The genesis of this paper was rooted, like much historical work, in a question: what place did the “old maid” have in the early American republic, when a more sexually permissive culture was being wrestled under control? This was intriguing because the old maid, as an individual and as a concept, stood outside the realm of commonplace premarital sexual activity in urban areas. “Old maid” sequentially referenced a woman’s age and virginity. “Spinster,” used synonymously, derived from older unmarried women in a household spinning wool, the traditional domestic task of younger women and girls.[1] These labels marked women as both virginal and unmarried, and tended to be applied by the mid-twenties, or even as early as twenty.[2] This rhetorical othering accompanied the rather different life of the old maid. As historian Mary Beth Norton wrote, in the late eighteenth century “a white spinster’s lot was unenviable: single women usually resided as perpetual dependents in the homes of relatives, helping out with housework, nursing, and childcare in exchange for room and board. Even when a woman’s skills were sufficient to enable her to earn an independent living, her anomalous position in a society in which marriage was almost universal placed her near the bottom of the social scale.”[3] Single women were anomalies and publicly labeled as such, a dual burden.
Attitudes toward spinsters reflect societal developments and ideologies of gender, race, and more. Susan Matthews of the University of Roehampton, studying old maids in eighteenth-century Britain, “suggest[s] that there is a relationship between a culture’s attitude to fertility and its representation of single women as writers.”[4] As concern over overpopulation spread, Matthews found, old maids became a bit more tolerable. In her dissertation on “Old Maids and Reproductive Anxiety in U.S. Southern Fiction, 1923-1946,” Alison Arant argued that old maids in the twentieth-century South threatened, through their childlessness, the future of the white race and its culture.[5] English scholar Rita Kranidis has argued that in Victorian Britain, spinsters were an affront to the ideal of true womanhood.[6] To be a woman was to be a wife and mother. Old maids were thus regarded as unnecessary to society, cultural excesses that must, some argued, be redistributed to the empire’s colonies.[7] Similarly, this paper concerns how societal realities and ideologies of women’s nature impacted perspectives on spinsters, and how all these elements changed over time. The work argues that old maids were more tolerated in the last decades of eighteenth-century America due, in part, to a more sexually permissive culture. It further argues that the harsher social attitudes toward old maids that solidify as the U.S. approaches the 1830s can likewise be partially explained by a crackdown on sexual excess. As we will see, scholars have more or less agreed that spinsters were relatively tolerable in this earlier period and less so in the later, but this paper adds a layer of nuance, exploring an unconsidered factor and making our understanding more comprehensive. What follows, then, is a look at the old maid’s place in a time of changing social constructions of womanhood, from sexual beings to sexually reserved Victorians, from mothers of little national importance to mothers as critical moral guides to the helmsmen of the new nation.
We begin with sexual norms. In Sexual Revolution in Early America, historian Richard Godbeer reveals a more permissive era in the eighteenth century, as the American colonies diversified and Puritan influence weakened.[8] While church authorities and others continued to insist upon strict sexual rules, such as no sexual activity until marriage, many ordinary people and local governments left them behind. It was in “the middle of the eighteenth century that county courts ceased to prosecute married couples for having engaged in premarital sex.”[9] Sex during courtship or otherwise outside marriage grew more common. The number of pregnant brides, low in the 1600s, rose dramatically by the time of the American Revolution: 30-40% of brides were already with child in some towns.[10] Another scholar notes that 1701-1760 saw one in five first births out of wedlock; from 1761-1800 it was one in three.[11] Some women married the father after they became pregnant, but others did not, either due to choice, abandonment, or not knowing who the father was.[12] Parents of sexually active young women often allowed the dalliances to take place in their homes, as it was much better to know who the young man was so he could be held accountable for any offspring and pressured to move forward with marriage.[13] This is a different culture than many modern Americans expect to find — did not Puritan religiosity and Victorian propriety define the American past, one leading directly to the other? On the contrary, in between these two distinct historical eras were rather different practices and beliefs. According to historian Jack Larkin, at this time long periods of abstinence were thought to be hazardous to one’s health.[14]
Further, rather than these norms representing a fall from grace, a new post-Puritan culture of moral corruption, it was in fact a return, according to Godbeer, to “English popular tradition.”[15] Puritans left behind a more permissive sexual culture in Europe, but as immigration to the colonies continued and as Puritan control loosened over growing populations, such a culture developed in America as well. This is not to say that the Puritans were wholly well-behaved. Court records reveal instances of fornication or adultery, punished with fines or whippings, and sodomy, punished with whippings, brandings, or banishment.[16] As noted above, there were pregnancies outside of marriage. Historian Francis Bremer of Millersville University points out Puritan colonists could be quite erotic, rather than prudish, and that “some people in early New England [were] censured by the church because they…deprived their married partner of sex.”[17] Nevertheless, it is clear that in the eighteenth century unmarried sexual behavior grew more common and societal rules around it grew less punitive. Godbeer suggests that the revolutionary spirit that emphasized independence and liberty further loosened Americans from the moorings of the church, parents, and so on.[18] This also had an effect on attitudes toward spinsters, as we will see. The beating heart of the Revolution played an interesting role in this story.
