CHAPTER ONE

THE CLASSICAL SPINSTER: REDUNDANTS, THE SINGLY BLESSED, AND THE EARLY NEW WOMEN

My dear, to a brighter future—when there will not be so many forced marriages, and women will be taught not to feel theirs a destiny manqué, nor the threat of poor spinsterhood, should they remain single.

—BRITISH WOMAN, NINETEEN, WRITING TO A “MOST-BELOVED” (PRESUMABLY UNHAPPY) MARRIED SCHOOL FRIEND, 1859

He: Who’s the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair?

She: A spinster aunt.

He: Where are you, taking the picture?

She: I’m the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair. I’m poor

Aunt Charlotte. And I’m still not well.

—BETTE DAVIS, HAVING LOST WEIGHT, NOW, VOYAGER, 1942

The woman of a certain age is a very charming concept in French. In just about every other language it is a euphemism for having lost, through age, whatever charmant thing it was that made you charming. And for a woman who never married, there are no euphemisms. The “losing” in her case is a condition, a pathology. It is about as far removed from a charming concept as a brain tumor.

—DORIAN, THIRTY-EIGHT, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO PRODUCER, 2001

IN THE SPINSTER MUSEUM

It seems safe to say that in 2002 nobody is a spinster and that a certain percentage of the population is not entirely aware of what a spinster is. For those in the latter category, I offer a brief tour of the Classical Spinster Museum.

WHAT THE OLD GIRL LOOKED LIKE:

“…grey-haired…desiccated…with a funny little tic that twitched her left eye-brow, and a mole on her upper lip….”

—A DESCRIPTION OF MISS SKIDMORE FROM EDNA, HIS WIFE MARGARET AYERS BARNES, 1935

WHAT SHE DID EACH DAY:

“I went upstairs to my flat to eat a melancholy lunch. A dried-up scrap of cheese, a few lettuce leaves for which I could not be bothered to make any dressing, a tomato and a piece of bread and butter followed by a cup of coffee…a woman’s meal, I thought, with no suggestion of brandy afterwards.”

—MILDRED LATHBURY, HEROINE, EXCELLENT WOMEN, BARBARA PYM, 1951

WHAT OTHERS THOUGHT (IN ADDITION TO “IT’S SO SAD”):

“A woman alone is an atrocity! An act against nature. Unmarried women pose a grave danger…our great civilization could decline…the larger health of the nation is at stake.”

—A BRITISH MP, FROM A SPEECH GIVEN IN 1922

THUS HER POTENTIAL TO BECOME A MONSTER:

“It was the third house on the right side of our street…gray ranch, white curtains, and this lady who lived there…she lived all alone and she never came out…It was the ‘cootie’s house’ because all you saw was one eyeball peeking out the corner bay window. In my child sense, she was only an eye and not a body. You had to run past.”

—EDITH, FORTY-FOUR, DANCE COMPANY ADMINISTRATOR, 2001

It’s an odd and dusty exhibition, and yet pieces of the collection are still scattered about the culture. A forty-two-year-old pianist who called herself “Mildred—definitely Mildred” says that her relatives give her money as she leaves any family event, in case, as an unmarried, childlike person, she doesn’t have her own. Another woman, thirty-eight, describes phone calls from relatives and friends who are “really calling to make sure I have not died and, as no one noticed, I’ve gone ahead and decomposed.” A single stockbroker, thirty-six, says, “My sister asks me to do errands that often require me to stand on long lines and this is ‘reasonable’ to her because she has children and I do not. What is this presumption?”

I’d call it an essential part of the spinster legacy.

IN WHICH THE SPINSTER ARRIVES

The first spinsters appeared in thirteenth-century France and a bit later in Germany and England as spinners of cotton and wool. They were not yet spinsters but femmes seules—unwed young girls, orphaned relatives, and widows of the Crusades who performed their tasks within the self-sustained family home. Most stayed there. Yet there were some who lived independently, dealing for themselves with weavers and textile merchants and often earning their praise. As late as 1783, in a Description of Manchester, we learn that “weavers were…obliged to pay more for the spinning than the price allowed by the merchants ‘but darst not complain…lest lose the spinner.’”

Long before the industrial revolution—and before the implementation of a restrictive British common law—single women worked on their own in other ways. Town and city records, portions of which have been published in academic papers, indicate that unwed women in medieval France, England, and Germany traded in raw wool, silk, and rare spices. Some engaged in foreign trading and owned their own ships, and a few are said to have managed large estates and breweries.

On into the seventeenth century, spinster was used to identify a respectable employment category. When later that century the French began using spinster to indicate an unwed woman, the term was understood to be descriptive: a woman on her own, for any number of reasons, and in need of an income.

In England, however, another spinsterly model was in the making: the Old Maid, who first took form as a loud, bosomy theater grotesque known as “the Dame.” Here was a new female creature so vain, so rabidly flirtatious she seemed unaware that the men she desired found her repulsive. For best effect, the dame was played by a man. Even in France, where the view of the serious, dedicated spinner prevailed, the playwright Molière created a protospinster, his own prehistoric Old Maid, in the form of Bélise, a conceited and oblivious character in Les Femmes savantes (1672). Bélise has never wed, and without companionship, talking to or arguing with herself or whomever happens to be standing there, she has come to believe that she’s a genius. Just as the British recognized the dame as a harridan with access to rouge pots, so French spectators recognized this blathering female as a deluded idiote.

By the late eighteenth century, these apparitions—the spooky lone woman who was neither brilliant nor beautiful—had coalesced. The resulting character, often set down at the edges of good society, appears first in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771), a novel reexamined in a 1990 doctoral thesis, “Singleness of Heart,” by scholar Susan Leslie Katz. The spinster part is small but highly detailed, as if the curtain had risen on a sitting-room drama and there, standing rigidly far stage left, was an odd-looking woman in conversation with herself. As the creature inches her way center stage, a male voice relates the woeful tale of one Tabitha Bramble. (The name Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches. The baby witch on the beloved 1960s TV series Bewitched was named Tabitha. The grandmother witch, Endora, was exceptionally catty, a real Tabby. And, to switch popular forms, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey called his troops of excellent war-widow detectives “the Cattery.”) But back to the tragically appointed Miss Bramble:

In her person, she is tall, raw-boned, aukward, flat-chested, and stooping; her complexion is sallow and freckled; her eyes are not grey, but greenish, like those of a cat, and generally inflamed…. her forehead low; her nose long, sharp,…her lips skinny, her mouth extensive, her teeth straggling and loose, of various colours and conformation; and her long neck shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles—In her temper, she is proud, stiff, vain, imperious, prying, malicious, greedy, and uncharitable.

And I leave out her dog, a cursed animal. Tabitha kicked it.

Before the debuts of the Dickensian sideshow freaks—the world-renowned bride, Miss Havisham, Miss Wade of Little Dorrit, and Rosa Dartle of David Copperfield—and even before Hawthorne’s Hepzibah, the “mildewed piece of aristocracy” wandering her way through The House of the Seven Gables, many voices articulated the case against the old maid. In 1748 the Oxford English Dictionary defined her as “any spiteful or ill-natured female gossip or tattler.” Alexander Pope made it personal: “My soul abhors the tasteless dry embrace/of a stale virgin with a winter face.” Wordsworth commented with cool remove—describing a maiden withering on a stalk—while Henry Fielding expressed pure and immediate disgust: “She did not resemble a cow so much in her breath, as in the two brown globes which she carried before her.” A few years later he added this advice: “Young ladies” dared not venture too close to one of these “types for the girl was sure to be bitten by one, as by a mad dog.” That is, if the maid in question still had teeth. A widespread public discussion had established that the old maid’s teeth were rotting at a faster-than-average rate. Without explaining exactly why, one medical treatise, circa 1766, featured a spirited debate about whether or not the maid should have them all pulled to avoid embarrassment “to one’s relations” caused by rotting incisors.

In her early incarnations, the old maid was not associated with the industrious and respected spinner. Rather, she was a toothless parody of the uneducated minor noblewoman who had been trained for nothing more than marriage and then had failed to capture a husband. Just think of Cinderella’s stepsisters. (It’s not surprising that this groping sadistic duo emerged in their distinctive modern form in the Perrault version of the fairy tale published in seventeenth-century France.)

But the industrial revolution and its aftermath would permanently blur the distinctions between the goodly spinner and the crazy old maid.

Once the self-sustaining mercantile household—the entire working system of artisan, apprentice, and journeyman—collapsed, those who’d worked there, the spinners included, were left to negotiate a place within the new economy. Many spinsters sought work inside the textile mills, although the mills favored the very young girl and then usually fired her when she turned twenty, or at whatever point she began to seem “older,” meaning tired and likely to complain. More mature spinsters took custom sewing or quilting assignments known as “out work.” When they could. The competition was intense, there was never enough work to begin with, and many were forced to quit. A few daring misses took more public positions in small token or “cent” shops, but the large majority moved in with former employers or distant relatives, who supplied room and board in exchange for household work and child care. Those without any connections advertised. Governess, companion, nurse, fine seamstress—these positions would be pinned onto the spinster’s image like a wilted, brown-edged corsage.

