by Betsy Israel
These perceived changes were amply documented in the 1851 British census. It seemed that there were in England 405,000 more women than men, creating a surplus in all segments of the female population.[1] Known as redundant or superfluous women, they officially became a social problem, and one with no easy remedy. Those who worked would compete for a limited number of jobs. And there were those who could not quite bring themselves to work. The pamphlet Dedicated to the Refined Young Lady, reprinted consistently from 1860 to 1905, dictated that one might make her way, without loss of station, in lace making, fancy needlework, or as a “paid reading partner.” She might also, under an assumed name, sell canned jams and jellies, write love stories for magazines, or give “dramatic readings.” The pursuit of an actual job, however, was impossible, for to work in an office, “to stamp envelopes… would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage.” The better girl might work “for cake” but not “for bread.” (It should also be said that this girl might not be cut out to do real work of any kind. The résumé of Mattie Silver, the central female character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, typifies the situation: “Her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite ‘The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord,’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’”)
Yet many, of course, were left with few choices. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were among those who routinely made visits to local “intelligence,” or employment, offices to apply for the scant number of jobs hundreds had applied for already. In Charlotte’s case, the jobs she eventually secured provided background and details for three of the most complex single heroines in all literature: the stoical Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone of Shirley (1849), and, my favorite, Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853), a boarding-school teacher so fiercely self-contained—she has suffered a severe trauma she cannot speak of—that Jane Eyre, in comparison, seems like a gay lady at Mr. Rochester’s house party. When left alone at the school during a holiday, Lucy suffers one of the most realistic nervous breakdowns in all literature. If not strictly autobiographical, this episode suggests that the author at a young age knew the misery of enforced, impenetrable solitude.
William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, intending to praise Charlotte Brontë, that she was “that fiery little eager brave… tremulous creature!” As he explained, “[I] see that rather than any other earthly good… she wants some Tomkins to love her and to be in love with her. But you see this is a little bit of a creature, without a penny of good looks, thirty years old, I should think, buried in the country.” She was a spinster. But at least a spinster with talent.
With so many others lacking literary or any other talents, what was Great Britain to do? The most famed proposal, entirely serious, came from one W. R. Gregg, a conservative commentator, in 1862. In his view it was essential that the British “restore by emigration of women that proportion between the sexes in the old country and in the newer ones.” The difficulty, he imagined, would be “chiefly mechanical. It is not easy to convey a multitude of women across the Atlantic or the Antipodes by an ordinary means…. Totransport the half million from where they are redundant to where they are wanted at an average of 30 passengers a ship would require 10,000 vessels, or at least 10,000 voyages.” (To clarify, the only transport of women out of Great Britain for reasons of marital status had occurred years earlier, when “purchase brides” had been shipped to the Virginia Colony for the “price of transport.”)
Gregg was ready for his critics. Should his scheme fall through, he had another, more practical solution for surplus waste. Under this plan, redundant women would be trained to behave like courtesans, thus attracting more men. Those too stubborn or proud to do so would, as promised, live out their miserly unadorned and childless lives as social lepers.
It should be noted that “stubborn and proud” in this situation referred at least in part to those women—educated, politically astute, or rebellious—who believed that a surplus of women existed only because nobody before had bothered to count them. Victorian men, as many saw it, lived to count, to document, to arrange and to name every detail of the physical world. This generation had drawn a map of the universe allowing for every phylum and genus; unmarried women fit no known categories.
In many ways, England offers up a textbook case history in spinsterism: A creature found in folklore and literature—the old maid—is dredged up, her traits grafted onto a segment of the female population that has become threatening—in this case, all those seemingly unwilling to wed. These women are assigned a subsecondary status and become, as a group, a cautionary icon for younger females: This Could Be You.
AMERICAN GOTHIC
Early America, early New England specifically, still holds the record for extreme intolerance toward single women. For years after the Salem hysteria, Americans regarded the unwed female, whether she was outspoken or mysteriously shy, with grave suspicion. The Puritans herded women into marriage, viewing it as a holding pen within which to grow the population and keep a firm lock on those deemed potentially threatening to it. Puritan doctrine preached that a woman possessed her own soul, as opposed to a soul meshed with her husband’s. She would be judged alone for her acts in this life, and it was her husband’s responsibility to be sure she remained true to God and that she behaved chastely for the greater good of the community. It was a job that required close scrutiny.
Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an unwed Boston woman of twenty-three was labeled a “spinster”; at twenty-six she plunged into the leprous zone of the “thornback,” a name derived from an ugly spiny-backed fish. If a thornback belonged to no family—and life spans were so short, many girls at twenty-six were on their own—then she needed to seek out a well-respected, churchgoing male whose wife was schooled in female piety. She would live with them, doing chores and, like a moral orphan, studying Bible and proper conduct. She would never leave the property unless escorted by an adult family member or a male of good repute.