Philadelphia, the capital of the United States from 1790 to 1800, also seemed to be a hub of sexual activity. Puritans and parents could regulate sex more easily in small settlement towns where everyone knew everyone and the church had more power over policy. Urbanization changed that. Young men and women migrated alone to cities like Philadelphia to find work — they were living independently in the birthplace of Independence. “The sexual climate in Philadelphia was remarkable for its lack of restraint,” Godbeer writes. “Casual sex, unmarried relationships, and adulterous affairs were commonplace,” as was prostitution.[19] Gay and lesbian couplings have also been documented.[20] “Maids are become mistresses,” an Elizabeth Drinker complained at the time.[21] In 2006, four years after Godbeer’s text, historian Clare Lyons produced Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830, an even deeper look at the licentious city. Philadelphians experienced an “era when the independent sexuality of their women was left unpoliced and their community openly engaged in struggles over the patriarchal prerogatives of husbands, embodied in the actions of eloping wives, adulterous women, and women who established sexual liaisons outside marriage.”[22] There occurred “debates over the nature of female sexuality and the extent of female agency…”[23] According to Lyons, free love challenged the gender order (as well as racial and class hierarchies, as sex between rather different people occurred).[24] The backlash to this, driven by the upper class and elements of the emerging middle class, slowly unfolded from the 1780s to the 1830s, redefining true womanhood as characterized by chastity and limited sexual interest.[25]
Christian Europe and America had for many centuries considered women more lustful than men, more sinful by nature, as evidenced by Eve.[26] This changed during the eighteenth century — by its end, men were the ones with uncontrollable sexual appetites.[27] Women were transformed: American historian Nancy F. Cott called the “passionlessness” of women the “central tenet of Victorian sexual ideology.”[28] Women were, Samuel Worchester of Vermont wrote in 1809, “formed for exalted purity.”[29] A cultural and legal crackdown on loose lower- and middle-class Philadelphians accompanied the redefinition of woman at the end of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth.[30] For example, arrests and prosecutions of prostitutes increased, medical texts explained the “Morbid State of the Sexual Appetite” causing everything from vision loss to vertigo to death, children born out of wedlock took center stage in true crime literature, and public relief for mothers of illegitimate children was slashed.[31] Such regulation occurred elsewhere as well, such as in Massachusetts.[32] Jack Larkin points to the 1830s as when sexually restrictive, Victorian norms solidified in the United States as a whole.[33]
As with the Puritans, of course, one must be careful not to overlook the complexities of Victorians. While societal rules and ideologies grew more repressive in cities like New York, Americans were not passionless beings, and a subculture continued to enjoy non-conjugal sex, gay relationships, prostitution, and pornography.[34] It must be understood that different eras may have different ideologies, rules from the powerful, and patterns of behavior, but there are always those who do not abide by common expectations. Concerning Victorian virtue, historian Carl Degler differentiates between “What Ought to Be and What Was.”[35] What is most relevant to this work, however, are indeed major doctrines and norms. It concerns, for instance, premarital sex being reframed in Philadelphia’s newspapers, magazines, and pamphlets as prostitution, and the Americans who adopted such views.[36] Such changing norms may have had a significant effect, though other causal factors are possible: from a peak in the Revolutionary period, premarital pregnancies fell steadily from about 30% before 1800, as noted, to about 10% after 1850.[37]
Of course, historians have lifted up factors other than sexual excess to explain the reconstruction of women’s nature and place in this era. Women were not just made chaste, after all, they were made content and dutiful in the home. Sex was to be for a husband alone, and its result, children, were to be women’s central concern in life. Rosemarie Zagarri, in Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic, offers as a causal factor women’s increased involvement in politics during this age (which built on women’s leap into political activity — boycotts, protests, writings, debates — that began during the American Revolution, charted by Mary Beth Norton in Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800).[38] With women now engaging in party organizing and advocacy, speaking enthusiastically of “women’s rights” after the 1792 publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and even voting in New Jersey, the gender hierarchy was under further threat.[39] By the 1830s, Zagarri argues, a backlash successfully drove women away from the parties and the ballot box (though women’s activism continued in other ways), fueled by a demand that arose in the 1780s: that women instead serve as “republican wives” and “republican mothers” at home, giving moral guidance to husbands and sons, those important to the success of the new nation.[40]
The redefinition of true womanhood should be seen, then, as a development that served more than one function in the early republic era. Sexual permissiveness and women’s political involvement alike were deemed damaging to society and, Lyons and Zagarri argue, its gender system. Thus, the new woman was not just sexually reserved and concerned with purity far more than pleasure, but she was a wife and mother who avoided politics. How well these concepts fit together — an emphasis on housewifery rejected sexual freedom, demands for chastity drove women toward married life. Sex was for husbands and wives.
In such a climate, what was the social attitude toward unmarried, virginal women? The old maid’s place is interesting. She stands at the intersection of changing sexual norms and changing familial ideologies. On one axis, the old maid was out of place in a more sexually permissive age (or at least aligned with church authorities and the most pious Americans rather than the cultural trend and their sexually active, unmarried peers), but then fit rather better under the more restrictive regime that followed, as she already followed the calls for chastity, willingly or not. On the other axis, the old maid may have been more tolerated before the onset of the demand for republican wives and mothers, when she would have become antithetical to the perceived needs of the young nation. Before the Revolution, marriage and motherhood were of course central to women’s lives, but they were not of any importance to the larger society, to politics and economics and national success.[41] What did it really matter if a woman remained single for life? All of that changed with the call for republican motherhood — marriage and childbearing were now critical, patriotic. The spinster was both out of line and in line before 1780, and then, in different ways, out of line and in line after 1830. In such a complex and changing world, how did Americans speak of old maids? Here it is meant literate, generally white Americans in urban areas, per the available evidence.
