Bachelor Girl

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 fiance 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 fiance 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.”

CHAPTER TWO The Single Steps Out: Bowery Gals, Shoppies, and The Bohemian Bachelorette

I do love it—me makin’ a spectacle ’o myself… but that’s how it is now: [I’m] an American girl in her finery and telling the men “where d’ you get off?”

—IRISH DOMESTIC TURNED “FREE WORKING GIRL,” 1871

Here is the work-a-day fact: No one knows where you came from, no body knows where you go.

—THE LONG DAY, BY DOROTHY RICHARDSON, 1905

…Your white collar girls?… I see them on buses, poor damned share croppers in the Dust Bowl of business, putting up a fight in their pretty clothes and keeping their heeby-jeebies to themselves. There’s something so courageous about it, it hurts me inside.