1 Feb /16

Spinster

One of the most famous British spinster characters – Bridget Johnson, was actually in her early 30s when was labelled as a: “verbally incontinent spinster who drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, and dresses like her mother” by Mark Darcy.

But the movie was released nearly 15 years ago and thankfully, much has changed since then as how our society treats women who are still single in their late 30s and even 40s.

In most of the Western world, gone are the times when women over 25 felt the pressure and the shame mark of being still unmarried.

In the modern Western society, many women speak out on their personal choices of not getting married and not having children or looking for the right partner in life regardless of how long the search is going to take.

The term spinster appeared in the 14th century to name a woman who practises spinning of thread as a regular occupation.

As unmarried women were supposed to occupy themselves with spinning, within time the term came to be “the legal designation in England of all unmarried women from a viscount’s daughter downward” [Century Dictionary] in documents from 1600s.

And by the early 18th century, the term jumped into the everyday language to refer to all unmarried women beyond the usual age of first marriage, which at the time was around 25 years.

The first written record comes from 1719, Richard Steel The Spinster, where J. Roberts says: “I write myself spinster, because the laws of my country call me so…As for us poor spinsters, we must certainly go away to France”.

One of the most popular stories told by and about unmarried women at the end of the 18th century, The Heron: a tail for the old Maids (an old maid was an equally shameful name for an unmarried woman) suggests that the old maids did not marry not because they could not have, but because were simply way too picky.

In modern everyday English, the term spinster is not used to simply label an unmarried woman as such, but refers to a stereotype of an older woman who is unmarried, childless, prissy, and most likely has many cats – a confirmed female bachelor with nasty habits and bad temper.