It is reasonable to predict spinsters would be more and more castigated the stronger republican motherhood took hold of the United States. (And they would not be alone — in her dissertation, advised by Clare Lyons, Kelly Ryan argues that bachelors were seen as deviant and selfish, betraying republican virtue and the common good by not taking wives.[42]) Chastity was increasingly stressed, but it was not supposed to last long with marriage and childrearing on the urgent agenda. But it is not such a given that spinsters would be more tolerated in the eighteenth century. One could hypothesize that old maids would be looked upon with greater, or similar, scorn in a permissive period. If it was more common for unmarried American women to be sexually active, would old maids be considered odd, or even failures, due to the inability to find a lover (rather than strictly the inability to find a husband and have children)? Prudish and old-fashioned for aligning with church authority in a time of liberty and independence? Or would there instead be more sympathy for spinsters, for the lonely in a time of free love? What of the health concerns? Virgin women in their late teens and early twenties with chlorosis, in reality caused by an iron deficiency, were thought to be ill due to lack of sexual intercourse.[43] Precise motivations behind sentiments cannot always be known, but the sentiments themselves can be revealing.
Let us consider how residents and the press of Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and other cities spoke of and represented old maids during the last decades of the 1700s. First, a look at expressions of undesirability.[44] In 1765, a Boston paper featured a woman who “would choose rather to be an Old Maid, than that the operation of the Stamp Act should commence in the colonies,” which frames spinsterhood as the lesser of two evils but an evil nonetheless.[45] “I often Run over in my mind, the many Disadvantages that Accrues to our Sex from an Alliance with another,” a New Yorker said in 1762, yet “the thought of being Domed to live alone I Cant yet Reconcile… [T]he Appellation of old Made…I don’t believe one of our Sex wou’d voluntarily Bare.”[46] A forty-nine year old Massachusetts woman in 1787 was deeply depressed, her home “dark and lonesome”; she “walked the rooms and cryed myself Sick.”[47] Dying an old maid was especially unfavorable, according to a New York paper in 1791.[48] Marrying an old maid was not always desirable, either. “An old ALMANAC-MAKER” wrote of the heavens in a 1793 National Gazette (Philadelphia) piece, personifying the moon and asking “Whether she be a maid? (if so, she must be a very old one indeed, and I’ll have no thing to do with her)…”[49] Some suspicion existed in 1796 Boston toward “old Maids and Bachelors, who alone, are opposed to Matrimony,” harboring “prejudices” against it.[50]
Yet while the old maid was disadvantaged, lonely, out of step, and perhaps not an ideal partner in some men’s eyes, she was not the object of disgust and vilification seen later. Further, there are in fact positive connotations applied to spinsterhood, as well as sincere extensions of sympathies. In 1792, the National Gazette reprinted a plan published in Ireland for a college for old maids. “It may at once amuse the curious,” the Gazette commented in a short introduction, “and afford a hint to the benevolent on this side of the Atlantic to attempt something upon a similar idea.”[51] The paper clearly favored the notion; its republication is significant, for the Irish writing expressed deep sympathy for unmarried women: “solitary seclusion is never the object of our voluntary choice… we require the mutual aid of each other. How deplorable then is the condition of an OLD MAID!” It presents the spinster as “stripped” of her relatives and friends; she “pines in solitude,” “cheerless” with no children underfoot, “denied the pleasures of society,” an “evil” state of affairs. Death “advances to her relief.” But a college would “relieve the miseries” and bring women into a “sisterhood” of great “comfort.” Here old maids are worthy of empathy and aid, not scorn.
Take a similar example. In matters of finding a spouse, money could impact desirability, one writer asserted. “Let an old maid, nine winters past the corner…come into the possession of a fortune: Though she was before neglected, and passed by with contempt; she all at once becomes the bon ton [fashionable, desirable].”[52] Suddenly “her youth is renewed — the wrinkles are all fled, and she is surrounded” by interested men. This was part of a critique of the harmful effects of the love of money — man would do anything for wealth, even court an old maid. They discover spinsters’ “beauties, which would never have had an existence, had she remained in her former indigent circumstances.” But “the world should be ashamed, that it can discover no merit but what is annexed to money.” Here is a small defense of spinsters, an implication that they have merits even if they do not come into riches when a relative passes away.
Even stronger, in Milcah Martha Moore’s commonplace book, a semi-private collection of women’s writings assembled during the American Revolution and later converted into a classroom text, poet Hannah Griffiths of Philadelphia defended her spinsterhood.[53] She was unbothered by the “Sneers thrown on the single Life.” A poem of hers read: “The Men, (as a Friend) I prefer, I esteem / And love them as well as I ought / But to fix all my Happiness, solely on Him / Was never my Wish or my Thought.” Vermont and Philadelphia papers ran a short verse in 1799 called “OLD MAIDS OF WINTER”: “But earlier happy is the rose distill’d / Than that, which withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness!”[54] This could be interpreted in different ways. “Single blessedness” may refer merely to the unmarried state, rather than stressing that singlehood is a blessing. In other words, it would be better to get married instead of dying alone. A rose will wither and die on its stem, but if it is chosen and plucked and distilled it will be “happy.” The use of the flower is rather sexual. But as we have seen, a woman need not be married to engage in intercourse in this era. We could just as easily interpret the work to mean one should have sex rather than remain a virgin until old age — intimacy as the key to happiness, not necessarily marital intimacy. The use of “virgin” could be seen as evidence of a focus on sex, rather than marriage. Though again, these still often went together for many Americans, so it is difficult to say for certain. (The use of “earlier” is also intriguing. Some roses will be wanted and plucked; they will be happier earlier. Does this not imply that roses who are not, who are left on the vine, will be happy at some point? If they are “old maids of winter,” perhaps not because they wed or had sex, but because they came to peace with single life.)