To quote a Boston bookseller, circa 1788, who’d seen his share of thornbacks: “Nothing can exceed it and [it is] look’d on as a dismal spectacle.”
Outside New England there seem to have been few such complications. One British traveler, Nicholas Crestell, called late-eighteenth-century America “a paradise on earth for women.” Excluding Massachusetts, a place with three times the usual number of spinsters, the colonial life was “luck incarnated.” Crestell wrote home: “That great curiousity the Old Maid, the most calamitous creature in nature, is seldom seen in this country.” So rare was this creature that she was called, so Crestell wrote, an “ancient maid.”
The phenomenon of the ancient maid was due largely to the “westward trek,” the monumental task of fulfilling America’s manifest destiny. Now here was a mighty concept that appealed to many men and drew thousands away from New England. As one historian would later put it: “Wives were as scarce in Idaho as husbands were in New England.”
Put another way, very few unwed New England women were inclined to trek after men into the wilderness. The self-educated spinster, in particular, understood just what was in store for her “out there.” At least one in twenty-five pioneer wives died in childbirth, and they were quickly replaced—the farms had to run; more children were needed to work the farms—and these next women, if they died, were quickly replaced and often replaced again.[2]
Back in the East, spinsters were evolving an early singular culture, based in friendships, books, teaching jobs, and tea parties that begin to suggest parlor scenes out of Henry James’s The Bostonians. Officials were quick to reassure the city’s men (of course some had stayed behind) and safely married women that these “other” women represented an aberration. To quote from an issue of the Farmer’s Almanac, 1869, “They’ve been left behind, as they are always left behind, and as they have diminished resources… they become diminished goods.” One very literal example: reputable Boston doctors began to report that spin
sters were likely to develop shriveled ovaries, a natural occurrence, it seemed, if one did not make good use of them early on. (Sperm, God-blessed, was safe.) The 1855 census confirmed that the aberration was far more widespread than suspected: There was a surplus of forty-five thousand females in the New England states. Rather than ship them off to Canada—the Massachusetts governor’s initial declaration—politicians, essayists, and concerned married women decided it was time to clarify just what it was a spinster might do, and what natural restrictions could be applied to her actions.
This first public etiquette for American spinsters called for a muted surrender, as if a spiritual hysterectomy had been performed, leaving behind as scars an insecurity and chronic melancholia.[3] Typically spinsters helped with the chores at home and moved between the homes of married siblings who needed help. And as in England, they hired themselves out as paid companions, tutors, schoolteachers or assistants, and seamstresses. Within the household, even if this was her original family household, she was made to seem unimportant and childlike—for a woman’s adult life began at marriage—and she was expected to keep herself well occupied and out of the way. One force-fed book, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (1858), suggested that the maiden female not engage in any taxing physical activity, including walks, unless they were limited to the periphery of one’s property. The poor thing might wander off and happen upon a preacher, some itinerant revivalist who might excite her, and as this and other manuals explained, these women, naïfs, were prone to outbursts of ecstatic piety. “She must never risk to be made enthusiastic by religious fervour… or agitated,” warned the author, hinting obliquely at sexual arousal. But an “industrious, independent, cheerful” spinster (the words of a bishop) need not be treated like a neutered pet (my own). She made an excellent companion for aging parents; in short, she was like a walking retirement benefit.
Of course “spinsters,” having perfected this meager act, still hoped for future union—whether with like friends or, still, yes, perhaps a man. Consider this excerpt from an 1867 “storiette” (a very short story, usually romantic, published in early magazines and compilations). In this one, a thirty-eight-year-old woman awaits the arrival of a man she was once engaged to, a man who went off to find fortune and has now returned. Here she is before her looking glass:
“A lavendar gown,” said Miss Cambron, with a stiff and critical survey of herself in the glass… quite suited to thirty eight; some lines about the mouth and eyes; a mere ghost of color… a look not specifically young. He won’t come again! He’ll want some little blue eyes—with pink cheeks and a coral necklace! It’s not his fault [still] she stood at her mirror contrasting the image it gave her with another from the deepening glass of her memory—that of a young girl.
She goes on at some length about her lack of “bloom,” the rosy-colored cheeks that define a woman as happy and young. (The concept of “bloom” figures heavily into many nineteenth-century spinster novels; in Jane Austen’s Persuasion it is mentioned twenty-one times.) Once it goes, the skin is pallid, symbolizing inevitable and rapid decay.
But it is important now to pause and state that not all women shared this belief in slow evisceration or found it at all relevant to their futures.
TRUE WOMEN AND THE SINGLY BLESSED
They are not a widely known group of women. They led no particular movement, formed no political cells, did not even qualify as a peer cohort—still, they made some small history by saying no. No to marriage proposals, in which the concept of “forever,” as Florence Nightingale famously said, slid into “never.” As in never being wholly oneself; never being permitted to make up one’s own mind; never to be able to move about freely. In some sense, buried alive. Especially if one was marrying just to marry. As one Eliza Southgate wrote to a friend in 1841, “Which is more despicable? She who married a man she scarcely thinks well of—to avoid the reputation of ‘old maid’—or she who…preferred to live her single life?”
