by Betsy Israel
CHAPTER 1: THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER
Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Women and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), a wonderful study of women in England and their attempts to live communally in the mid to late nineteenth century; Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978). Working from four famous novels the author charts a fascinating and original thesis on societal responses to women living in groups. See also: Pauline Nestor, Female Friendships and Communities: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell (London: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Sheila Jeffries, The Spinster and Her Enemies 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), is the best work published on 1920s-era sexology and its long-term detrimental effect on single women. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) stands as the pioneering and intensive work on early single revolutionaries dubbed “the Singly Blessed”; Susan Leslie Katz, “Singleness of Heart: Spinsterhood in Victorian Culture” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1990).
Dorothy Yost Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Literature: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951), is the seminal work on the spinster in novels. The book received much popular attention because of what I’ll call its news peg: There were, or so it seemed, a large number of single women in the population, and one had to study them in historical context and, with an unavoidable 1950s bias, determine what they might do to “adjust” to their status. The author concluded there was much a spinster might do in modern society, as opposed to most of the sad women she wrote about. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2d ed. (1980; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Susan Koppelman, Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1984); Laura L. Doan, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Journal of Feminist Studies/Critical Studies Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
On Florence Nightingale:
I. B. O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 1820–1856: A Study of Her Life Down to the End of the Crimean War (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931); Nightingale had the distinction of being the lone woman included in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1918) and the far more unfortunate distinction of being viewed in it as a repressed sexual hysteric. Florence Nightingale to Her Nurses: A Selection from Miss Nightingale’s Addresses to Probationers and Nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s Hospital (London: Macmillan, 1914). There is an excellent discussion of Florence Nightingale in Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913); Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Atheneum, 1983). Myra Stark, ed., Cassandra (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979).
On Louisa May Alcott:
Ednah D. Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890); Sarah Elbert, ed., Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
On Clara Barton:
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); William E. Barton, The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1969).
Conduct books and nasty warnings:
Ann Judith Penny, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (London: Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858); Mrs. Ellis (Sarah Stickney), The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1842); Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (New York and London: G. P. Putnam/Knickerbocker Press, 1905); Susan C. Dunning Power, The Ugly Girl Papers, or, Hints for the Toilet (New York: Harper Brothers, 1875); Robert Tomes, The Bazar Book of Decorum (New York: Harper Brothers, 1877); Eliza Leslie, The Behaviour Book: A Manual for Ladies (New York: Willis P. Hazard, 1854).
“Muzzles for Ladies,” Strand Magazine, no. 8 (1894); W. R. Greg, “Why Are Women Redundant?” Literary and Social Judgments (London: Trubner, 1868); Daniel Defoe, “Satire on Censorious Old Maids,” in William Lee, ed., Daniel Defoe, His Life and Recently Discovered Writing, 3 vols. (1869; New York: Burt Franklin, 1969); Mary Ashton Livermore, What Shall We Do with Our Daughters? (Boston: Lee & Shephard, 1883).
Spinster novels:
Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Tobias Smollett, Humphry Clinker (1771; New York: Penguin, 1967); Jane Austen, Emma (1816; London: Oxford University Press, 1971) and Sense and Sensibility (1811; New York: Penguin, 1976); Charlotte Brontë, Shirley (1849; New York: Penguin, 1974), Jane Eyre (1847; New York: Bantam Classics, 1988), and Villette (1853; New York: Bantam, 1986); George Gissing, The Odd Women (1893; New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61; Lon don: Penguin, 1965) and David Copperfield (1849–50; London: Oxford University Press, 1983); Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset (New York: Penguin, 1981); Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (1853; London: Penguin, 1976); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (1851; New York: Buccaneer Books, 1982).