As Mary Beth Norton shows, the 1780s and 1790s saw women speaking of “the honourable appellation of old maid,” a situation of “great dignity.”[55] “It is not marriage or celibacy [that] gives merit or demerit to a person,” Anne Emlen wrote.[56] Unmarried women were “as well of[f]” as wives; some “young ladies are…very willing to be old maids” if “worthy” men were nowhere to be found.[57] Elizabeth Parker felt a bond with other spinsters, disappointed at “one of the sisterhood’s falling off” (getting married).[58] A girl from Maine said, “I do not esteem marriage absolutely essential to happiness… [W]hich is the most despicable — she who marries a man she scarcely thinks well of — to avoid the reputation of an old maid — or she, who with more delicacy, than marry one she could not highly esteem, preferred to live single all her life?”[59] Of course, old maidism was not always about rejecting undesirable men, but having no sexual interest in them. Some gay women of course refused to marry, despite any social disadvantages, instead enjoying flings, long-term relationships, and cohabitation with other women.[60] Asexuality is also part of the human condition and cannot be discounted.
A powerful declaration of independence from this age was “Lines Written by a Lady, who was questioned respecting her inclination to marry,” published anonymously in Massachusetts Magazine in 1794. English scholar Paul Lewis suspects it was written by Judith Sargent Murray, author of the 1790 “On the Equality of the Sexes,” which defended women’s intelligence and called for more educational opportunities.[61] He calls “Lines Written by a Lady” possibly “the most joyfully and radically feminist work published in an American magazine during the early national period.” The astounding poem read:
With an heart light as cork, and mind free as air
Unshackled I’ll live, and I’ll die, I declare;
No ties shall perplex me, no fetters shall bind,
That innocent freedom that dwells in my mind.
At liberty’s spring, such draughts I’ve imbibed,
That I hate all the doctrines by wedlock prescribed.
Its law of obedience could never suit me,
My spirit’s too lofty, my thoughts are too free.
Like an haughty republic my heart with disdain
Views the edicts of Hymen, and laughs at his chain,
Abhors his tyrannical systems and modes,
His bastiles, his shackles, his maxims, and codes,
Inquires why women consent to be tools
And calmly conform to such rigorous rules;
Inquires in vain, for no reasons appear
Why matrons should live in subjection and fear.
But round freedom’s fair standard I’ve rallied and paid
A vow of allegiance to die an old maid.
Long live the Republic of freedom and ease,
May its subjects live happy and do as they please.[62]
Here a powerless, miserable marriage is deemed far worse than spinsterhood. Interestingly, one of Paul Lewis’ students discovered a 1798 poem in a Boston newspaper, the Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser, that echoed and even directly quoted “Lines Written by a Lady.”[63] This later piece was penned under the pseudonym “Betty Broadface.” It is entitled: “Occasioned by reading a piece in the Chronicle, written by a disappointed Old Bachelor” — in other words, it is a response to a previously printed poem in the Chronicle that castigated wives and marriage from a man’s perspective. The response read:
The greatest of evils (you say) is a wife,
That happens to man in the course of his life!
Yet, for a woman to wish for a Husband, tis plain,
Is wishing for something as foolish as vain!
A husband! oh, think of setting up late,
While at tavern, he’s gaming away your estate!
In getting a husband, how much do you gain?
Why, a husband and children perhaps to maintain.
A husband! consider tyrannical rule.
A husband! don’t get one, unless you’re a fool.
A husband! (oh think what a life of delight)
All day in a passion, in liquor all night;
All husbands I do not thus charge with disgrace,
But you know my good reader, ’tis often the case,
There a’nt (we can prove it by tracing their lives)
Not one honest husband, to two honest wives.
There’s such a great chance, such a risk to be run,
So few that succeed, and so many undone;
Round the standard of freedom, I’ve rallied and paid
A vow of allegiance, to die an old maid!
Ye girls for the future like me be resolv’d,
Let all your connections with men be dissolv’d!
Tho’ the crying of children, perhaps now appears
As charming as music, to delicate ears,
This music you’d find, would be soon out of tone,
And you’d sigh for the time, when you once slept alone.[64]
Old maids were also connoted as wise. The Connecticut Courant in 1795 referenced the “nine old maids,” the muses consulted in ancient poetry.[65] This was reprinted in Philadelphia’s Gazette of the United States and Daily Evening Advertiser. New York’s Gazette of the United States mentioned the nine old maids and their prophetic dance as well.[66]
Many mentions of old maids have no negative or positive connotations.[67] The term was often used as a simple descriptor, like one would call a man a “farmer” or “doctor,” but this is notable — spinsterhood defined one’s entire identity. In any case, though there were “sneers” and “contempt,” it is clear that a certain degree of tolerance existed at the end of the eighteenth century. Not only were single women speaking up in their own defense, but men were publishing such writings in their papers, not only to entertain readers but to express some sympathies as well. As we turn to sources after 1800, there is still some empathy for spinsters, especially from women,[68] but other expressions grow harsher in tone. Remember, there is no hard line between the more sexually liberal age and the more restrictive Victorian period. Just as there is no clear demarcation between the times of unimportant, traditional motherhood and crucial, republican motherhood. While 1800 is noted, the ideological changes did begin before this and slowly evolved until coming to dominance in the 1830s.
