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“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