Among the castaways were hundreds of unlucky upper-class girls. In some cases they’d been orphaned and their family homes lost to male relatives through the machinations of British inheritance laws. And some stood to lose prospective mates. With the industrial revolution, it had become common practice among the upper classes to postpone marriage until the groom had established himself financially. But in both Europe and the United States, many men had quickly learned to live well as bachelors, renting private rooms, joining private clubs, taking mistresses. Now, when the intended had suffered so drastic a setback, there was even less urgency to wed. As one MP put it, “Before us lies the disaster we have…watched coming. A girl who has trained for the arts of wifehood…schooled in the gracious arts, who fails so much as to wed? We witness the unfolding of a tragical redundant class.”

These perceived changes were amply documented in the 1851 British census. It seemed that there were in England 405,000 more women than men, creating a surplus in all segments of the female population.* Known as redundant or superfluous women, they officially became a social problem, and one with no easy remedy. Those who worked would compete for a limited number of jobs. And there were those who could not quite bring themselves to work. The pamphlet Dedicated to the Refined Young Lady, reprinted consistently from 1860 to 1905, dictated that one might make her way, without loss of station, in lace making, fancy needlework, or as a “paid reading partner.” She might also, under an assumed name, sell canned jams and jellies, write love stories for magazines, or give “dramatic readings.” The pursuit of an actual job, however, was impossible, for to work in an office, “to stamp envelopes…would greatly decrease the likelihood of marriage.” The better girl might work “for cake” but not “for bread.” (It should also be said that this girl might not be cut out to do real work of any kind. The résumé of Mattie Silver, the central female character in Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome, typifies the situation: “Her equipment, though varied, was inadequate. She could trim a hat, make molasses candy, recite ‘The Curfew Shall Not Ring Tonight,’ and play ‘The Lost Chord,’ and a pot-pourri from ‘Carmen.’”)

Yet many, of course, were left with few choices. The Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, were among those who routinely made visits to local “intelligence,” or employment, offices to apply for the scant number of jobs hundreds had applied for already. In Charlotte’s case, the jobs she eventually secured provided background and details for three of the most complex single heroines in all literature: the stoical Jane Eyre, Caroline Helstone of Shirley (1849), and, my favorite, Lucy Snowe of Villette (1853), a boarding-school teacher so fiercely self-contained—she has suffered a severe trauma she cannot speak of—that Jane Eyre, in comparison, seems like a gay lady at Mr. Rochester’s house party. When left alone at the school during a holiday, Lucy suffers one of the most realistic nervous breakdowns in all literature. If not strictly autobiographical, this episode suggests that the author at a young age knew the misery of enforced, impenetrable solitude.

William Makepeace Thackeray wrote, intending to praise Charlotte Brontë, that she was “that fiery little eager brave…tremulous creature!” As he explained, “[I] see that rather than any other earthly good…she wants some Tomkins to love her and to be in love with her. But you see this is a little bit of a creature, without a penny of good looks, thirty years old, I should think, buried in the country.” She was a spinster. But at least a spinster with talent.

With so many others lacking literary or any other talents, what was Great Britain to do? The most famed proposal, entirely serious, came from one W. R. Gregg, a conservative commentator, in 1862. In his view it was essential that the British “restore by emigration of women that proportion between the sexes in the old country and in the newer ones.” The difficulty, he imagined, would be “chiefly mechanical. It is not easy to convey a multitude of women across the Atlantic or the Antipodes by an ordinary means…. Totransport the half million from where they are redundant to where they are wanted at an average of 30 passengers a ship would require 10,000 vessels, or at least 10,000 voyages.” (To clarify, the only transport of women out of Great Britain for reasons of marital status had occurred years earlier, when “purchase brides” had been shipped to the Virginia Colony for the “price of transport.”)

Gregg was ready for his critics. Should his scheme fall through, he had another, more practical solution for surplus waste. Under this plan, redundant women would be trained to behave like courtesans, thus attracting more men. Those too stubborn or proud to do so would, as promised, live out their miserly unadorned and childless lives as social lepers.

It should be noted that “stubborn and proud” in this situation referred at least in part to those women—educated, politically astute, or rebellious—who believed that a surplus of women existed only because nobody before had bothered to count them. Victorian men, as many saw it, lived to count, to document, to arrange and to name every detail of the physical world. This generation had drawn a map of the universe allowing for every phylum and genus; unmarried women fit no known categories.

In many ways, England offers up a textbook case history in spinsterism: A creature found in folklore and literature—the old maid—is dredged up, her traits grafted onto a segment of the female population that has become threatening—in this case, all those seemingly unwilling to wed. These women are assigned a subsecondary status and become, as a group, a cautionary icon for younger females: This Could Be You.

AMERICAN GOTHIC

Early America, early New England specifically, still holds the record for extreme intolerance toward single women. For years after the Salem hysteria, Americans regarded the unwed female, whether she was outspoken or mysteriously shy, with grave suspicion. The Puritans herded women into marriage, viewing it as a holding pen within which to grow the population and keep a firm lock on those deemed potentially threatening to it. Puritan doctrine preached that a woman possessed her own soul, as opposed to a soul meshed with her husband’s. She would be judged alone for her acts in this life, and it was her husband’s responsibility to be sure she remained true to God and that she behaved chastely for the greater good of the community. It was a job that required close scrutiny.

Throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an unwed Boston woman of twenty-three was labeled a “spinster”; at twenty-six she plunged into the leprous zone of the “thornback,” a name derived from an ugly spiny-backed fish. If a thornback belonged to no family—and life spans were so short, many girls at twenty-six were on their own—then she needed to seek out a well-respected, churchgoing male whose wife was schooled in female piety. She would live with them, doing chores and, like a moral orphan, studying Bible and proper conduct. She would never leave the property unless escorted by an adult family member or a male of good repute.

To quote a Boston bookseller, circa 1788, who’d seen his share of thornbacks: “Nothing can exceed it and [it is] look’d on as a dismal spectacle.”

Outside New England there seem to have been few such complications. One British traveler, Nicholas Crestell, called late-eighteenth-century America “a paradise on earth for women.” Excluding Massachusetts, a place with three times the usual number of spinsters, the colonial life was “luck incarnated.” Crestell wrote home: “That great curiousity the Old Maid, the most calamitous creature in nature, is seldom seen in this country.” So rare was this creature that she was called, so Crestell wrote, an “ancient maid.”

The phenomenon of the ancient maid was due largely to the “westward trek,” the monumental task of fulfilling America’s manifest destiny. Now here was a mighty concept that appealed to many men and drew thousands away from New England. As one historian would later put it: “Wives were as scarce in Idaho as husbands were in New England.”

Put another way, very few unwed New England women were inclined to trek after men into the wilderness. The self-educated spinster, in particular, understood just what was in store for her “out there.” At least one in twenty-five pioneer wives died in childbirth, and they were quickly replaced—the farms had to run; more children were needed to work the farms—and these next women, if they died, were quickly replaced and often replaced again.*

Back in the East, spinsters were evolving an early singular culture, based in friendships, books, teaching jobs, and tea parties that begin to suggest parlor scenes out of Henry James’s The Bostonians. Officials were quick to reassure the city’s men (of course some had stayed behind) and safely married women that these “other” women represented an aberration. To quote from an issue of the Farmer’s Almanac, 1869, “They’ve been left behind, as they are always left behind, and as they have diminished resources…they become diminished goods.” One very literal example: reputable Boston doctors began to report that spinsters were likely to develop shriveled ovaries, a natural occurrence, it seemed, if one did not make good use of them early on. (Sperm, God-blessed, was safe.) The 1855 census confirmed that the aberration was far more widespread than suspected: There was a surplus of forty-five thousand females in the New England states. Rather than ship them off to Canada—the Massachusetts governor’s initial declaration—politicians, essayists, and concerned married women decided it was time to clarify just what it was a spinster might do, and what natural restrictions could be applied to her actions.

This first public etiquette for American spinsters called for a muted surrender, as if a spiritual hysterectomy had been performed, leaving behind as scars an insecurity and chronic melancholia.* Typically spinsters helped with the chores at home and moved between the homes of married siblings who needed help. And as in England, they hired themselves out as paid companions, tutors, schoolteachers or assistants, and seamstresses. Within the household, even if this was her original family household, she was made to seem unimportant and childlike—for a woman’s adult life began at marriage—and she was expected to keep herself well occupied and out of the way. One force-fed book, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (1858), suggested that the maiden female not engage in any taxing physical activity, including walks, unless they were limited to the periphery of one’s property. The poor thing might wander off and happen upon a preacher, some itinerant revivalist who might excite her, and as this and other manuals explained, these women, naïfs, were prone to outbursts of ecstatic piety. “She must never risk to be made enthusiastic by religious fervour…or agitated,” warned the author, hinting obliquely at sexual arousal. But an “industrious, independent, cheerful” spinster (the words of a bishop) need not be treated like a neutered pet (my own). She made an excellent companion for aging parents; in short, she was like a walking retirement benefit.