Without treatment, a girl with reddened skin in the year 1800 would be undesirable, and experience the “remorses and miseries of a despised old maid.”[69] In 1815, old maids were “withr’d.”[70] They could grow “ugly and ill-natured,” complaining of hard times, circumstances that made potential husbands more difficult to find and remaining with “her father, mother, uncle, or aunt” more appealing.[71] Women who rejected suitors were “scornful” and “cold,” having only themselves to blame for singlehood.[72] In the 1830s, an “old maid” of the Winnebago was described by Caleb Atwater, a white politician and historian, as a “miserable human being,” “snarling, hissing.”[73] Her unpleasant character was tied to her lack of interest from men: “the only distinguishing mark of attention she had ever received from any man, was a smart blow, with a flat hand, on her right ear!” A New York paper wrote of “a little withered old maid residing at the village of Aldbury, with cold, unwinning manners, and grey, dark eyes, in which sadness and suspicion seem ever striving for mastery.”[74] One old maid was described as “snuffy,” meaning contemptuous — castigated for her abolitionism, which was tied to her singlehood (she “supposes a strapping runaway negro rascal a very Adonis”) and possibly for her sexuality, which would also relate to her unmarried status (“she is a great he-woman, who wears breeches under her petticoats”).[75] In 1838, a writer compared New York’s winter months to “wretched spinsters over the age of twenty.”[76] The next year, the same paper wrote of “senseless, heartless, shrivelled old maids” in expensive boarding schools.[77] The attitudes did not appear in white papers alone. The Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate, a paper from New Echota, Georgia (a capital of the Cherokee), reprinted a piece from a Scottish journal in 1829 stating that “would-be-young old maid[s]” could be “monster[s],” smooth-tongued and on the surface gentle but in reality “the most peevish, hypocritical, greedy, selfish, and tyrannical being in existence.”[78] She is all “stings” under a “coat of honey,” doing “more mischief, in her own officious, sneaking, underhand way than a hundred bold down-right murderers, who kill their men, and are hanged for it.” American society, it seems, was turning against old maids.
What afforded more tolerable views toward spinsters in the last decades of the eighteenth century? Historians have offered persuasive theories. There were various important developments that could change ideologies. Mary Beth Norton argued that a questioning of marriage and more favorable attitudes towards old maids were driven by the struggle for national independence. All the talk of freedom and change seeped into the foundations of culture.[79] Note, as Norton did, the language of the Revolution in “Lines Written by a Lady” above.[80] But demographics also have causal power. “By the late 1700s,” sociologist Laura Carpenter writes, “men in America no longer outnumbered women, as they had in the early colonial period, making it increasingly difficult for women to marry.”[81] With fewer possibilities of marriage, spinsterhood would last longer and more women would experience it. We would expect this to ease social attitudes towards old maids — what is more common is far less mockable. Norton engages with this demographic change, writing that women came to outnumber men in parts of New England by 1790, which “in part” helps explain more positivity toward old maidism, but argues that revolutionary ideology must be considered a significant factor, given that such positivity existed in areas of the U.S. with a more even sex ratio.[82] It should be noted that scholars have determined that in other periods of U.S. history, such as the twentieth century, views of old maids grew harsher as their numbers decreased — the converse of what we see in the early republic era.[83] There is an inverse relationship between numbers and negativity.
But what the field has not yet considered is the role of sexual excess — how it could impact social attitudes toward the spinster. Before elaborating, note again that “old maid” was both a comment on sex and a comment on marriage — here is a virginal, unmarried woman — but their interconnectedness could be broken. For instance, a woman could, from one perspective, cease to be an old maid upon becoming sexually active, no marriage required (likewise, she could, from one perspective, remain an old maid between the wedding and consummation). Just bear in mind that there were two senses to the label “old maid.”
In a more sexually permissive age, this paper argues, the celibate was not such a reviled oddity because she had the potential, at any time, to abandon her maiden state. Being an old maid, in the sexual rather than matrimonial sense, was therefore more a matter of personal choice, rather than a personal failure. Sex and marriage were, for a century or so, pulled somewhat apart. If a woman was unmarried, it could not be so assuredly assumed she was in fact a maid — many unmarried women were having sex. “Maids” had “become mistresses.” A writer in 1800 declared that “those who marry will have husbands, and those who marry not, by Fate’s unalterable decrees, must live old maids, or else no maids at all.”[84] Despite the mention of fate, the last thought highlights women’s choice in this period — to be unmarried and celibate or unmarried and sexually active. “Celibacy,” after all, as we saw above, did not give “merit or demerit to a person,” so many chose to abandon it. As for those who were old maids (and as for the old maid as a concept in the American imagination), they were unmarried and virginal, but the latter could be addressed so easily, and often was, that “old maid” as a degradation held little power. You could still mock someone for being unmarried and thus undesirable, but such a barb would not have as much sting if marriage was not a prerequisite for love and sexual pleasure. Observers simply did not know who was or was not an old maid in the sexual sense, only in the marital sense, and that did not carry much weight — an unmarried woman could be greatly desired and acting upon it. A sex life was private, not publicized by marital status. But when the concepts of sex and marriage were pushed back together, when it was more understood that singleness and chastity went hand-in-hand, there was a stronger foundation for denigration — to be unmarried was more safely assumed to be virginal, to be wholly undesired and defective, to be alone and miserable. Contempt for spinsters suddenly made more sense.
