SPINSTERS
The married state was certainly held up as the desirable norm for women, but for many it was unattainable or undesirable. From around 1850, evidence of a ‘surplus' of women in the population fuelled discussion of the problem of the ‘redundant' woman.
In previous centuries there had always been a relatively high proportion of never-married adults in the population — up to25 per cent. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, northern Europe with its relatively high age at first marriage of around 26 had more single women than southern European states where women tended to marry younger, but by the end of the eighteenth century women in Italy, Spain and Portugal began to wait longer before marriage.72 Lifelong single women were still more common in northern Europe, and in towns rather than rural areas, but local conditions such as the availability ofwork for both sexes, inheritance customs, real wages and the option of alternative ways of life, such as the convent, influenced the proportions of women never marrying in any one state, region or town. In the Haute Loire region of France, some parishes counted up to 25 per cent spinster or widow-headed households; similarly in fishing communities in the far north of Britain up to one-quarter of households were headed by women, the majority either unmarried or widowed.73 Yet, despite the ubiquity of the spinster, her position has seemingly always been interpreted as marginal, ‘a lifetime of peripheral existence... a functionless role played out at the margins of other people's lives without even that minimal raison d'etre — the possibility of bearing children.'74 It is no coincidence that accusations of witchcraft focused on the unmarried or masterless woman who was neither protected nor, apparently, sexually fulfilled by a man. In popular literature the spinster acquired negative connotations, she became, as Hufton describes her, a ‘sempiternal spoilsport in the orgy of life.'75 In Fanny Burney's popular novel Camilla, Mrs Mittin called herself ‘Mrs' even though she was single, because to be thought of as a young widow was far preferable to the alternative: ‘and if one is called Miss, people being so soon to think one an old maid, that it's disagreeable.'76
More recently, though, the single woman or spinster has been rehabilitated by historians who have insisted that not only was spinsterhood a state of choice for some, but it also permitted a woman to take advantage of opportunities unavailable to her married sisters.
For some, spinsterhood has been interpreted as a form of resistance to the confinement of marriage and motherhood. Thus, the asexual, sad, unfulfilled singleton, unable to contract a marriage or kept at home by elderly parents, has been transformed into the independent career or businesswoman, the eternal aunt, if not at the centre then very close to family life, or the woman living in a female partnership.77 In this process, the term ‘spinster' itself has been given back its original meaning — a female spinner — casting off the negative associations of the nineteenth century implying a mean-spirited and bitter old maid.Through the course of the nineteenth century the popular discourse on the desirability, if not the necessity, of marriage for a woman grew more insistent as the ideology of domesticity took hold. This is not to underestimate the pressure on women to marry in earlier times, although a fair number of eighteenth-century women seem to have gone to some lengths to avoid it and some made positive choices in favour of the single life.78 However, by the early nineteenth century, marriage, not trade, came to be seen as a middle-class woman's means of survival. Consequently, the plight of the ‘redundant’ woman symbolised to many middle-class commentators a wider social disorder.79 To counter the threat they supposedly posed, unmarried women were urged to find a new respectable role, usually in a pseudodomestic context such as the girls’ school, the hospital or religious community. One English advice book of 1858 recommended unmarried women to ‘find some harmless mode of doing active service’ on the grounds that in the absence of such a role ‘she inevitably becomes the prey of her own egotism’.80 Such admonitions were invariably directed at the middle-class spinster, and significant numbers responded, although it is not entirely clear whether institutionalisation was a positive choice for women who were disinclined to marry or a necessary fall-back for middle-class girls who were in need of a vocation and a place to live.
Unmarried working-class women were perceived as less of a problem since they were more likely to be accommodated within a household, most often as a domestic servant.Changing patterns of employment meant that by the mid-nineteenth century there were areas where women were in high demand as workers, leading to a notable imbalance in the sex ratio — for example in textile towns and other concentrations of female employment such as the lace industry in Nottingham, jute in Dundee and herring-gutting in Shetland — and girls were warned not to move to these places if they wished to find a mate. The Girl’s Own Paper of 1886 warned teenage girls that the chances of finding a husband even in London were slim, citing the 1881 census figures of 1123 women to every 1000 men.81 In Shetland, where the fishing industry accounted for the long-term absence and the high mortality of men, the average ratio of 131 women to 100 men between 1801 and 1891 resulted in a high proportion of female-headed households on the islands and a large number of households containing various combinations of unmarried female relatives: sisters, aunts and daughters. In rural communities where work opportunities were scarce, the unmarried needed to be part of a larger household. Survival alone was very hard. In the more marginal agrarian economies of the Western Isles of Scotland, many farms came to be run by women as men left to find work in the towns. But in the more productive agricultural areas, the position of single women was progressively marginalised. In Ireland at the end of the century, female labour shifted into the home and women became increasingly dependent upon male heads of households. At the same time the number of women permitted access to the world of full-time housewifery via marriage was shrinking. The options for an unmarried woman in Ireland were limited: emigration was one of the most popular solutions; remaining as an unpaid familial servant was another.82
The single life was undoubtedly more difficult for a woman than a man in all kinds of ways. Economically, single women were worse off than their male counterparts.