Of course “spinsters,” having perfected this meager act, still hoped for future union—whether with like friends or, still, yes, perhaps a man. Consider this excerpt from an 1867 “storiette” (a very short story, usually romantic, published in early magazines and compilations). In this one, a thirty-eight-year-old woman awaits the arrival of a man she was once engaged to, a man who went off to find fortune and has now returned. Here she is before her looking glass:

“A lavendar gown,” said Miss Cambron, with a stiff and critical survey of herself in the glass…quite suited to thirty eight; some lines about the mouth and eyes; a mere ghost of color…a look not specifically young. He won’t come again! He’ll want some little blue eyes—with pink cheeks and a coral necklace! It’s not his fault [still] she stood at her mirror contrasting the image it gave her with another from the deepening glass of her memory—that of a young girl.

She goes on at some length about her lack of “bloom,” the rosy-colored cheeks that define a woman as happy and young. (The concept of “bloom” figures heavily into many nineteenth-century spinster novels; in Jane Austen’s Persuasion it is mentioned twenty-one times.) Once it goes, the skin is pallid, symbolizing inevitable and rapid decay.

But it is important now to pause and state that not all women shared this belief in slow evisceration or found it at all relevant to their futures.

TRUE WOMEN AND THE SINGLY BLESSED

They are not a widely known group of women. They led no particular movement, formed no political cells, did not even qualify as a peer cohort—still, they made some small history by saying no. No to marriage proposals, in which the concept of “forever,” as Florence Nightingale famously said, slid into “never.” As in never being wholly oneself; never being permitted to make up one’s own mind; never to be able to move about freely. In some sense, buried alive. Especially if one was marrying just to marry. As one Eliza Southgate wrote to a friend in 1841, “Which is more despicable? She who married a man she scarcely thinks well of—to avoid the reputation of ‘old maid’—or she who…preferred to live her single life?”

She who “preferred to live her single life” lived it most often in New England, from the 1830s through the mid-1870s. This was the era of “single blessedness,” an almost devotional phrase used by a fairly elite and intellectual band of single women to describe a state of unmarried bliss. To sketch a quick composite of this early rebel, we can say that she grew up amid intellectuals, preachers or writers, with left-leaning principles and a love of oration. Household conversation ranged from abolitionism, transcendentalism, or trade unionism to any other radical topic then debated at public meetings and in Unitarian church sermons. She may not have received an education like her brother’s, but on her own she had trained her mind the way others had worked to play delightfully upon the pianoforte, or to sing lieder (not that she lacked these more delicate talents). Living across an expanse of cities, towns, and states, these single women did not create a declaration of their beliefs. But if they had, it might have been this: a desire to elevate singlehood from its status as horrifying fate to “an expression of self-reverence.”

Dr. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, author of Liberty: A Better Husband, a dazzling book on these women, derived the term “singly blessed” from a letter, written in 1820 by a frustrated young woman, Eliza Chaplin, to her friend Laura Lovell. As Chaplin wrote of marriage and singlehood: “[rather than] endure the unhappiness that exists where minds are ‘fettered to a different mold,’ and rather [than] be subject to the ‘eternal strife’ which…prevails [I prefer] ever to remain in ‘single blessedness’ and deem it felicity thus to live.”

The list of women who described themselves this way was long: the abolitionist Grimké sisters, Florence Nightingale, the poet and onetime mill girl Lucy Larcom, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Vida Scudder, and M. Carey Thomas, second president of Bryn Mawr and one of the first women to attend Cornell. There were even a few men who agreed; commentator Aretemus B. Muzzy wrote during the 1840s: “A single life is not without its advantages; while a married one that fails…is the acme of earthly wretchedness.”

Single blessedness had its roots in the eccentric nineteenth-century New England household but, more important, in new attitudes toward female education. Starting at midcentury, many middle-class families began to send pubescent girls to boarding schools, and later a smaller number would send their most insistent marriage-aged daughters to “girls’ college.” (Among the elite schools, Vassar opened in 1861, Wellesley in 1870; Smith in 1871, and Bryn Mawr in 1885.) A few of the most determined enrolled in the small number of all-male schools admitting women, while the majority of the education-minded daughters attended the teaching academies known as “normal schools.”

No matter how unusual and enlightened her upbringing, no adolescent girl started out in life aspiring to a state of single blessedness. She entered boarding school understanding what any average woman knew: Marriage served as a woman’s only practical life solution. Moreover, it served as her moral and spiritual duty. If any aspect of this observation had been left unclear, every political, religious, educational, and literary force in the culture, every leader, of anything, wrote out or recited for girls the female life agenda: to make and maintain the family home, populating it with no fewer than five children (allowing for inevitable miscarriages), and to create within it a calm, well-decorated realm for her hardworking, exhausted husband.

Author Catherine M. Sedgwick, writing circa 1835, summarized the primitive female media blitz in this way: “By all the talk that we hear from old and young, married and single…marriage is not only the felicity of woman, but [the source of ] her dignity, her attractiveness, her usefulness…her very life depends on it!”

By the second or third year of school, the more intuitive, rebellious girl had come to grasp the underpinnings of the institution. Perhaps she’d learned that nuptial came from nupta, the Latin word for veil, or covering. In French the word was couverte, which gave rise to the full-surrender marital state known as couverture. As adapted in the United States from British common law, married women had no legal rights and were in essence the property of men, who owned and got to keep it all, including any children, in the case of divorce. As that translated on a day-to-day basis: He ventured forth into the world; she stayed inside. As it was said of these appointed spheres: “He for the world and commerce; she for the domestic, the nursery.” Or, as Milton had earlier expressed it: “He for God only; she for God in him.”

By graduation, such a girl would have understood the mechanics of Victorian marriage, and what historian Barbara Welter dubbed “the Cult of True Womanhood.” True womanhood was the brainchild of the “domestic feminists” (oxymoron notwithstanding), a group of reform-minded women who sought a conservative way to mediate their problem. Their problem, roughly summarized: What exactly should intelligent married women do, given that they didn’t belong in the world but had opinions and ideas too big for the house?

The best-known domestic feminist was Catherine Beecher, sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe (she watched the kids while Harriet wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and Henry Ward Beecher, the preacher now best remembered for his role in a sex scandal. As she and others viewed it, the Wife, exercising subtle manipulations—an exquisitely hypnotic feminine style—might exert some quiet influence over her husband, encouraging him to take certain desired actions out there in the world. At the same time, she’d project a radiant moral force over her children. Think of her as a human aerosol can, her sweet lingering residue infusing the house with calm, a sense of order for her brood, and, when needed, an undetectable means for mesmerizing her husband to get her way.

Not all marriages followed the stage directions—one partner set to play the whispering, encouraging angel and one to play the boss. But there was an inherent deceit in many male-female transactions. Consider that most men and women, husbands and wives, did not always know each other at the start of marriage. They knew only what to expect. No matter how pleasant on the surface, marriage could be what one young college girl called “a trial of inequality.” And not always in the ways expected. Activist Mary Dodge, who preferred instead of “singly blessed” the term “nobly discontent,” had put it this way: “True, he may be as good as she, but he might not be good enough for her.”

The best relationship a woman had was often with her girlfriends.

Sketches from the mid-and late nineteenth century show two women huddled together at the center of a dark velvet davenport, holding hands. During the Civil War era, they were dressed in crinolines so wide that the women look like matching parachutes—ready to jump, together. Later, in photographs, they’re shown strolling, bustles out and arms linked. A magazine illustration common throughout the Victorian age shows one writing a letter to the other, who is pictured inside a daydream cartoon balloon, the edges frilly, like a valentine, the beloved’s imagined face angelic.

Special friends usually met at boarding school, and typically their parents encouraged the duet. In the ideal parental scenario, two young girls would be “smashed”—think of best friends going steady—and once smashed, they’d learn trust, loyalty, tolerance, patience. Once they’d mastered these skills they would be able, theoretically at least, to transfer them onto a marital relationship. Even if those who wed never felt quite the same about their husbands.

At the time there were far fewer taboos on touching between same-sex friends and it was common for affectionate girls to kiss each other, to sleep in the same bed, and to engage in what we’d consider foreplay—and possibly more. The term “lesbian”—the very idea—did not in its current sense yet exist. Until it was redefined, circa 1919, to discredit “new spinsters,” that is, independent, professional singles, the word conjured a series of images from antiquity, usually transvestites, for example, a medieval Frenchwoman clad in armor and perched on a horse. Many girls’ school professors, prime examples of the singly blessed, lived with special friends—smashes that had turned into lifelong partnerships. To their students, what could have seemed more natural than women in pairs?