Interestingly, examining sources from the Library of Congress digital archive, definitional or redundant elements grew substantially more prevalent in the early nineteenth century. Like the reminder in “OLD MAIDS OF WINTER” (1799) that old maids were “virgin[s],” later publications were more likely to draw attention to meaning. In a Philadelphia paper in 1800, “old maids” were “antiquated desponding virgins.”[85] The old maid, an 1833 book noted, was a “virgin charmer.”[86] The Madisonian, printed in Washington, D.C., made sure to mark a “spinster” as a “maiden” in 1837.[87] The Morning Herald of New York did the same.[88] A few months later, the Herald included a true redundancy: “old maiden spinsters.”[89] In 1838, a “rigid featured old maid” and a friend in the same predicament were emphasized as “chaste.”[90] One writer, “tired of celibacy,” was included among the “bachelors and spinsters.”[91] A new stress on explicit definition may evidence conceptual change — abstinence and singlehood being drawn closer together.
Of course, the increasing disdain for unmarried women was, like the prior tolerance, a product of multiple factors. As Zagarri argued, one was the need to drive women away from politics; the call for “republican motherhood” made spinsters at odds with societal needs and norms. Demographic change, however, was not likely a factor in the increasing contempt, for it continued the prior trend. Many counties in New England had female-heavy or even sex ratios from the 1820s and ’30s through the rest of the century.[92] White women’s average age of first marriage rose from 1800 onward (per available data; the trend likely began before this).[93] Demographics again made space for increasing positivity toward old maids, but they were counteracted by powerful cultural forces, toward which Zagarri’s work and this paper have drawn attention.
The crackdown on sexual excess repositioned the old maid and opened the door to harsher criticism. Once shielded by the culturally condoned ability to make love, a disassociation between marriage and sex, the unmarried woman was now assumed to be a virginal and unwanted. She was thus a failure in two ways. The old maid was not only failing to carry out her social duty by becoming a wife and mother, she was marked as undesirable, a failure of personality, character, appearance, and so on, due to the increasingly sexually restrictive world around her. This world lifted up the virgin, but there were limits — this could not continue when she was in her late twenties and thirties, when she was violating true womanhood and patriotism by failing to find a husband and have children, when society found it harder to imagine she would have sex, due to her new lustless nature and society’s new rules, and find fulfillment and love outside marriage. Recall the fact, cited earlier, that nonmarital pregnancies declined from before 1800 to mid-century, which may evidence less nonmarital sex as a result of Victorian ideology and norms (though other possible factors, such as increased contraceptive use, must be considered as well).
The factors behind tolerance for celibate or single women in a given human society may be too diverse to allow for any broader theory. In American society over the span of several decades alone we have a sexually permissive culture, demographic shifts, and revolutionary ideology at play. The idea that sexually liberal societies tend to have higher tolerance for celibate women cannot yet be asserted with confidence, nor the corollary that more restrictive societies tend to disdain them, despite a strong start to cross-cultural analyses of celibates in texts such as Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence (editors Elisa Janine Sobo and Sandra Bell).[94] It remains convincing that sexually conservative cultures without a powerful emphasis on motherhood, for instance, would glorify the older, unwed, virginal woman. In medieval Christian Europe, chaste marriages and lifelong virginity were celebrated, as they signaled true purity and the deepest commitment to God.[95] Yet the eighteenth century may not be the only period in the American story where tolerance for celibate women and a sexually free culture went hand-in-hand. In the modern U.S., where as much as 95% of the population has sex before marriage, there is increasing recognition of celibacy as a sexual orientation.[96] Though some argue the “cat lady” has replaced the “old maid” and “spinster,” tolerance for and understanding of asexual individuals (not all of whom are virginal) is found in many corners.[97] While no one would argue that mockery of older virgins has disappeared, the increasing acceptance of “aces” should be seen as undermining the power of denigration. As in the eighteenth century, it should not be posited that a more sexually open society is the only factor that brought this about, but it is likely a contributing one. At the least, it is further evidence that less restrictive cultures and greater acceptance of celibates are not incompatible.
Overall, this paper sought to explore how changing societal realities and views of women’s nature affected attitudes toward old maids. Other scholars have considered this in the context of other nations, American regions, and eras; historians like Norton have observed the phenomenon in the setting and time considered here. This writing closely parallels Norton’s acknowledgement that an unbalanced sex ratio played a role in more tolerable views of old maids, in that it is vulnerable to criticism for being too correlative or speculative. Demographic change and perspective change may occur at the same time, but it is difficult to link them with primary sources; changes in the sexual culture and changes in perspective may likewise occur simultaneously, with causal bonds challenging to show. This thesis may be uncomfortably theoretical, and could benefit from future documentary discoveries, but, when laid out in its entirety, has a rational foundation and explanatory value.
In the early American republic, sexual excess had to be brought under control. Woman’s nature had to be redefined as devoid of lust. Marriage and family had to be made paramount — only within such confines should sex be experienced. Through this, old maids went from more tolerable to more despised. The unplucked rose violated and challenged the ideals of true womanhood that centered republican wives and mothers, but was also no longer protected by a brief disassociation between singleness and sexlessness. In looser times, the old maid may not have been a maid at all. She could be secretly desired by and involved with suitors; she could shed her virginal state at any time; marriage was no requirement for love. That was the common understanding. There was less fodder for castigation; a house of mockery would have to be built on sand. This ensured a relative tolerance, with other factors like fewer men and ideals of liberty at work as well. In the more restrictive, Victorian era, the old maid was more safely presumed to be a maid. We see this in the emphasis on definition in the historical record — possibly supported by lower rates of premarital pregnancy. Because she was unmarried, the old maid was unpleasured and unwanted, and everyone knew it — a metaphorical, strangely reversed scarlet letter. Singleness and sexlessness were sown together, a marriage into which the judgemental could sink their teeth.