The limited employment opportunities for women and poor wage rates meant that many unmarried women of all social classes existed precariously. The gradual marginalisation of women from the artisan trades in the eighteenth century and the gendered division of labour which accompanied industrialisation, combined to exclude women from male earning privileges. The tendency for middle-class spinsters to find work as governesses and lower-class women to become domestic servants is unsurprising in an economy in which women's work and wages were based on their being wives within a wider household economy. In the absence of a male breadwinner a woman was obliged to find a substitute family to perform a similar function. ‘Spinster clustering', whereby a number of unmarried women formed a household, was most likely an economic strategy although we should not rule out the importance of same-sex friendships or unions amongst women of all social classes.83 Despite these survival strategies, single women were the largest group in receipt of poor relief, especially when they became aged and were unable to undertake paid employment. However, few poor and aged spinsters left their own homes for institutions. Women were keen to retain their independence — around 26 per cent of elderly women in England lived either alone or shared a household with unrelated residents in 1891 — and parishes in England often provided almshouses and cottages to keep them out of the poorhouse.84 Amongst the middle classes there is some evidence to suggest the image of the desperate ageing spinster living in ‘genteel poverty' may be an exaggeration. In the smart west end of Glasgow, by the end of the century spinsters headed 13 per cent of households and some of these women were financially quite well off, either from their own business success or as a result of inheritance.85As definitions of femininity were increasingly predicated upon dependence, unlike in the early modern period, single middle-class women who engaged in trade or who acted as independent businesswomen were in some danger of compromising their femininity.86 In the words of Sarah Stickney Ellis in 1839: ‘if a lady but touch any article, no matter how delicate, in the way of trade, she loses caste, and ceases to be a lady.'87 Yet, spinsters did continue to engage in business, both as major contributors to family enterprises and as independent women.
They had little choice. In England, teaching, innkeeping and shopkeeping were the most popular activities for unmarried women. Moreover, by the end of the century single women, especially those who had benefited from improvements in girls' education, were the main beneficiaries of the new areas of ‘respectable' white-collar employment. In one middle-class area of Glasgow, for instance, the census recorded single women in a wide range of occupations including governess, teacher, dressmaker (the most popular), shop assistant and clerical worker.88 Single middleclass women in towns and cities who inherited property from the family business employed factors — middlemen — to appoint tenants, collect the rent and deal with the grubby, unladylike side of the property business on their behalf. In Imperial Berlin (1871—1918), numerous single and widowed women earned a respectable living by running boarding houses. Taking in lodgers could be seen as a natural extension of the role of housewife and it enabled middle-class women to maintain their status through erecting a fayade of not working.89 The landlady, though, always risked her reputation, working as she did at the interface of bourgeois respectability and urban prostitution since, undoubtedly, some boarding houses were fronts for brothels, at least in the popular imagination. Teaching remained one of the more respectable occupations for an educated single woman. In Glasgow by 1881, 84 per cent of female heads of households who were teachers were spinsters.90 Teaching offered some degree of financial security and positioned the spinster within an acceptable occupational framework (working with children, often subject to a male head) which mirrored the home.It would be a mistake to group spinsters under the umbrella of independent women, notwithstanding the fact that some from the middle class did forge an autonomous lifestyle outside marriage and free of family obligations. Indeed, the majority of unmarried women remained locked into familial relationships, whether their own or other people's.
The family became either a ‘refuge from the shame of spinsterhood', an arena of activity which provided an alternative identity, or a means of economic survival.91 Consequently, single women typically worked as carers of young, sick and elderly family members, they were active in philanthropy, ministering to poor families, and they fulfilled similar roles for the state — as foster mothers, nannies, nurses and teachers. The story of Alice Jay, the eldest daughter of an Essex farm labourer, is a case in point. When still quite young she left the family home to keep house for her uncle and aunt, their daughter and her handicapped child in Durham. She stayed for a number of years until her uncle died, at which time she moved south to live in with another relative. She never married but was always part of a family.92 The life of a single woman, then, was like her married sister's, defined by family responsibilities. It was this plight which roused feminists to demand improvements in education for girls in order that unmarried women might be given the means to pursue economic independence.The First World War decisively shifted the sex ratio in Europe, creating a generation of young women for whom marriage must have appeared an unlikely prospect. Yet this harsh reality was not reflected in the popular discourse of the immediate postwar era. The so-called bachelor-girl was a temporary status to be enjoyed before marriage, a sentiment expressed in a British girls' magazine of the 1920s: ‘But is there a single modern girl for all her modernity and, perhaps, her occasional scoffs at romance who doesn't deep down in her, look forward to a time when she will make a little home for herself and the boy she loves?'93 In the nineteenth century the spinster had been marginalised by economic realities and the ideology of domesticity; after the war, a time when spinsterhood was a stark reality for many women, the legitimacy of the permanent unmarried state was still scarcely admitted.