The intense devotion of many a smash is revealed in girls’ most secretive correspondence. One girl wrote of “the thrill of our pet dovey times” and a “burning sensation, both when I am with you—as you will know—and when I am alone and imagining back.” Studies made in 1900 of twenty thousand “Boston marriages”—two women who lived as sisters or lovers—and of numerous smashes revealed episodes of mutual masturbation. Other couples give no hint of overt sexual activity—or what we’d consider overt sexual activity—but were, rather, said to be playful and affectionate.

Whatever the precise nature of the bond, smashed girls likely remained friends for life, whether or not one of them married. “My every nerve springs forward at attention when I hear the post arrive!!” wrote a married friend to another who was far off and unwed. In long letters illustrated with ink drawings—self-portraits, fancy matching gowns, two women out strolling—they reaffirmed their feelings for each other and helped each other negotiate the requirements of married life. One engaged New Englander revealed to her dearest friend in 1782 a shocking decision: she would never change her name. “I think it a good [name] and am determined not to change it without a prospect of some great advantage. I am sure to confront a tribunal.”

Threatened by these connections, some men called them immature, proof that women underneath were really children who could not put away girlish toys and dolls and sit properly alongside their mates. As far back as 1847, a visitor to the United States, one Domingo Sarmiento, concurred: “Americans have developed customs which have no parallel on this earth—the unmarried woman flies about with her friends as if it were a butterfly.”

The more unusual man found beauty in these friendships, sometimes collecting and reading aloud women’s letters to one another. For this odd connoisseur, female love letters were refined works of sentimental expression, the prose equivalent of a hand-carved miniature or cameo. Scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg writes that Goethe published the love letters sent between his fiancée, Bettina, and a countess she was deeply attached to; Margaret Fuller, respected New England intellectual, found a U.S. publisher for the volume. To underscore how important these bonds were in the young (and older) female life, consider the life span of one early study on the subject, The Friendships of Women, by William R. Alger. It was published in Boston in 1869 and by 1890 had reached its twelfth printing.

It was obvious still that to marry was to win at the era’s female lottery—if not necessarily hit the jackpot—but the point is that a few women actively, and without trace of pathos, had begun to question the contest. In articles entitled “A Loyal Woman’s No,” and “The Difficulties That Accrue to Our Sex from the Marriage Bond,” they argued for allowing some female lives to evolve on their own terms, possibly with their own chosen friends or family. As one midcentury woman, a self-styled biological researcher, wrote to her “dearest dear”: “I cannot wait these days to turn 30! Then I may put away all pretense of being marriageable and concentrate on my interests.”

SEND ME NO FLOWERS

Starting in the 1870s, the marriage rate among educated women plummeted to 60 percent, compared with 90 percent of all women in the general population, and the figure would remain low until 1913 or ’14. Remember that these women lived in an era that celebrated feats of daring and genius in the visual and dramatic arts, social and physical sciences, transportation, politics, and archeology. Explorers, doctors, even realist novelists were heroes, secular gods lauded for their intellectual gifts and their bravery. A talented woman would have been acutely aware of her potential.

And she also would have been acutely aware that marriage carried with it specific dangers. One in every thirty women died in childbirth. And there was plenty of opportunity to witness a live unanesthetized birth before marriage, an experience that Susan B. Anthony herself called “a very nasty business.” (The entire nature of the business would become far nastier in 1880, when the U.S. government declared abortion and the few extant forms of contraception illegal—a ban on all abortions that would remain in place until the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.)

Then one had to contemplate husbands.

Even the loyal and genuinely loving ones couldn’t help but domineer, and many of them, even the very best, were likely to drink. In fact, it was widely accepted that all men drank, just as all men used spittoons and knew their way around a rifle. (Some even claimed drinking was healthy. Midcentury it was often argued that whiskey was cleaner and safer to drink than New York City public water.) Earlier in the nineteenth century the little-known but remarkable Women’s Moral Reform Society had railed against alcohol as the primary cause of spousal battering, rape, and the use of prostitutes. There were always pious groups who specialized in social cleanup, “municiple housekeeping,” as it was called. But none had made the explicit link between male drinking and male abuse of women. In its women-run newspaper, The Advocate, Moral Reform editors listed the names of men seen leaving brothels. As they saw it, this was “The Everyman” and they also called him “The Destroyer.” One Advocate writer stated, “I’d as soon bed down with a nice clean dog as with a man…holding a bottle.”

That’s not to say that the singly blessed used terms such as “The Destroyer” or that they refused to hear marriage proposals. Many young women had simply learned to reject them—no matter how often they were repeated.

In one famed case, a Boston woman refused the same man sixteen times; another allegedly turned down twenty-six different men. Poet Lucy Larcom, who worked for years as a mill girl in Lowell, Massachusetts, reported that her first proposal left her with hives for a week. Florence Nightingale seems to have turned them down weekly, pausing to consider just one man so exceptional, famed, and intelligent that only the most beautiful and brainy of the famed Nightingale girls would do. She spent six months writing furiously in her journals to explain her refusal, a grueling narrative alternating between rage and self-loathing, a suspicion of mental illness, and a tenuous pride in following the secret pledge she had made to her herself about her duties. My favorite terrorized-fiancé story belongs to Jane Austen, a young woman said by one of her closest friends to “shift,” to be charming and decorous and yet to possess “eyes the color of a viper’s.” Once, while visiting friends, she listened warily as a young suitor made so passionate a case, she stunned herself by accepting, then left for home. But not long into the ride she began to feel queasy. One hour later, she had her driver turn back, despite bad weather, to rescind her agreement. After seven hours of additional traveling she arrived home physically ill but relieved.

As more unattached women seemed to be working, giving speeches, or just out walking around at odd hours, the Massachusetts governor once again proposed direct action. This time he hoped to ship the state’s twenty-one thousand redundant women to Oregon or California, where wives, as always, were in short supply. (As historians would later point out, so were prostitutes, although this particular need the governor did not publicly address.)

The proposal died, but not the paranoid views of single women. What seemed to be changing was the way some single women, the “blessed” in particular, responded. In public situations, even the youngest had been trained to ignore nasty epithets and walk proudly. College women took an eager part in debates, for example, at Oberlin, “Is Married Life More Conducive to a Woman’s Happiness than Single?” or “Is the Marriage Relation Essential to the Happiness of Mankind?” True, for girls at coed schools it was hard, in almost any situation, not to run off crying. But there are records of girls who braved the taunting (“The Co-ed leads a wretched life/She eats potatoes from a knife!”). In an 1863 diary one college girl remarks that she is developing “a natural armor, which seems attached and fastened tight on to my body and brain. I hope someday I may step out of it.”

Professional women out on the road needed an even stronger suit of armor and perhaps a sword. The original abolitionists were typically booed off stages. Men called them hags who’d never had men and wanted to free the black “species” only so they could snag themselves a black male. Social workers and nurses typically slept in the worst parts of a city, sometimes among people who had contagious diseases. Others, traveling for pleasure, to see friends who’d married or gone to teach at far-off schools, suffered nasty comments along the way. Still, a trip for the single woman was a test, an adventure that would have been unimaginable to her as a girl; some stayed on the road for up to six months. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, founding feminist and the mother of seven, once wrote jokingly to her single and suddenly absent colleague, Susan B. Anthony: “Where are you? Dead or married?”)

Back at home, Theodore Roosevelt, an up-and-coming public figure, accused them of committing “race suicide,” meaning that they were failing to produce healthy white babies amid the many (I paraphrase) filthy, copulating immigrants. But as single women saw it, that was the vision of a paranoid man who happened, by chance, to be a politician. Ignoring him, they continued their school studies, their work, and their travel. Clara Barton’s sister, Mary, had an idea for them all. Like everyone else, she had “viewed from a safe distance the exquisite happiness of marriage.” In response, she declared, “Let us form an Old Maid’s Hall!”

THE MAKING OF A FEMALE COMMUNE

There was no precedent for group life among American single women who were not nuns. Most unmarried women ended up back where they’d started—at home, tending to the usual family crises: illnesses, pregnancies, and the usual miserable complaints. Poet Lucy Larcom put it this way: “I cannot think my own thoughts in the thick of other people’s lives.”

Louisa May Alcott echoed the sentiment in 1868: “I want to realize my dream of supporting the family and being perfectly independent. Heavenly hope!” This she is said to have written in her journal, so we may assume she wrote it in secret, separate from the diary her relatives would have seen. In many households anything a family member wrote, any letter received, was considered open for reading or recitation. This passed the time and served also as a means—especially in houses occupied by teachers or writers—for exercising one’s critical faculties. Or just for criticizing. (Louisa May Alcott’s father, the famed preacher and educator Bronson Alcott, noted that, of his daughters’ journals, “Anna’s was about other people. Louisa’s is about herself.”)