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[1] Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life in the United States: 1790-1840 (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989), 26.
[2] Amy Froide, “Spinster, Old Maid, or Self-Partnered — Why Words for Single Women Have Changed Over Time,” UMBC Magazine, December 2, 2019, https://umbc.edu/stories/spinster-old-maid-or-self-partnered-why-words-for-single-women-have-changed-through-time/.
Joseph Pickering, Emigration, or No Emigration (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1830), 29. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbtn.13760/?st=pdf&pdfPage=29.
[3] Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1996), 42.
[4] Susan Matthews, “Productivity, Fertility, and the Romantic ‘Old Maid,’” Romanticism 25, no. 3 (2019): 225-236. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/336190039_Productivity_Fertility_and_the_Romantic_’Old_Maid’.
[5] Alison Arant, “‘That Rotten Richness’: Old Maids and Reproductive Anxiety in U.S. Southern Fiction, 1923-1946,” doctoral dissertation, University of South Carolina, 2012. Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/1044/.
[6] Rita Kranidis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 228-229.
[9] Godbeer, Revolution, 228.
[10] Ibid. See also Larkin, Reshaping, and “Historian: Early Americans Led Lusty Sex Lives,” UPI, August 29, 1988, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/08/29/Historian-Early-Americans-led-lusty-sex-lives/7614588830400/.
[11] Laura Carpenter, Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (New York: NYU Press, 2005),22.
[12] Godbeer, Revolution, 316.
[13] Ibid.
[14] “Early Americans,” UPI.
[15] Godbeer, Revolution, 229.
[16] Lisa Lauria, “Sexual Misconduct in Plymouth Colony,” The Plymouth Colony Archive Project, 1998, http://www.histarch.illinois.edu/plymouth/Lauria1.html#VII.
[17] Madeline Bilis, “Debunking the Myth Surrounding Puritans and Sex,” Boston Magazine, October 18, 2016, https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2016/10/18/puritans-and-sex-myth/.
[18] Godbeer, Revolution, 300, 334.
[19] Ibid., 300.
[20] Ibid., 271, and Rachel Hope Cleves, “Same-Sex Love among Early American Women,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History, July 2018. Accessed March 8, 2023 from https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-498.
[21] Godbeer, Revolution, 300.
[22] Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730-1830 (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 393.
[23] Lyons, Sex, 393.
[24] Ibid., 309.
[25] Ibid., 309-310, 394. See also Kelly A. Ryan, “Making Chaste Citizens: Sexual Regulation and Reputation in the Early Republic,” Regulating Passion: Sexuality and Patriarchal Rule in Massachusetts, 1700–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[26] Carol F. Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998). See chapter 5, especially pages 153-162.
[27] Godbeer, Revolution, 266. See also Lyons, Sex, 393-394.
[28] Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850,” Signs 4, no. 2 (1978): 220. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173022.
[29] Ibid., 228.
[30] Lyons, Sex, 310.
[31] Ibid., 336-341, 352, 369, 385-388.
[32] Ryan, Regulating, chapter 6.
[33] “Early Americans,” UPI. See also Larkin, Reshaping.
[34] Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Sex as Symbol in Victorian America,” Prospects 5 (October 1980): 51-70. Retrieved from https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/prospects/article/abs/sex-as-symbol-in-victorian-america/A2E807BC9DFEFC09CAD2B938EFE2337F.
[35] Carl N. Degler, “What Ought To Be and What Was: Women’s Sexuality in the Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 79, no. 5 (1974): 1467–90. https://doi.org/10.2307/1851777.
[36] Lyons, Sex, 312 and chapter 6.
[37] Daniel Scott Smith and Michael S. Hindus, “Premarital Pregnancy in America 1640-1971: An Overview and Interpretation,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5, no. 4 (1975): 538. https://doi.org/10.2307/202859.
[38] Norton, Daughters, and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
[39] Zagarri, Backlash, 2-9.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Norton, Daughters, 297.
[42] Kelly A. Ryan, “Regulating Passion: Sexual Behavior and Citizenship in Massachusetts, 1740-1820,” doctoral dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006. Retrieved from https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/4122/umi-umd-3913.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. See page 275.
[43] Lyons, Sex, 158.
[44] See also “From the Columbian Centinel,” “THE EXTRACT,” Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia, PA), April 28, 1796. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026273/1796-04-28/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf. Notice the reference to a fortune teller using dark terms with an old maid — the future is not bright.
[45] Ryan, dissertation, 231.
[46] Norton, Daughters, 41.
[47] Ibid., 42.
[48] “FROM THE GENERAL ADVERTISER,” Gazette of the United States (New York, NY), January 22, 1791. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030483/1790-01-22/ed-1/?st=pdf. Observe the language: “women must die old maids.”
[49] A. O. A. M., “For the NATIONAL GAZETTE,” National Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), August 21, 1793. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025887/1793-08-21/ed-1/?st=pdf.
[50] Ryan, dissertation, 274.
[51] “[THE following plan for establishing a college for old Maids…],” National Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), October 3, 1792. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025887/1792-10-03/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[52] “The Corporal, No. V,” Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), December 5, 1798. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025881/1798-12-05/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[53] Karin A. Wulf and Catherine La Courreye Blecki, eds., Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 95-96.
[54] “OLD MAIDS OF WINTER,” Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), February 13, 1799. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025881/1799-02-13/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[55] Norton, Daughters, 240.
