna, of course; by the time she left Newburyport, she was only twelve, just a girl—though, hold on. In Shakespeare's time reproductive ability equaled maturity; Juliet was thirteen when she married Romeo. At what age was a girl considered
a woman in America at the turn of the last century? For this I turned to marriage historian Stephanie Coontz: throughout the 1800s the legal age of consent in most states was ten, eleven, or twelve—seven in Delaware—but, mercifully, by century's end social reformers had pushed that number to between sixteen and eighteen.
*
³

Edna's mother and I were both around forty, but unlike her I'd never been married or, therefore, divorced. Is a divorcée a single woman? And what about widows—do they count?

Because single women and married women have historically had different rights, I asked my father to consult his
Black's Law Dictionary
, the most widely used law dictionary in the United States. There's no entry for “single woman,” but there is the very glamorous-sounding Latin term
feme sole
: “a single woman, including those who have been married but whose marriage has been dissolved by death or divorce, and, for most purposes, those women who are judicially separated from their husbands.” (Note that even the law defines a single woman by what she lacks.)

DePaulo elaborates on that definition of a single woman. She argues that you're “socially single” if you're sexually or emotionally involved with someone but the two of you don't consider yourself a couple, or don't meet society's definition of coupledom (which ranges from exclusivity to cohabitation). Further, you're “personally single” if you
think
of yourself as single, even if you're coupled.

That her definitions apply to men and women alike might seem to suggest that the single experience is the same regardless of gender. But the old-fashioned synonyms that remain in circulation indicate otherwise.
Bachelor
originally referred to men of
inferior status in professions so demanding, they precluded marriage. In thirteenth-century France this meant, for instance, a theological candidate who held merely a bachelor's degree instead of a master's. Around 1300 the word crossed into English to describe low-ranking knights. Much later, Victorian matchmakers appropriated the term and added
eligible
, for an unmarried man blessed with financial and social inducements, and
confirmed
, for any who wanted to remain that way. By the late nineteenth century the term had neutralized to simply mean “unmarried man,” as it still does today.

The term
spinster
follows an inverse trajectory. It originated in fifteenth-century Europe as an honorable way to describe the girls, most of them unmarried, who spun thread for a living—one of very few respectable professions available to women. By the 1600s the term had expanded to include any unmarried woman, whether or not she spun.
*
⁴

Not until colonial America did
spinster
become synonymous with the British
old maid
, a disparagement that cruelly invokes
maiden
(a fertile virgin girl) to signify that this matured version has never outgrown her virginal state, and is so far past her prime that she never will. At a time when procreation was necessary to building a new population, the biblical imperative to “be fruitful and multiply” felt particularly urgent, and because only wives, of course, were allowed to have sex, the settlers considered solitary women sinful, a menace to society. If a woman wasn't married by twenty-three she became a “spinster.” If she was still unwed at twenty-six, she was written off as a hopeless “thornback,” a species of flat, spiny fish—a discouraging start to America's long evolution
in getting comfortable with the idea of autonomous women. During the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, of the nearly two hundred people accused of witchcraft—all of them from the little farming villages and seaside towns I grew up among—the majority were adult women at the fringes of society, whether poor single mothers or widows whose wealth inspired jealousy.
*
⁵

Indeed, I was raised in spinster territory. Throughout the nineteenth century, New England harbored more single women than anywhere else in the country, with the highest proportion in Massachusetts, which had more than double that of the American population as a whole. This was largely because of the massive losses sustained by the Civil War, which of course ravaged the whole country; historically, wars create a radical spike in the single female population. (In ancient Rome, repeated military campaigns so drastically depleted the pool of marriageable freemen that some single women tried to marry slaves, to much public resistance.) But other factors—the bruised postwar economy, which made it difficult for men to professionalize and marry early; a regional commitment to intellectual and literary pursuits, which extended to women—created a social atmosphere in which single women were allowed, a little bit, to flourish.

Few people, if any, seriously use the term
spinster
today, and yet we all agree on what she is.
Oxford English Dictionary
: “An unmarried woman, especially an older woman thought unlikely to marry”;
American Heritage Dictionary
: “Often offensive. A woman, especially an older one, who has not married”; the dictionary on my MacBook Air: “An unmarried woman, typically an older woman beyond the usual age for marriage. Usage note: In modern everyday English, ‘spinster' cannot be used to mean
simply ‘unmarried woman'; it is now always a derogatory term, referring or alluding to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and repressed.” Only
Black's Law Dictionary
offers a neutral definition: “The addition given in legal proceedings and in conveyancing to a woman who has never been married.”

I'd made my trip home the month I turned forty—my era's version of the hopeless thornback.

In ancient Rome, there were several Vestal Virgins at any given time guarding the sacred fire of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Each was tapped for the priesthood before puberty and sworn to celibacy for thirty years. Once she'd fulfilled her service—usually by her mid-thirties, and no later than forty—she was given a pension and was free to do whatever she wanted, even marry. Marriage to a former Vestal was a coveted status symbol.

My five awakeners had brought me all this way. Maybe it was time I set down on paper everything they'd taught me, then progress into this next decade by myself.