One contemporary, Ellen “Nelly” Wheeton, was caught with the contraband: a journal hidden beneath some papers in a drawer. In it, she had apparently expressed disdain for the married state. As she managed later to write: “[Mother] found it necessary to prohibit the use of pen and ink, or slate and pencil, except while receiving instruction from her or the writing master. My brother was made to spy upon my actions…he often threatened to tell mother when he had seen me writing upon the wall with a pin, which I sometimes did when I had no other resources.”

But could such a young woman have simply moved in with like-minded female friends? Consider it: a house, a self-sustained universe, where women could live happily among themselves, refusing marriage and, more important, childbearing. The idea was blasphemous. It was as if Herland, the utopian 1915 novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, had sprung to life. (In this work, serialized in the author’s own magazine, a British expedition sets out to find a hidden country populated solely by genius women warriors; as they discover, men of all classes have been extinguished.) In short, the idea of an all-female house incited alarm.

Yet there was a long tradition of communal living among single women. In Great Britain it dated to A.D. 385 and the founding of the Ursuline and Pauline orders, religious communes that were actually more like early social-work agencies. Lone girls from all over England arrived daily so desperate and grateful that, from the descriptions, it’s not hard to imagine them standing on the steps and shouting “Sanctuary!” These groups—and there were constantly new ones—quickly earned the title “bastard flocks,” for their loose approach to devotional life. Without quite meaning to, they had devised the only viable escape for unwed women stuck at home: an unquestionably proper religious setting in which girls could learn something useful. In fact, to claim a religious calling—whether fantasized or cleverly invented—would become the means for many determined single women to break free. Florence Nightingale, for example, claimed that she’d had an epiphany as opposed to a rebellious fit and this calling, this quasi-religious mission, allowed her slowly to extricate herself from her controlling family.

But the conventual life was a hard one. The novitiates, or the new girls, spent a year working through strictly regimented days on the grounds. After that they were trained to perform charitable works for the poor. These works—nursing, child care, housecleaning, cooking—were physically draining and carried out in places so run-down, in weather so bad, few girls told their parents just what they did. (One communard, a nurse trainee, returned home, told her family what she did, and found that no one would come near for fear of disease.) But the rewards! A justifiable life outside the house! A job, a place, procured on her own! Most thrilling was the chance to be judged for one’s skills and bravery and not one’s ability to please a man.

Some communards were tremendously influential. Annie Macpherson, a young Scottish woman, established a fund to take in Arab street kids who’d been abandoned all over London. Working with a small team, she arranged for their safe transport and adoption by families in Canada. That’s how I describe her achievement. One of her male contemporaries saw it differently. Here was yet another woman blindly ignoring her responsibilities. Instead of marriage she was determined to “explain the world to swarthy students.”

She had her American counterparts. Single abolitionist Fanny Wright, along with her spinster sister, established an all-women commune on some uncleared land in Tennessee and called it Nashoba. Their goal was to educate freed slaves, but the effort was cut down by charges of free love and unfair labor practices; poor finances ultimately forced the school to close. As if in penance, Wright at thirty-six entered a loveless marriage.

But another sort of British commune, this one originally male, would have a serious and lasting impact on American spinsters. That was the settlement house, a social-work institute set down in the worst parts of major cities and, in America, run by corps of women, often college friends who then lived there together for the rest of their lives. Jane Addams, founder of Hull House in Chicago, and Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement are the most famous, and their “houses,” of course, are still in business. But there were many others that did the same—offered to poor women, and especially immigrant women, necessary services, whether medical referrals, English-language classes, or specific items such as blankets, food, and clothing.

And their sights were set higher. Senior staff trained young women “of promise” (meaning girls with a clean appearance, a serious demeanor, and a college diploma) and sought out others with political backgrounds. House leaders formed alliances with one another to construct what scholar Carroll Smith-Rosenberg calls “a delicate web of interlocking social justice organizations.” Over time, settlement leaders and their allies campaigned for child-labor legislation, women’s unionization, and the founding of the NAACP (despite all the justified charges of early white feminist, specifically suffragist, racism). And many settlement causes, suffrage for one, eventually became U.S. law. Some of their residents would later move into positions of power, especially during the 1930s, when Eleanor Roosevelt tapped them to run New Deal agencies that dealt with women.

As professionals, these women had a uniform, similar to that of academics: shirtwaists, high-collared white blouses that buttoned down the back and stood up stiffly, worn with long skirts, hair pulled back from the face in a bun. Spectacles, keys, crucifixes hung like necklaces. It was a presentation of self that read: I am serious, not girlish and frilly but so somber, so plain I can mean nothing to you sexually; I have a cause. This warrior wear may be viewed as the sartorial ancestor of the early dress-for-success professional gray-out.

Using their somber appearance, their impressive credentials, and their emphasis on feminine good works, the settlement women gained national respect. The causes they worked for did not have anything to do with the rights of women to live alone or in groups. But their group-house experiment, so exotic and yet so sensible, influenced thousands of girls to sign on. Thousands of parents and would-be fiancés dissolved in panic.

THE GIRL GROUP AS TERRORIST CELL

Suspicion of women living in groups shows up in the earliest of Western mythologies. In the Greek myths, we find the Graeae, three eerie spectral sisters, who lived in some indefinite realm beyond the space and time of the human world. The Graeae shared among them one eye, which they passed to one another at regular intervals. It was this eye that Perseus stole to use in his search for the Gorgons, a sister band of outcasts. The eye revealed the group and his special prey: Medusa, whose phallic snakey head he then chopped off and paraded as proof that the world was safe once more for men. (Medusa, of course, could turn any man to stone just by looking at him.)

Not so easily defeated were the Amazons, a ferocious band of warrior women who lived on a mysterious island, hidden from the world, where they practiced their “arts…. To draw the bow, to hurl the javelin.” According to Herodotus, each Amazon cut off a breast to make it easier for her to handle the weaponry. Eventually, Theseus, king of Athens, waged a severe, relentless battle and won their queen as his wife. Another select group of single women, the Muses, daughters of Zeus, watched over male lives. Each had the power to give to men specific artistic or intellectual gifts; they also possessed control over men’s imaginations, their ability to love and remember, although they could not directly affect a man’s destiny. That was left to the most feared female gang of all—the three Fates, those morbid shrouded beings who rolled out the string of life, stretched it, and raised the knife.

A mistrust of female communality turns some unexpected corners. Bronson Alcott summed up the patriarchal view when he said of Louisa, “She has involved herself with a group of women who are ridiculed and condescended to…. she [will be] tolerated as an eccentric…a faded woman…fit only for the fringes of family and social life.” But some early feminists objected, too. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of what would become the feminist constitution On the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), worried that women together were forming “unnatural organizations,” behaving without regard to the outside world, and thus developing a “grossness,” too great a degree of “intimacy,” among one another that would make it impossible for them to function as adult women the world would take seriously. Writer Eliza Lynn Linton, circa 1875, referred to shared group houses, or any too-close female organization, as “the shrieking sisterhoods.”

The sound of women talking together—gossiping, chattering, even whispering—seems always to have evoked negative images, shrieking or otherwise. Nathaniel Hawthorne complained famously of the many hack women writers, “damned scribblers,” as he called them, whose dreadful blathering books outsold his own. He often added to his usual tirade the secret belief that they worked somehow together, having masterminded a female word machine. “They speak endlessly to one another in private letters and they keep diaries which they are only too pleased to have others read out loud.” The Strand magazine, in 1894, only hinting at satire, called for the reinstatement of the brank, or gossip’s bridle, a sixteenth-century device that was, until 1824, used to “silence the talkative shrew.” The brank or branks consisted of an iron framework that locked like a helmet onto a woman’s head. Attached to the front was a small metal flap, or “gag,” that was inserted into the woman’s mouth so that she could not move her tongue. The bridle had extra features. The sharp gag was positioned so that if our shrew spoke at all, her tongue would be slashed.

The paranoid belief that women, when gathered in groups, will plot gossip, using words as Amazons used their weapons, is a recurring theme throughout history.

A fascinating document of this dread is a little-known 1916 antiabortion film called Where Are My Children? In this story, a small-town district attorney prosecuting a doctor for performing a deadly abortion learns that the doctor has performed abortions on many single women the lawyer knows—in fact, he’s assisted married women and, as it turns out, most of the women in the town. It soon becomes clear that the local women have for years secretly helped one another to terminate pregnancies, passing the doctor’s information around like contraband. One member of this underground network is the lawyer’s wife, who may have had an abortion and, like all others in her spy circle, without telling her husband. The thought of abortions was awful enough.* But worse almost was the thought of women plotting together to control their fertility. The lawyer, played by Tyrone Power, Sr., seems about to break down. To comfort himself, he declares that if women pose such “a danger to mankind,” they will be monitored. Male spies will be turned on the crazy female spies, and they will stop them! And their antisocial insanity.

