This article is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Family History devoted to spinsters, who are defined as women who have not married by age 35 and are thus unlikely ever to marry. Relatively high propor tions of spinsters in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raise questions for the history of marriage, the family, and women. After in troducing the articles in this issue, the author discusses differences in the propor tions of women never-marrying in China and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe, and the association of spinsterhood with the timing of mar riage, the sex ratio, economic circumstances, and religion.
Single women in agriculture -- Single women in manufacturing -- Single women in business -- Teachers, governesses and ladies' companions -- Spinsters who stayed at home -- Spinsters and learned ladies -- The poor spinster and the poor law -- Crime, prostitution and the single woman -- The surveillance of single women -- Ways of escape -- Religion and the spinster -- Friendship and pastimes
The Western European folk model of spinsterhood portrays the spinster as a woman who eschews marriage because of economic difficulties or who deliberately chooses a career other than marriage. How does this model fare in other societies? Using population registers covering a single village in Japan in the preindustrial period (1671-1871), this paper finds that spinsters are rare. There are few economic bars to marriage, but, more importantly, there are no careers for unmarried women. They do not serve as domestic servants or as sur rogates in other roles in the household; they do not occupy specialist helping roles, and they do not become religieuses. On the contrary, even women whose prospects are slim are deliberately placed in households as married women. Hence, spinsterhood in Western Europe is an anomaly. Its existence must be ex plained, not assumed.
Several theorists of social change have argued that there are profound transformations in social interactions emerging in the context of wider social, cultural and economic change, including a shift to greater choice and fluidity in personal relationships. Alongside this, there has been widespread academic support for the notion of individualism as a major explanation of family change, with several commentators raising concerns that changing familial forms signal increasing self-centredness and a decline in commitments to others. Remaining single can be seen as paradigmatic of such individualisation, and single women in particular risk being characterised by their lack of connection to significant others. However, there has been relatively little empirical attention to the relationships of single people. This paper draws on research on never-married single women in Britain and analyses their relationships with both kin and non-kin in relation to claimed transformations in intimacy prevalent in contemporary debates. It concludes by considering the implications of the main findings of this research for sociological debates about the changing conceptions of both intimacy and 'the family'.
Terms of kinship are closely related to the lexico-semantic group associated with gender and age denomination, as well as the group associated with the determination of social status. Everything considered a norm has a high social status. Married women and men, children born in marriage fall under the norm. A situation is considered normal when a woman and a man perform their functions in marriage well, i. e. they take care of each other, their children, elderly parents, the house; a woman lives in her husband's house. Everything that is contrary to the norm receives a negative assessment. Accordingly, people who are unmarried for various reasons, i.e. single men and women, have a low social status in traditional culture: spinsters and bachelors, widows and widowers, divorced spouses; illegitimate children; children who have lost or never had parents (or one of the parents), i. e. orphans; childless spouses; a woman who had a baby out of marriage; women and men who poorly perform their functions in marriage (bad parents, bad spouses – for example, drinkers, adulterers); a husband who came to live in his wife's house. The article analyzes denomination and motivation for denomination of spinsters and bachelors, i. e. people who have never been married or got married at an older age as compared to what is considered 'normal'. For the designation of a girl who did not get married in due time, about 20 lexemes and 30 attributive combinations were noted in Arkhangelsk dialects. Accordingly, there were noted about 20 lexemes and one and a half dozen word combinations designating a bachelor. To denote a spinster, there are used the same lexemes as for denoting a girl of marriageable age: virgin, girl, maid, etc. Words that have a direct meaning in the age and gender category receive a different meaning after being transfered to the lexico-semantic group 'Social status'. The same lexemes can be used in other meanings, for example, 'a woman who had a baby out of marriage'. Word combinations or phraseological units may be a motivation for the formation of lexemes denoting a spinster. Noteworthy are parallel names: old / elderly maid ~ old/elderly guy; starukha, staritsa ~ starik, starets (derived from the root 'star', which conveys the idea of being old); perestarok – for both men and women; kholostyak (which is explicitly translated as 'bachelor') ~ kholostovka, kholostyachka (feminine gender versions of 'kholostyak'); bobyl' ~ bobylka. However, this parallelism can be purely superficial: where a single man is concerned, the designations under study mean, as a rule, a guy who is not married yet; but when it comes to a single woman, the designations refer to a girl who has already missed the right time to get married. The change in the emphasis is very significant. The study is based on the material from published volumes of the Arkhangelsk Regional Dictionary, its card catalog and the author's field notes.
British society of the mid-nineteenth century contained a large excess of single and widowed women over single and widowed men. To contemporaries one important offshoot of this situation was a major "spinster problem, " which was focused especially on difficulties in finding suitable occupations and residen tial locations for single women as they aged. This paper uses a national sample from the 1851 manuscript census to explore the social situation of spinsters over the life course and to compare their situations with those of bachelors and of women of other marital statuses. The data show the importance of domestic ser vice and familial employment for younger spinsters and the significance of Poor Relief and property income for spinsters in old age. Residentially, institutions and living with kin were particularly significant for older spinsters. The paper concludes by relating the life cycle experience of spinsters to the growing body of evidence on the nature of the life cycle in Britain in the 200 years before the Second World War.
"This study entails a qualitative cultural film analysis of single women characters in six contemporary US-American movies released between 1999 and 2008. On the one hand, the focal point is the assessment of character portrayals and their embedding into their everyday lives. On the other, it focuses on the correlation between age, gender, and marital status. Results show that an acknowledgement of different kinds of single older women seems prevalent, yet also reveal a dominance of hetero-normativity. It is concluded that Hollywood offers a so called counter world of single women and aging, particularly with regard to socio-economic strains, health, and an active aging process where one can look 'younger'."--Publisher description
This article argues that the status of spinster was associated with widowhood in the decades after the First World War in Britain, an association that is still active in our collective memory. Widely publicized census statistics suggesting that a whole generation of young men perished during the war led to the beliefs that an accompanying generation of women had lost lovers and fiancés, would be unable to marry, and were therefore deprived of the chance of leading "normal," happy lives. Drawing upon a range of sources, including census statistics, fiction, poetry, autobiography, and oral history, the author examines the consequences of these beliefs for unmarried women in the context of a society that privileged marriage and nuclear families with male breadwinners and dependent wives over all other family formations.
