Blessed or Not? The New Spinster in England and the United States in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

After 1870, single women in England and America began to speak favorably about spinsterhood. With new acceptable means to earn money and with a growing openness about the fragility of happiness in marriage, employed or financially independent middle-class women no longer regarded marriage as necessary for financial support or self-respect. In magazine articles, single women compared their lives to those of their married friends and told readers that spinsterhood, with its financial and intellectual independence, could be a rational choice. Though social commentators worried and warned of loneliness, these bachelor women enjoyed the amenities and companionship afforded by an urban setting. Novelists distrusted the spinsters' advocacy of single-blessedness as stories ended with the new female protagonists marrying. A minority that some times wavered, the new spinsters, by demonstrating a respectable option, helped to reverse traditional scorn for old maids and to pave the way for those who would later demand, like men, to combine work and marriage.