Single women in particular were often written off as crazy. “Their talkativeness, violation of conventions of feminine speech, and insistence on self-expression…. [that] was the kind of behaviour…that led to their being labeled ‘mad,’” writes scholar Elaine Showalter. Although it was impossible to prove, it was often said that single women in the late nineteenth century made up more than half the population of mental institutions.

By the 1960s, when critic Elizabeth Janeway revisited female collectivity, incessant chattering and potential madness no longer seemed to be the issue. The problem, as she saw it, lay in the social distancing of “unwanted unloved tribe(s),” whether single women, homosexuals, or any excluded group. Stuck together in a quarantined state, group members began to “externalize” or project their self-hatred onto outsiders. And the same dynamic would often work inside the group itself. In this self-loathing and paranoia she foresaw the spread of internal anarchy and betrayal.

The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 film version of the Clare Boothe Luce play, more enjoyably makes the same point. True, the characters technically are married, but we never see the husbands; the women act as though the men don’t exist and spend their days wandering from home to store to spa in a state of heavily subsidized singledom. With little to do, without connection to the larger world, they live to gossip and to plot against one another. The Women, both as play and film, turns verbal sparring into a spectator sport, a fur-draped “pardon me” teacup kind of wrestling match with destructive results. The idea of manless women turning on one another, proving that these women are vile and imbecilic, has endless appeal. Both Wendy Wasserstein and Julia Roberts have attempted to revive the play, and a campy new version debuted on Broadway in the fall of 2001.

LIVES OF THE LONE RANGERS

Let’s briefly examine the lives of three nineteenth-century single women—Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, and, with special emphasis, Florence Nightingale. They are all members of that traditional grade-school book-report list of famous women, the one that includes Eleanor Roosevelt, Madame Marie Curie, and Helen Keller, who was for years presented as the consummate female role model (deaf, dumb, and blind but through intensely hard work making the most of it). Each of these women had to wait miserably at home before starting her career at about age thirty. And all struggled for years with intense frustration, guilt, and heavy bouts of depression.

Florence Nightingale will live always on record as history’s greatest and bravest nurse, as well as one of history’s most effective medical reformers. But the brave “Lady of the Lamp,” unlikely heroine of the Crimean War and England’s most celebrated medical statistician, spent much of her life until age thirty-three battling her mother. Frances Nightingale was a rich, socially prominent woman who expected her daughters, Parthenope and the younger, more beautiful Florence (named for the city where she was born), to participate fully in the season’s activities—balls, concerts, visiting rounds—then to move on to the family’s winter estate and start up again. Florence loathed social life, the hours spent dressing and chatting and smiling, all of it engineered to culminate in her early marriage. Her only solace was in the lessons she had with her father, a Cambridge graduate who’d insisted on teaching both girls mathematics, Latin, Greek, and literature. At sixteen, Florence wrote in one of her many journals that she could happily spend the next year seated with her father in the library. That, however, was impossible; her mother, Florence wrote, was intent on “raising female slaves” she could marry off for good profit.

As she continued: “I don’t agree at all that a ‘woman has no reason—and not caring for anyone else—for not marrying a good man who asks her,’ and I don’t think Providence does either…. Some have every reason for not marrying, and…for these, it is much better to educate the children who are already in the world and can’t be got out of it, rather than to bring more into it.”

When she was seventeen and out for a walk in the garden, Florence received what she referred to as her “calling.” The voice of God told her plainly that she was to do good works, although he did not specify exactly which ones. She had always been interested in “social conditions,” and much to her mother’s horror, Florence began visiting poor, sick neighbors near the family’s summer estate in Derbyshire and near the winter manor at Hampshire. Through a friend of her father’s, she arranged to tour local hospitals, and as a teenager she first posed the question she’d spend the rest of her life attempting to answer: How can any person get well in such depressing and horrible places? She started reading, often secretly by candlelight, about nursing technique and hospital administration. Soon she was the only London belle to have extensive knowledge of bedsores, sutures, and the average number of patients stored like animals in underlit institutional rooms.

This “dank obsession” (her mother’s words) mortified her family. Nursing at that point ranked close to servant’s work—dirty, unsuitable, and just possibly, not that one would say it, involving what we would call bedpans. The fights between Florence and her mother gradually escalated. Florence assured her she did indeed find herself pretty and that, yes, she did like attention but that she wanted to do something useful. She wanted—-and she was sorry to hurt them—but she wanted to train to be a nurse. At that point several of her relatives, including possibly her sister, began to moan, literally throwing themselves on the ground at the thought of Florence near sick people. After long years of subterfuge, argument, and many crying fits, the Nightingales sent Florence on a chaperoned tour of the world.

In letters home, the chaperones described Florence as moody and adamant in visiting not museums but hospitals. At important social situations, she fell into odd muttering trances; at other times she remained silent for so long she seemed catatonic. Silence had become her refuge, a trick she had taught herself to persevere. Many Victorian women, trapped between the desire for work and family duty, famously became ill. But Florence Nightingale brought the conflict, and its torments, to new highs. She was silent, indisposed, bizarre in public, but always, even in the midst of fits, scheming a new life for herself. Unlike most of her neurasthenic peers, she had decided to “serve,” and as a first step she had decided to “avoid at all costs marriage.” As she told her journal: “Marriage…is often an initiation into the meaning of that inexorable word never; which does not deprive us, it is true, of what at their festivals the idle and inconsiderate call ‘life,’ but which brings in reality the end of our lives, and the chill of death with it.”

On their way back to England, her traveling party passed through Germany and stopped at a school renowned for its teaching hospital. Florence felt she’d at last found a place. Ignoring extreme disapproval, she announced her intent to take a three-month nursing course at the German facility and promptly left, convinced her entire life was about to change. When she triumphantly finished, she returned home to find that it hadn’t. There were invitations and calling cards, outings and theater—an engagement calendar that seemed to be full for several years.

As she later wrote, “I…dragged out my twenties. Somehow, I don’t know how.” Locked in her room, she tore at the world in her journals: “Why,” she asked at age thirty-two, “are women given passion, intellect, moral activity…and a place in society where no one of the three may be exercised?”

During this time she channeled her rage into an unusual novel called Cassandra, a series of monologues delivered by numerous characters who, like the prophetess, could see the future, discourse with great fury for hours (and pages), then suffer outrage when no one believes a word. It was published in 1860, once Florence was famous, but for her parents it was, even in an unfinished state, a baffling and embarrassing enterprise.

In 1853 she got her first real job, as superintendent of the London Establishment for Gentlewomen During Illness. More significant, that same year, at the age of thirty-three, she took a London flat of her own, a move so shocking her mother is said to have fainted. Florence was never able to confront her mother directly, but in a journal she addressed her and the situation this way: “Well, my dear, you don’t imagine that with all my talents…that I’m to stay dangling about [your] drawing room all my life!…You must look at me as your vagabond son…you were willing enough to part with me to be married…and I should have cost you a great deal more.”

In 1854 her “calling” at last seemed to materialize. The Minister of War, a social acquaintance greatly impressed with her work, called on her to recruit nurses and to help organize the field hospitals in the Crimea, where Britain, France, and Turkey were fighting Russia. The tricky part was that no women had ever before served as battle nurses. Florence gathered thirty-eight nurses and went off, with a secret allowance from her father, into the war at Scutari.

The female nurses at first were scorned, dismissed from operating rooms, jeered at, served dinner hours after the male staff. But the work so absorbed Florence—she was the lone woman to assist at amputations—that people came to respect her for her stoicism, her amazing speed, and her genuine empathy. As “the lady in chief,” she acted as the soldiers’ friend. She learned their names, sat with each one, read to them or wrote letters for them and made sure they were mailed. She also took care of their finances, sending home checks and corresponding with wives who needed money. And she taught the squeamish by example. Florence was known around camp for her friendship with a man who had half a face.

At the war’s end Florence returned home famous, a woman adventurer and living saint. Some also saw her as a genius. In the Crimean War she used statistical calculations to determine how many men could be kept alive if rooms were sanitized according to her specifications. She was credited with inventing the pie graph to demonstrate her estimates—how many would live, how many die according to conditions—and she was usually right. The British government created a fund so that Florence could organize civil hospitals along the same lines as she had in the Crimea. At thirty-five, the raging girl locked in her room now had a rare and meaningful life before her.

