Spinster (45 page)

After meeting Edith Konecky, I decided I might as well call Richard Rupp, the professor who'd found Maeve in the nursing home, to hear him tell the story. Toward the end of our conversation he said something I couldn't let go of: “She had a good life up there, but it was a miserable life because she was unlucky in love.”

Over the years I've noticed that only men use this phrase—“unlucky in love”—in reference exclusively to unmarried women,
as if they can't possibly comprehend that contentment or even happiness is possible without the centrality of a man. Even my father said it to me once, with all good intentions, after a breakup. I told him that I was sad for sure that the relationship hadn't worked out, but that in fact I considered myself lucky in love: I'd had the pleasure of falling in love several times, with men who loved me in return. Just because one or the other of those relationships hadn't lasted my entire life didn't detract from what I'd gained. Edna Millay summed it up rather nicely in her sonnet “I Shall Forget You Presently, My Dear”:

I would indeed that love were longer-lived,

And vows were not so brittle as they are,

But so it is, and nature has contrived

To struggle on without a break thus far,—

Whether or not we find what we are seeking

Is idle, biologically speaking.

Clearly Maeve's mental health contributed to her downfall. But I wasn't convinced being “unlucky in love” had all that much to do with it.

Ragged Island, Casco Bay, Maine

By now you've surely noticed that of my five “awakeners” only three—Neith Boyce, Edna Millay, and Maeve Brennan—ever met the official definition of spinster.

I don't accept
all
the blame for this. When I attached myself to Neith and Edna, I didn't know they'd eventually “join the vast majority,” as Neith so memorably put it. I'd been dimly aware from the first that Maeve had married, briefly, but her
writing persona was so solitary that I managed to forget this until Angela Bourke published her biography. Besides, two open marriages and one unsatisfying interregnum with an alcoholic don't really represent marriage as I'd ever thought of it. Edith Wharton chose me, not the other way around, so her marriage doesn't count.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman represents a category all her own. Her ability to think clearly and deliberately about each stage of her life
*
¹
taught me the most about the long-ago fantasy that set my adult life into motion: the spinster wish.

In my early twenties, the “spinster wish” was my private shorthand for the novel pleasures of being alone. As I grew older, and felt more strongly the cultural expectation of marriage, the words became more like a thought experiment, a way to imagine in detail what it would look like to never settle down. The word
wish
is crucial. A wish is a longing, not a plan of action. It was perhaps precisely because I found so much meaning and satisfaction in my relationships that I conjured such an escapist fantasy, not because I didn't want such relationships, but because I also wanted to find other avenues of meaning and identity.

Only now, looking back, do I see that this thought experiment ultimately doubled as positive reinforcement; by continuing to wonder about and converse, internally, with “ambiguous women”—the scholar Carolyn Heilbrun's wonderful term for those who choose not to center their lives around a man—I became one.

It wasn't until I researched this book and came to a more
comprehensive understanding of the largely unwritten history of the “ambiguous woman,” that I truly fell in love with the word
spinster
itself. To explain why, I must briefly share two more history lessons.

The first lesson predates the lives and times of my five awakeners. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, in early America spinsters were usually outcasts, pushed to the edges of society by circumstance, where they often endured painful isolation and scorn.

This began to change during the American Revolutionary period, when the fervor for social and political independence inspired by our new Constitution ignited the minds of not a few thinking women to question the “conjugal imperative,” becoming what I think of as “radical spinsters”—quiet outsiders with a mission.

According to historian Lee Chambers-Schiller, among small pockets of New Englanders born between 1780 and 1840 arose what she calls a “Cult of Single Blessedness”
*
²
—unmarried women who chose and reveled in their status. Like the far more prominent Cult of Domesticity it wasn't an actual cult; rather, it was a way certain women (and there weren't all that many of them) thought of themselves in relation to the social order—specifically, as those women who chose to remain celibate rather than compromise their integrity by marrying merely for social or economic gain. By rejecting “the self-abnegation inherent in domesticity,” they engaged in the “cultivation of the self,” upholding
the single life “as both a socially and personally valuable state,” and “through the choice against marriage, articulated the values of female independence.”

Many of the era's most influential thinkers—most famously America's first female public intellectual, Margaret Fuller, the great suffragist Susan B. Anthony,
*
³
and the popular novelist Louisa May Alcott—remained single for most if not all of their lives. In 1984, when Chambers-Schiller published the first-ever historical study of these pioneers, she pulled her title,
Liberty, a Better Husband
, from an entry in Alcott's diary, written on Valentine's Day 1868, in which the never-married novelist mentions an article she'd just finished writing, titled “Happy Women.” “I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know,” notes Alcott, “for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”

I like to think that these writers and activists influenced the group of unmarried seamstresses who petitioned the Massachusetts State Legislature to give them their own village in the wake of the Civil War. The women argued that because they far outnumbered men in the region, and therefore couldn't marry, the state should, in effect, step up and be their husband. They requested “a tract of good cultivated land” divided into lots ranging from a half acre to five acres, each with “a good (but the cheapest possible) house.” Every woman would be provided with “rations, tools, seeds, and instructions in gardening” until she became self-supporting, at which point she'd pay off her debt and become sole proprietress of her domain, which she could leave to a female heir in the event of her death.

Such a reasonable, modest, even considerate request! Not surprisingly, the legislature didn't respond. But the proposal brilliantly
highlights the plight of an underclass of poor widows and would-be wives who had no choice but to go it alone—and yet, even more tellingly, responded with self-respect and ingenuity.

The second (and final) history lesson is about a centuries-long phenomenon known among demographers and historians as the “demographic transition”—a long, massive decline in family size that took place in the United States between 1800 and 1940.

Throughout the 1600s and 1700s, it was common for a woman to give birth nine months after her wedding and go on to get pregnant every two years, until she reached the end of her fertility or died (whichever came first). Even with high infant-mortality rates, the enormous risks presented by both pregnancy and childbirth, the fact that some women never married, others were infertile, and still others developed secondary infertility, the average “completed” family—those with mothers who survived to age fifty—had 8.02 children.