Twentieth century: Edith Wharton, Sanctuary (New York: Scribner’s, 1903); Edna Ferber, The Girls (New York: P. F. Collier & Son, 1921); Anne Parrish, The Perennial Bachelor (London: Harper Brothers, 1925); Margaret Ayers Barnes, Within This Present (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1933) and Edna, His Wife (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Josephine Lawrence, But You Are Young (Boston: Little, Brown, 1940), a novel on the “new dependency,” a trend also known as “the piggy family,” and The Tower of Steel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1943), the story of four single girls in the city, an early version of this familiar genre (one is in flight from her piggy family—“the indecent demands made upon her spiritual privacy”—one commits suicide, and so on); Sophia Belzer Engstrand, Wilma Rogers (New York: Dial Press, 1941) and Miss Munday (New York: Dial Press, 1940); Zona Gale, Faint Perfume (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1923); Fanny Hurst, The Lonely Parade (New York: Harper Brothers, 1942); Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born (New York: Scribner’s, 1942); Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (New York: Scribner’s, 1911); for the Lily Briscoe character, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1927); Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland 1909–1912; New York: Pantheon, 1979) and The Yellow Wallpaper (1892; New York: Bantam Classics, 1989); Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (New York/London: Governeur, D. Appleton and Co., 1943), for the two spinster piano teachers who live off the snacks brought to them or accidentally left by their piano students. Esther Forbes, Miss Marvel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935); Sylvia Ashton-Warner, Spinster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958).
Theodore Pratt, Miss Dilly Says No (New York: Duell, Sloane and Pearce, 1945), a little-known spinster novel about a movie-company secretary who writes terrible scripts no one bothers to finish—they’re as dull as she is! Then she writes a memoir of her life as a movie-company secretary, never thinking it might be published. It is. Be comes a best-seller. And so the film companies, her own especially, fight over the rights to make the movie of how idiotic they all are. Miss Dilly, locked up in a hotel room with a starlet bodyguard, repeatedly says “no.” Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means (New York: Knopf, 1963) and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (New York: Dell, 1966); Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps (1942; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970) and The Group (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963); Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs (New York: Avon, 1985); Anita Brookner, Look at Me (New York; Pantheon, 1983), Hotel Du Lac (New York: Pantheon, 1984), Family and Friends (New York: Pocket, 1985), and Brief Lives (New Yo
rk: Random House, 1990); Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).
Periodicals:
“The Old Maid of the Family—A Sketch of Human Life,” Atheneum, no. 3 (January 1830); J. A. Turner, “Link Not Thy Fate to His,” Peterson’s (Apr. 1859); “A Woman Alone: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century America,” New England Quarterly, vol. 51 (1978); Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer, “The Unglorified Spinster,” Cosmopolitan (May 1907); Francis Power Cobbe, “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” Fraser’s, no. 66, (1862); “Why Is Single Life Becoming More General?” The Nation (1868); Molly Haskell, “Paying Homage to the Spinster,” The New York Times Magazine (May 1988).
The cult of true womanhood/domesticity:
Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, no. XVII (1966); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New Eng land, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982); Glenna Matthews, Just a Housewife: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Memoirs and essays:
Marian Governeur, As I Remember: Recollections of American Society During the Nineteenth Century (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1911); Domingo Sarmiento, Michael Rockland, ed. and trans., Travels in the United States in 1847 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970); Elizabeth Lynn Linton, The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: Richard and Bentley, 1883) and Modern Women and What Is Said of Them (New York: Redfield, 1868); Natalie Dana, Young in New York: A Memoir of a Victorian Girlhood (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963); Hazel Hunton, Pantaloons and Petticoats: The Diary of a Young Woman (New York: Field, 1950); Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance (New York: D. Appleton and Co., Century, 1934).
CHAPTER 2: THE SINGLE STEPS OUT
On working women in general and their economic status in the United States:
Lynn Y. Weiner, From Working Girl to Working Mother: The Female Labor Force in the United States, 1820–1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Alice Kessler Harris, History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). On male attitudes about organized female labor, specifically the idea that men, not women, had to support what would be recognized as a “family,” see Martha May, “Bread Before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage,” part of the larger, very useful Women, Work and Protest: A Century of U.S. Women’s Labor History, Ruth Milkman, ed. (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1985); Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
On immigration:
Hasia R. Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Sidney Stahl Steinberg, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Hutchins Hapgood, The Spirit of the Ghetto: Studies of the Jewish Quarter in New York (1902; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Maxine Seller, ed., Immigrant Women (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); portions of Susan Ware, ed., Modern American Women: A Documentary History (Chicago: Dorsey, 1989); the classic, still viable New York story, Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (New York: Scribner’s, 1890), and Robert Hunter, Poverty (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904), about Chicago; Henry Roth, Call it Sleep (New York: Random House, 1937).
