Spinster

Spinster at first designated, simply, people (either male or female) whose occupation was spinning. The term was originally appended in name lists of various sorts to designate the individual's occupation. From the seventeenth century onward, the term morphed into a legal designation for a never-married woman and from there into general use, where it usually was deployed with faintly pitying or contemptuous connotations. Thus a term that begins as an occupational tag for people (mostly women) who could support themselves independently with the work of their hands evolves into an invidious policing technique for what Adrienne Rich famously dubbed "compulsory heterosexuality": a spinster was an unmarried woman who had "lost" the race for heterosexual success.

Women who were spinsters were free, of course, to view the term rather differently. Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), author of Little Women, Little Men, and many other novels, short stories, journals, and essays (some based on her work as a nurse during the Civil War), gloried in the title. Commenting on her sister's honeymoon cottage, she noted in her journal, "Very sweet and pretty, but I'd rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe." As her writing career was to all intents and purposes the sole support of her birth family from an early age, it is no doubt safe to say that Alcott's paddle was formidable.

Like other women categorized as spinsters, Alcott undercuts the presumptively negative valence of the term in her own personal habitation within it. Additionally, as with so many other labels that begin their linguistic careers as terms of opprobrium (e.g., queer), spinster has also been reclaimed for political and theoretical purposes. The feminist philosopher and theologian Mary Daly (1987) revises spinster thus: "a woman whose occupation is to Spin, to participate in the whirling movement of creation; one who has chosen her Self, who defines her Self by choice neither in relation to children nor to men; one who is Self-identified; a whirling dervish, Spiraling in New Time/Space."

Spinster functioned as a "polite" code word for lesbians well into the twentieth century. For instance, Barbara Bell's 1999 memoir quotes Joan Lock, a 1950s British police officer, as estimating that 10 to 15 percent of the women who served with her were of "the confirmed spinster type." It is still deployed as a pitying/contemptuous marker for presumptively heterosexual women who have not, somehow, managed to be winners in the race for a heteronormative life with male husband and children. There are also people who are recycling the word to define a voluntarily chosen lifestyle that involves neither; notably, this use of the word conflates the lesbian woman with the heterosexual woman who chooses to opt out—or, rather, it erases what is supposed to be a line of demarcation.

Spinster has thus moved from a term denoting a woman who lives independently financially and legally to a term denoting a woman who lives independently financially and legally. And yes, this is progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, Barbara. 1999. Just Take Your Frock Off: A Lesbian Life. Brighton, U.K.: Ourstory Books.

Daly, Mary. 1987. Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language. Boston: Beacon Press. Available from http://www.cat.nyu.edu/wickedary.

                                         Lynda Zwinger