Louisa May Alcott, author most famously of Little Women, likewise spent much of her young life tied to her family, but not as a hothouse society belle. She was more like an itinerant family coordinator. Her father, Bronson, founder of free-form progressive schools in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, was never fully able to keep the family—his wife, Abigail, Louisa, and her three sisters—solvent and moved them frequently. They lived in a house, Hillside, in Concord, where Louisa would recall taking nature walks with Henry David Thoreau. For a while they lived in a communal village in Harvard called Fruitlands. (She wrote about their life there years later, in Transcendental Wild Oats.) They lived in New Hampshire and recurrently in Boston, in each place the Alcott girls spending much of their time trying to earn extra money to help their father. When Louisa was in her twenties, she published a novel, Flower Fables (her first novel, written at seventeen, would not be published for decades). And the next time her father announced a move, Louisa said no; she was staying in Boston to pursue her literary career, seamstressing on the side. Alone for the first time, she began to work on a series of stories called “Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy,” the characters who would become the March sisters of Little Women. Ultimately, when her publishers demanded, she would complete the novel in two and a half months. But for a time she put it aside.

One of her younger sisters had died suddenly at twenty-two. Her older sister had married. Louisa felt she had no choice but to move back to Concord, where the family had resettled, to help her mother. As the more levelheaded of the two remaining daughters, Louisa and her mother shared the endless duties of running Orchard House. (The March family in Little Women would live in a fantasy version of her childhood Hillside; Louisa May would write it seated in Orchard House).

For an aspiring writer, it was a grueling, at times unbearable life—baking, washing, mending, ironing, jobs that at the time could last for days. In 1858 she wrote to her married sister, “If I think of my woes, I fall into a vortex of debt, dishpans and despondency awful to see…so I say, every path has its puddle and I trust to play gaily as I can…in my puddle…while I wait for the lord to give me a lift.”

For “economic salvation” she considered marriage. She considered it all of one day, coming to the same conclusion that Susan B. Anthony reached on behalf of an undecided niece: “Marriage. It is an all absorbing profession.” Instead, she worked as a seamstress, a paid companion. She took teaching jobs at her father’s school and argued with him about his plans to leave her the school (she didn’t want it). As her mother aged, more of the housework fell to Louisa and her less-than-enthusiastic youngest sister. She had to get out. The Civil War was on, and she wrote in her diary: “November—30 years old. Decided I must go to Washington as a nurse, if I would find a place. Help is needed and I love nursing and MUST LET OUT MY PENT UP ENERGY in some way. I want new experiences…. So I’ve sent my name in if they will have me.”

In Washington she worked diligently as a nurse-in-training at the Union Hotel Hospital, where she treated thousands of injuries, witnessed terrifying operations and many deaths. For a woman who’d spent most of her life indoors, it was an astonishing experience and she afterward reworked her letters home into a book called Hospital Sketches (1868).

She never really went “home” after the war. Living but not slaving in Concord, she became the editor of a children’s magazine, Merry’s Museum, and worked continuously for the suffrage movement. (She was the first woman to register to vote in Concord after Massachusetts passed its state suffrage law.) She wrote ten novels and two volumes of nonfiction. When her youngest sister died, she adopted her niece, Lulu, who’d been named for her, and took her to Boston, where she established a new family compound.

Louisa May Alcott never married because she could not envision the latter half of her life, like the first part, trapped in a house that needed cleaning. As she put it: “The loss of liberty…and self-respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being Mrs. instead of Miss.”

Like Louisa May Alcott, Clara Barton, the youngest of five children, longed to escape from Massachusetts, once writing in her diary, “Have ye work, my brave countrymen, real work for me there?…Is there anything useful I can do?” She’d been working since age fifteen when, after tutoring her at home, the family sent her out as a teacher. For years she reported feeling nervous in these jobs, insecure, and always tired. She later worked to organize free schools in towns throughout New England—apparently still feeling very shy but not always quite so nervous. She was most proud of an experimental free school she had planned and opened in New Jersey. But when she learned that her male coworkers, even those beneath her in the hierarchy, were earning more than she was, she quit, “full of familiar uncertainty and queer sickness.”

Through an acquaintance, Clara took a “real” job in the U.S. Patents Office in Washington—at just about the time wounded Civil War soldiers started appearing in the city. Although her only nursing experience had been the two years she spent tending a sick brother, she immediately began to organize relief efforts. Her quick, critical observation was that nurses were plentiful; supplies were short. She collected and advertised for food, blankets, and medicine and soon after founded an organization that would distribute goods to battle sites. The scheme was so efficiently executed that the U.S. Surgeon General granted her a pass to travel with army ambulances “for the purpose of distributing comforts for the sick and wounded, and nursing them.”

She was one of the only women on the front lines of the Civil War, appearing as if on schedule at every major battle and making sure there was enough of everything to go around. After the war she spent years working to find soldiers still missing in action. She also took her first trip to Europe and while there met with members of the International Red Cross. Immediately she envisioned an American branch, an organization that would function like a Clara Barton during the Civil War: getting supplies and other assistance to disaster sites. Despite complex political opposition, she opened the first chapter of the American Red Cross in 1881 and began training recruits in emergency procedures and a new concept she had devised called “first-aid skills.” Barton invented the first-aid kit. She wrote a book called The Women Who Went to the Field, a Civil War study that included Louisa May Alcott. She was present at many Red Cross interventions—fires, floods, tornados. As an older woman, she became one of the first female diplomats in U.S. history and spent six months as a substitute prison warden. She was the first woman ever to hold such a resolutely male post. It was often said—and this was a real first—that she was “very popular among the prisoners.”

Florence Nightingale’s story had a far stranger and more ambiguous ending. When the Crimean War ended, something in Florence, arguably the most famous woman in England, seemed to snap.

Whether it was battle fatigue, psychosomatic or genuine illness—she’d been exposed to hundreds of viruses—she retreated to bed, alone, refusing all requests to appear or speak. The quarantine lasted months, until she was named to a royal commission investigating health issues in the British army. She was also commissioned to write a monograph on the health of the British military in India. In 1860 she published Notes on Nursing, a guide that is still in print, and used the rest of her Crimean funds to open her own training hospital. But most of this activity, including her involvement in the Nightingale clinic, took place from her room. She communicated through letters and rarely spoke.

By age forty she had done it all—reached her professional peak and permanently won the war with her mother. It is hard to believe, but during the remaining fifty years of her life, Florence rarely left her flat. Now and then she heard or gave lectures, attended openings for hospitals, and had graduating students of the institute over for tea. But the majority of her time she spent in bed with a malady even she could not cure.

I’ve always thought that Charlotte Perkins Gilman had Florence in mind when she wrote her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), the tale of a woman confined to bedrest. (The diagnosis: nerves, neuritis, neuralgia—the vague ailments ascribed to uppity women—a version of which appeared on aspirin labels into the 1960s.) All day the woman stares at the wallpaper, until one day its shapes and patterns—yellow flowers, loops, and vines—start to undulate. Then one day a vine turns into a tiny struggling woman. Every day thereafter, she wakes to see tiny women crawling everywhere, trapped inside the yellow wallpaper, until the entire room is overtaken by a howling morass of fairy-size women.

Florence Nightingale is pictured in most history texts as a female crusader wearing a halo. Fair enough. She was a brilliant exemplar of what single women could accomplish despite intense opposition. But she is also a strange and bitter reminder of the high personal price such women paid.

AND NOW THE POOR DEAR THING

During the nineteenth century, many novels set out to map aspects of the spinster experience—Cranford (1853) by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Mill on the Floss (1860) by George Eliot, The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) by Anthony Trollope, Emma (1816) by Jane Austen, which featured the classically inept Miss Bates, the ultimate spinster biddy, fluttering, talking out of turn, and babbling on at the sidelines. Miss Bates has a twittery cousin in Jane Osborne, the stuck-at-home daughter in Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray, and another relative in Miss Tonks, the schoolteacher in Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1862).

But none of these books—and there are hundreds of them—“solve” the spinster’s problem. Some of the characters walk through life oblivious, unaware that most people think them useless, afeminine, and dim-witted. Other spinsters have analyzed their social status and feel all the proper outrage, only what to do? They speak out in long angry monologues addressed either to mirrors or to parents who are powerless to help.

Very few novels propose alternatives. One entertaining exception is a British novel called The Odd Women (1898) by George Gissing. His story begins with a widowed doctor who, in the first paragraph, dies in a carriage accident. He leaves behind five daughters, none of whom has any known skills. He leaves them no money, and due to the sexist British inheritance laws, no house. They abandon the country estate that is no longer theirs and head for London. There they begin the downward spiral of so many single women of the time, both in life and fiction. Two sisters die. The youngest, prettiest, and least able to withstand it is sent out to do factory work while the older two talk a great deal about starting schools or perhaps just teaching in one. Yet they never do. They sit about the parlor of their hotel and, later, on the beds of shabbier rooming houses, and as months pass, their plans and their conversations make less and less sense. They’re always drunk.