Factory life and domestic service:
An extraordinary overview of women working in nineteenth-century New York is Christine Stansell, City of Women (New York: Knopf, 1986). The book tracks the long climb up from piece or “out” work to factory work (and includes a fascinating discus sion of how one patriarchal system—in the home—was simply substituted with another in the factory). It is invaluable as a study of Bowery culture, the rackets, prostitution, and attitudes about domestic work. Virginia Penny’s original Employments of Women, A Cyclopedia of Women’s Work: How Women Can Make Money Married or Single (Boston: Walker, Wise, 1863) literally lists the thousands of jobs a woman did or might do during the Civil War era. If a woman earned a dime doing it, it’s in here. Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986) is the best overall examination of the “culture of commercial leisure” (her phrase) and the dangers of the new, unsupervised world of dance halls and amusement parks and the practice of treating.
“The Story of a Sweatshop Girl,” originally printed in Independent, no. 55 (1902) and reprinted in David Katzman and William Tuttle, eds., Plain Folk: The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); Benita Eisler, ed., The Lowell Offering: Writings by New England Mill Women 1840–1845 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1977); Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood (1889; Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1973); Bessie and Marie Van Vorst, The Woman Who Toils: Being the Experience of Two Ladies as Factory Girls (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1903); Alvin F. Harlow, Old Bowery Days (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1931); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (London: Ox ford University Press, 1978). In Clara E. Laughlin, The Work-a-Day Girl: A Study of Some Present-Day Conditions (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1913), each chapter is an in-depth report on one of many lowly jobs. The book is illustrated with precise black-and-white photographs of lone working women; Hutchins Hapgood, Types from City Streets (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1910); Garry Gaines, The American Girl of the Period: Her Ways and Views (New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1878); Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls (New York: MacMillan, 1911); Esther Packard, A Study of Living Conditions of Self-Supporting Women in New York City (New York: Metropolitan Board of the Young Women’s Christian Association, 1915); Carol B. Schoen, Anzia Yezierska (Boston: Twayne, 1982); Louise Henrikson, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life (Piscataway, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988); Robert A. Woods and Albert J. Kennedy, Young Working Girls: A Summary of Evidence from Two Thousand Social Workers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913); Derek and Julia Parker, The Natural History of the Chorus Girl (London: David and Charles, 1975).
Store and office culture:
Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986); “‘The Customers Ain’t God’: The World Culture of Department-Store Saleswomen,” in Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz, eds., Working-Class America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); John William Ferry, The History of the Department Store (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Robert Hendrickson, The Grand Emporiums: The Illustrated History of America’s Great Department Stores (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); Lisa M. Fine, The Souls of the Skyscraper: Female Clerical Workers in Chicago, 1870–1930 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); Helen Woodward, a successful advertising woman who began as a secretary, argued that stenography was “a woman’s shortest cut to a big job,” in Through Many Windows (New York: Harper Brothers, 1926); Grace Dodge, A Bundle of Letters (New York/London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1887); Florence Wenderoth Saunders, Letters to a Business Girl: A Woman in the World of Business (“…replete with Practical Information Regarding the Perplexing Problems of a Girl Stenographer…”) (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1908); Mary S. Fergusson, Boarding Homes and Clubs for Working Women, Bulletin No. 15 (The U.S. Bureau of Labor, 1898).
Working-girl novels:
Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a New York Working Girl (1905; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990): the controversy surrounding the authentic
ity of the author’s account was never officially resolved, although it seems she likely did as she said: had some early experiences as a working girl, then later in life went back as an undercover reporter. The sticking point was how much time she could possibly have spent as a young penniless girl in the factories. In her hometown, she worked for the Pittsburgh Dispatch; in New York she wrote for many publications, including Eugene Debb’s Social Democrat, and in 1899 she began a ten-year engagement at the New York Herald. That’s when she did her research for what’s been called—and I think, accurately—an autobiographical novel. Richardson published another novel in 1924, The Book of Blanche, this one about a single woman, a musician, trying to establish herself in New York City. The book, less socially conscious, had more traditionally romantic and sexual concerns, but as in The Long Day, the heroine never marries.
Sinclair Lewis, The Job, 3d ed. (1917; Omaha: Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, 1994), Main Street (1920; New York: Dover, 1999), and Ann Vickers (New York: P. F. Collier, 1933); Christopher Morley, Human Being (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1932) and Kitty Foyle (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1939); Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900; New York: Penguin Classics, 1986) and Jennie Gerhardt (1910; New York: Penguin, 1994); Anzia Yezierska: The Breadgivers (1925; New York: Persea, 1999) and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (New York: Persea, 1999).
