Spinster (46 page)

Recently women's historian Kathryn Sklar showed me a graph, so I could see for myself: a straight line marches steadily at the 8.02-mark across two centuries—until the early 1800s, when it begins a sharp plummet and steadily declines over the next 120 years. By 1900, the average had dropped to 4 children per family. It sank further during the Great Depression, to 3, then rebounded in the late 1940s and 1950s. What we think of now as the mid-century Baby Boom really just put us back where we'd been in 1900—to an average of 4 children per family. In the 1970s and 1980s family size shrank to its lowest ever—between 1 and 2 children—and has hovered there ever since.

We still don't know how to fully explain this radical shift. My first guess was migration to the cities, but Sklar explained that fertility has always been low in urban centers—I was shocked to
learn that fertility decline was actually
driven
by rural areas. She said that demographers point to the importance of families and women within families wanting to control their economic futures in new ways. Some even argue that this “industrious” attitude, which preceded the Industrial Revolution, made the Industrial Revolution possible.

In her fascinating paper “Victorian Women and Domestic Life,” Sklar argues that the transformation from large to smaller families happened because for the first time in American history women of all classes and races were consciously exerting control over their own bodies and the reproductive process. This “widespread adoption of family limitation,” combined with all the other radical changes taking place in America between 1830 and 1880—the transportation and communications revolutions, the abolition of slavery, and the separation of public and private life, to name a few—actually “constituted change in human history on the scale of the Neolithic Revolution.”

Which is to say: It was the first time women as a group (as opposed to scattered individuals) had ever exerted control over their own bodies and the reproductive process. The first time women were acting on the idea that they were people first, women second.

Sklar uses as one of her case studies Charlotte Perkins Gilman's great-aunt, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet married Calvin Stowe in 1836, when she was twenty-four. By 1843 she had five children, including a pair of twins. Their marriage was a good one. But the next summer, in 1844, Calvin left home to travel for work, as he did every year, and in the series of letters they exchanged while he was away, a stalemate emerges.

He is very forthcoming about his attraction to her. “Every desire I have, mental and physical, is completely satisfied and filled up, and leaves me nothing more to ask for. My enjoyment with you is not weakened by time nor blunted with age, and every
reunion after separation is just as much of a honeymoon as was the first month after the wedding,” he writes. “Yet we are not as happy as we might be.”

This oblique reference is to their sexual life. In her own way, Harriet has been making it clear that she's had enough of the demands of wifedom. “I am sick of the smell of sour milk and sour meat, and sour everything, and then the clothes
will
not dry, and no wet thing does, and everything smells mouldy; and altogether I feel as if I never [want] to eat again.” In another letter she writes, “I feel no life, no energy, no appetite…in fact, I am becoming quite ethereal.”

What she doesn't state outright is the memory of her own mother, who gave birth to eleven children before dying at forty-one. Harriet would not allow herself the same fate. Her method of contraception was sexual abstinence. In the spring of 1846 she fled to Brattleboro, Vermont, for a water cure, and stayed for ten months. Almost immediately upon her return home, Calvin did the same, staying away for fifteen months. In this way, for six years—1843 to 1849—Harriet avoided pregnancy. In 1848 and 1850, when she was thirty-seven and thirty-nine, she gave birth twice more, thereby omitting, as Sklar puts it, two to three children that her mother did not.

No doubt her sister Catharine approved. In her wildly popular
Treatise on Domestic Economy
, first published in 1841 and reprinted every year until 1856, she wrote that the most important fact in a woman's life was whether or not she controlled it, for “there is nothing, which so distinctly marks the difference between weak and strong minds, as the fact, whether they control circumstances, or circumstances control them.”

As the numbers show without a shadow of a doubt, Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband were part of a national trend toward family planning that affected all classes and groups. The Victorian era has gone down in the popular imagination as a
century-long frigidity-fest. In fact, Sklar suggests, the so-called “passionlessness” we attribute to Victorian women was their ingenious means of shutting down their own libidos, and those of their husbands, in order to abstain from sex at a time when birth control was unreliable and/or simply physically uncomfortable (e.g., sheep intestine).

More than a century has passed. Today we tell girls to grow up to be or do whatever they want. But the cultural pressure to become a mother remains very strong; rare is she who doesn't at least occasionally succumb to the nagging fear that if she remains childless, she'll live to regret it.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's adolescent declaration to her beloved Martha Luther, then, remains among the most prescient things she ever wrote. Here is the passage I quoted earlier, this time with the salient phrase in bolded letters:

I am really getting glad not to marry…. If I let that business alone, and go on in my own way; what I gain in individual strength and development of personal power of character,
myself as a self
,
you know, not merely as a woman, or that useful animal a wife and mother
, will, I think, make up, and more than make up in usefulness and effect, for the other happiness that part of me would enjoy.

While researching this book taught me the true value of the spinster, writing it made me see that the question I'd long posed to myself—whether to be married or to be single—is a false binary. The space in which I've always wanted to live—indeed, where I have spent my adulthood—isn't between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn't even belong here in the twenty-first century.

The question now is something else entirely: Are women people yet? By which I mean: Are we finally ready for a young woman to set out on the long road of her life as a human being who inhabits but isn't limited by her gender? We've been evolving toward this new question ever since America was founded, albeit excruciatingly slowly and with many stops and starts along the way. Until the answer is an undeniable yes, a girl actually can't grow up like a boy, free to consider the long scope of her life as her own distinct self.

I grant that a wholesale reclamation of the word
spinster
is a tall order. My aim is more modest: to offer it up as shorthand for holding on to that in you which is independent and self-sufficient, whether you're single or coupled.

If you're single, whether never-married, divorced, or widowed, you can carry the word
spinster
like a talisman, a constant reminder that you're in very good company—indeed, part of a long and noble tradition of women past and present living on their own terms.

If you find yourself unhappily coupled, you can use the word
spinster
to conjure a time when you weren't, and to recall that being alone is often far preferable to being in a bad relationship. Figuring out how to reclaim that happier self can offer a road map out.

For the happily coupled, particularly those balancing work and children,
spinster
can be code for remembering to take time out for yourself. And if you've never learned how to be alone in a way that feels fruitful and energizing, there's no time like the present. As the never-married Sarah Orne Jewett wrote in her 1896 novella
The Country of the Pointed Firs
, which remains one of the best books about the many varieties of the single experience:

There are paths trodden to the shrines of solitude the world over,—the world cannot forget them, try as it may; the feet of the young find them out because of curiosity and dim foreboding; while the old bring hearts full of remembrance.