Then the three surviving sisters are reunited with an intense young woman they’d met years earlier. Her name is Rhoda Nunn, and she is hawkish-looking, unmarried, and proud, a spinster who considers her position a privilege. With an older friend of hers, Miss Barfoot, Rhoda has started a special school for single women; she teaches them how to “typewrite,” and to take dictation. Recognizing that there is little she can do for the elder two, Rhoda persuades Monica, the youngest, to leave the factory and enroll at her school. But Monica is a poor, unfocused student and soon leaves to marry a much older man who has pursued—some might say stalked—her for months. Monica does not love him, but she knows she cannot support herself, that she has neither the will nor the talent to live in the world like Rhoda Nunn. The marriage is disastrous. The husband expects his young wife to wait on him. Monica is shocked by the presumption, uninterested and resentful. Watching it transpire, Rhoda again feels blessed.

That is, until Miss Barfoot introduces Rhoda to her nephew, Everard. He is deeply impressed with the solidity and devotion Rhoda brings to her work and, to Rhoda’s amazement, he expresses romantic interest. For a long dreamy time Rhoda is enraptured by this attentive nephew and with the idea that a man should pursue her at all. It starts to seem that she might leave the school and marry Everard. Then Monica dies in childbirth and Rhoda, after agonizing contemplation, rejects Everard, relieved, it seems, to have that part of her life, that possibility, over and done with. “No man had ever made love to her,” Gissing writes. “She derived satisfaction from this thought, using it to strengthen her life’s purpose; having passed her thirtieth year, she might take it as a settled thing…and so shut the doors on every instinct tending to trouble her intellectual decisions.”

Rhoda returns to the school and with the two reformed alcoholic sisters takes in Monica’s child from the useless husband to claim as theirs. It makes sense. As she says, for women like herself, “the world is moving.”

That meant the women who were known as “strong-minded.” As The Independent observed in 1873, “A dozen years ago hardly one female could be found…who would openly acknowledge that she was strong-minded…. Now they not only acknowledge that they are such, but they glory in it.” Investigative reporter Ida Tarbell added, “Four hundred years ago, a woman sought celibacy as an escape from sin. Today she adopts it to escape inferiority and servitude; superiority and freedom are her aim.”

But even the strong-minded would find their own lives, their own gloried versions of an Old Maid’s Hall, hard to sustain. Spread out among schools, settlements, and all receptive points between, single women struggled to keep up contact. Letters were very slow in arriving, and it was costly to travel. Holidays and birthdays passed without one’s primary friends and relatives around to celebrate. Important news—of a move, an illness, sometimes of a death—arrived weeks, sometimes months, after the fact.

Losing a job could be traumatic. Aging single women found the hunt for work an exhausting, demoralizing process, and it was tiring to imagine reorganizing an unconventional life at age forty-plus. Some maintained the stamina for political work, living meagerly on small honoraria augmented by donations and article writing, but much about their lives seemed increasingly difficult. Serious politico-feminists traveled year-round, claiming no residence, their days spent on bad roads (in horse-drawn carriages or on wooden-seated trains) to reach provincial places that were often dangerous. Protestors sometimes broke up their speeches by hurling raw eggs, symbolic reminders of the speaker’s presumably unfertilized ova.

“I do not feel like myself these times,” wrote a teacher who was “staying on against my wishes” in Virginia, to a sister staying on against her own wishes in Ohio, 1875. “I dare not look at a map and the spaces between us and the impossibility of it so weakens me. I admit I have dropped into tears…. Will I ever see you? Or anyone?”

These separations, and other anxieties of spinster life, were most realistically expressed in a tiny genre of short fiction known as “spinster stories.” Written in the mid-nineteenth century, these tales were often collected in year-end gift books, elaborately illustrated volumes of the year’s best literature, essays, and short fiction that made fancy and beloved Christmas presents.

In these stories the spinster often appears as a wise, older aunt who one day decides to talk of her life to a young niece. Usually, the niece is not prepared to hear about it. My spinster aunt once fell in love? My spinster aunt had a life outside this house? Of course, in the end the niece is forced to reevaluate not only her views of her aged aunt (who isn’t really as old as she’d seemed) but her presumptions about women, marriage, what it might really be like to live alone.

An interesting example of this genre is a story called “One Old Maid,” from a Scribner’s collection entitled Handicapped (1881), by Marian Harland. The story begins on New Year’s Eve in the opulent dining room of a mansion. There, beneath the chandeliers, we meet Juliana Scriba, a handsome middle-aged woman whose family has gathered for a private meal that includes for the first time the fiancé of her daughter Emma. As the guests debate their topic—“Is it nobler to live for others?”—the butler announces a Miss Boyle, “a tall meager lady…wrapped in a thick plaid shawl, simpering and blinking.” She enters, apologizing, declaring that she’s there but a moment and dare not sit. She was only passing and, but, oh…Juliana, as if speaking to a servant, demands that “Co”—who is her sister—sit down this instant!

Co, short for Corinne, sits and starts to talk. She talks for so long that the entire table stares at her as she eats, her bonnet strings trailing around on the plate. After applying a grandiose adjective to every food item, she takes a “noble” orange and readies to leave. A butler hands her a large basket, and one son is instructed to see “his aunt” out with it. The fiancé is shocked: Aunt? Sister to Juliana? That? He embarks on a long monologue on the evils of celibacy, while the girls ask their mother, “How old is Aunt Co? Forty? Fifty? Seventy-five?” Juliana defends Corinne, but it is useless. They are all deep in discussion of the curse that befalls careless women.

It’s a long walk back to Co’s, the original family homestead, miles it seems, all of it through snowy marsh. Corinne wishes out loud she’d worn her boots, but such is the weather of a spinster aunt. After what seems like an hour, she stops by a tiny house without lights, hears shrieking, and rushes her way to the back. Corinne hurries in to find a whalish woman jerking around on the floor. An impatient nurse, standing nearby, declares, “She has been this way the whole time.” Corinne comforts “Lulu,” the sprawling creature, announcing that “Sister” has come. Corinne and Lulu, as we’ve learned in a conversational aside between Juliana and her husband, are twins.

Meanwhile, back at Juliana’s, there’s another unexpected visitor, Aleck, a man once rejected by the busy, committed Corinne. As he explains, he has recently lost his wife and has come in search of his onetime love. Thrilled to learn that she’s just left, he rushes out to her house (in a closed carriage, mind you). He enters rapidly, then stops cold as he sees an old woman rise from her chair. “Miss Corinne Boyle?”

“I don’t wonder you ask, Aleck,” Corrine says, faltering, “but I should have known you anywhere.” Then she starts to sob. After a while, with her nose red and skin chalky white, they speak as old friends, although he cannot hide his disappointment and revulsion. His thoughts: “What a fool! What a sentimental simpleton he had been to forget that a woman must fade fast in a life like hers! Fade, and shrivel, and dry into hardness!”

For a while after he leaves, Corinne cries out to God at this unfairness. And yet as she calms down she reassures herself that God has guided her well in this life. Her ability to love, and receive love, was not to be within the realm of men; it is love born of commitment, honor, the keeping of a promise long ago made to a dying mother. She has kept her word and in return received unconditional love.

She has also upheld her end of one classical spinster formula: Divide a family of girls into wives and outcasts. The wives reign, and the outcasts, even if they chose their fate, as did Corinne, tell themselves elaborate religious stories about the rewards of their sacrifice. One recent example of this sisterly dichotomy occurs in Marvin’s Room, by Scott McPherson (1992), a play first and then a movie starring Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton as the sisters. The sister who has remained at home all her life to care for ailing relatives is now ill herself with leukemia. After some persuasion, the prodigal, biker-chick sister returns home with her surly adolescent son. After many conflicts and awkward attempts at reconciliation, the sick one explains to the prodigal how she was able to stand her life as family nurse. It’s because, simply, she has been unconditionally loved. And although she doesn’t say this, she has been able to shut herself off from the world, avoid sex and the messiness of men in exchange for an unshakable sense of nunlike purpose. In the voice of the deluded martyr, she cries: “I’ve had so much love.”

We are supposed to find this pathetic, and because it invokes such a profound denial of a fully lived life, we do. At the same time, she’s had the love she claims to have wanted. In remaining true to her vow, so has Corinne. But the reader understands the spinster formula, the essential code. We are never allowed to consider her choice as anything less than insane.

True, sometimes spinsters themselves couldn’t stand it at all and broke down. Jennie Gerhardt, heroine of the eponymous Theodore Dreiser novel (1911), finds herself dreading “before her [the] vista of lonely years…. Days and days in endless reiteration.” But others were all too glad to avoid packing up the trousseau. For these women, an unusual degree of female freedom, work, caring for others, and the company of like-minded women represented a better solution to life than the role of wife. Even in the end.

The activist Frances Power Cobbe wrote in 1869, “Yes, the old maid will suffer a solitary old age as the bachelor must. It will go hard. But,” she added, “she will find a woman ready to share it.”