She who “preferred to live her single life” lived it most often in New England, from the 1830s through the mid-1870s. This was the era of “single blessedness,” an almost devotional phrase used by a fairly elite and intellectual band of single women to describe a state of unmarried bliss. To sketch a quick composite of this early rebel, we can say that she grew up amid intellectuals, preachers or writers, with left-leaning principles and a love of oration. Household conversation ranged from abolitionism, transcendentalism, or trade unionism to any other radical topic then debated at public meetings and in Unitarian church sermons. She may not have received an education like her brother’s, but on her own she had trained her mind the way others had worked to play delightfully upon the pianoforte, or to sing lieder (not that she lacked these more delicate talents). Living across an expanse of cities, towns, and states, these single women did not create a declaration of their beliefs. But if they had, it might have been this: a desire to elevate singlehood from its status as horrifying fate to “an expression of self-reverence.”
Dr. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, author of Liberty: A Better Husband, a dazzling book on these women, derived the term “singly blessed” from a letter, written in 1820 by a frustrated young woman, Eliza Chaplin, to her friend Laura Lovell. As Chaplin wrote of marriage and singlehood: “[rather than] endure the unhappiness that exists where minds are ‘fettered to a different mold,’ and rather [than] be subject to the ‘eternal strife’ which… prevails [I prefer] ever to remain in ‘single blessedness’ and deem it felicity thus to live.”
The list of women who described themselves this way was long: the abolitionist Grimké sisters, Florence Nightingale, the poet and onetime mill girl Lucy Larcom, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Vida Scudder, and M. Carey Thomas, second president of Bryn Mawr and one of the first women to attend Cornell. There were even a few men who agreed; commentator Aretemus B. Muzzy wrote during the 1840s: “A single life is not without its advantages; while a married one that fails… is the acme of earthly wretchedness.”
Single blessedness had its roots in the eccentric nineteenth-century New England household but, more important, in new attitudes toward female education. Starting at midcentury, many middle-class families began to send pubescent girls to boarding schools, and later a smaller number would send their most insistent marriage-aged daughters to “girls’ college.” (Among the elite schools, Vassar opened in 1861, Wellesley in 1870; Smith in 1871, and Bryn Mawr in 1885.) A few of the most determined enrolled in the small number of all-male schools admitting women, while the majority of the education-minded daughters attended the teaching academies known as “normal schools.”
No matter how unusual and enlightened her upbringing, no adolescent girl started out in life aspiring to a state of single blessedness. She entered boarding school understanding what any average woman knew: Marriage served as a woman’s only practical life solution. Moreover, it served as her moral and spiritual duty. If any aspect of this observation had been left unclear, every political, religious, educational, and literary force in the culture, every leader, of anything, wrote out or recited for girls the female life agenda: to make and maintain the family home, populating it with no fewer than five children (allowing for inevitable miscarriages), and to create within it a calm, well-decorated realm for her hardworking, exhausted husband.
Author Catherine M. Sedgwick, writing circa 1835, summarized the primitive female media blitz in this way: “By all the talk that we hear from old and young, married and single… marriage is not only the felicity of woman, but [the source of ] her dignity, her attractiveness, her usefulness… her very life depends on it!”
By the second or third year of school, the more intuitive, rebellious girl had come to grasp the underpinnings of the institution. Perhaps she’d learned that nuptial came from nupta, the Latin word for veil, or covering. In French the word was couverte, which gave rise to the full-surrender marital state known as couverture. As adapted in the United States from B
ritish common law, married women had no legal rights and were in essence the property of men, who owned and got to keep it all, including any children, in the case of divorce. As that translated on a day-to-day basis: He ventured forth into the world; she stayed inside. As it was said of these appointed spheres: “He for the world and commerce; she for the domestic, the nursery.” Or, as Milton had earlier expressed it: “He for God only; she for God in him.”
By graduation, such a girl would have understood the mechanics of Victorian marriage, and what historian Barbara Welter dubbed “the Cult of True Womanhood.” True womanhood was the brainchild of the “domestic feminists” (oxymoron notwithstanding), a group of reform-minded women who sought a conservative way to mediate their problem. Their problem, roughly summarized: What exactly should intelligent married women do, given that they didn’t belong in the world but had opinions and ideas too big for the house?
The best-known domestic feminist was Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe (she watched the kids while Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher now best remembered for his role in a sex scandal. As she and others viewed it, the Wife, exercising subtle manipulations—an exquisitely hypnotic feminine style—might exert some quiet influence over her husband, encouraging him to take certain desired actions out there in the world. At the same time, she’d project a radiant moral force over her children. Think of her as a human aerosol can, her sweet lingering residue infusing the house with calm, a sense of order for her brood, and, when needed, an undetectable means for mesmerizing her husband to get her way.