[56] Ibid.
[57] Ibid., 241.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid., 241-242.
[60] Cleves, “Same-Sex Love.”
[61] Paul Lewis, “‘Lines Written by a Lady’: Judith Sargent Murray and a Mystery of Feminist Authorship,” The New England Quarterly 92, no. 4 (2019): 615–632. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/26858283.
[62] Ibid., 617-618.
[63] Paul Lewis, “The Brief Career of ‘Betty Broadface’ Defender of ‘Old Maids,’” Early American Literature 57, no. 1 (2022): 221-235. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/article/846527/pdf.
[64] Ibid., 224.
[65] “To All Christian People,” Gazette of the United States and Daily Evening Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), January 13, 1795. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026271/1795-01-13/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[66] Simon Searcher, “THE STUDENT — NO. I,” Gazette of the United States (New York, NY), December 9, 1790. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030483/1790-12-09/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[67] See for instance “THE DISH OF TEA,” National Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), July 7, 1792. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025887/1792-07-07/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[68] For instance, to Anne Royale in 1826, old maids were “odd” but also “very coy and very sensible.” See Anne Royale, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the United States (New Haven: Young Ladies Academy at the Convent of the Visitation in Georgetown, 1826). Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbtn.18960/?st=pdf&pdfPage=157.
[69] Solomon Simple, “The Moral Dispensary,” Gazette of the United States and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), July 1, 1800. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026272/1800-07-01/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[70] “Wooden Breast Bone, and Jackson’s Victory,” 1815 leaflet. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/item/rbpe.22803200/.
[71] George Fowler, ed., The Wandering Philanthropist (Philadelphia: Bartholomew Graves, 1810), 180. Retrieved from https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/wanderingphilant00fowl/wanderingphilant00fowl.pdf.
[72] “The Old Maid: When I Was a Girl of Eighteen,” 1837, C. Bradlee (Boston). Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/sm_oldmaid/page/n3/mode/2up.
[73] Caleb Atwater, Writings of Caleb Atwater (Columbus: Scott and Wright, 1833), 333. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/lhbtn.12883/?st=pdf&pdfPage=282.
[74] Hon. Mrs. Norton, “LAWRENCE BAYLEY’S TEMPTATION,” The Herald (New York, NY), February 18, 1836. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030311/1836-02-18/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[75] “MANAGER’S LAST KICK — ABOLITION,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), June 26, 1837. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1837-06-26/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[76] “Leaf from a Loafer’s Log,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), May 29, 1838. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1838-05-29/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[77] “The Follies of the Fashionable System of Female Education,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), September 3, 1839. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1839-09-03/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[78] “From the Edingburgh Literary Journal: Monsters Not Mentioned in Linnaeus,” Cherokee Phoenix and Indians’ Advocate (New Echota, GA), September 9, 1829. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83020874/1829-09-09/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[79] Norton, Daughters, 240-242, chapters six through nine.
[80] Ibid., 242.
[81] Carpenter, Virginity, 22.
[82] Norton, Daughters, 241.
[83] Naomi Braun Rosenthal, Spinster Tales and Womanly Possibilities (New York: SUNY Press, 2001).
[84] Solomon Simple, “The Moral Dispensary,” Gazette of the United States and Philadelphia Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), April 9, 1800. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83025881/1800-04-09/ed-1/?sp=3&st=pdf.
[85] “From the Wilmington Monitor,” Gazette of the United States and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), August 4, 1800. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn84026272/1800-08-04/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[86] George Fibbleton [Asa Greene], Travels in America (New York: W. Pearson, P. Hill, and others, 1833), 80. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.travelsinamerica00gree/?st=pdf&pdfPage=87.
[87] “NOT PARTICULAR,” The Madisonian (Washington, D.C.), December 5, 1837. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn82015015/1837-12-05/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[88] “Fashionables at Saratoga, 1837,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), July 22, 1837. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1837-07-22/ed-1/?sp=2&st=pdf.
[89] “AMERICAN INSTITUTE,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), November 1, 1837. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1837-11-01/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[90] “EPHEMERA; OR ETCHINGS FROM LIFE,” The Native American (Washington, D.C.), March 3, 1838. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn86053569/1838-03-03/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[91] “Nuptial Soiree and Supper on Wednesday Night,” Morning Herald (New York, NY), February 14, 1838. Retrieved from https://www.loc.gov/resource/sn83030312/1838-02-14/ed-1/?sp=4&st=pdf.
[92] Lincoln Mullen, “Divergence in U.S. Sex Ratios by County, 1820–2010,” interactive map, http://lincolnmullen.com/projects/sex-ratios/. Derived from data via Minnesota Population Center, National Historical Geographic Information System: Version 2.0 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 2011), http://www.nhgis.org.
[93] Michael R. Haines, “Long-term Marriage Patterns in the United States from Colonial Times to the Present,” The History of the Family 1, no. 1 (1996): 15-39. Retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1016/S1081-602X%2896%2990018-4.
[94] Elisa Janine Sobo and Sandra Bell, eds., Celibacy, Culture, and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).
[95] Carpenter, Virginity, 19, and Karen Cheatham, “‘Let Anyone Accept This Who Can’: Medieval Christian Virginity, Chastity, and Celibacy in the Latin West,” in Carl Olson, ed., Celibacy and Religious Traditions (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2007).
[96] Benjamin Kahan, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
“Premarital Sex is Nearly Universal Among Americans, and Has Been for Decades,” Guttmacher Institute, December 19, 2006, https://www.guttmacher.org/news-release/2006/premarital-sex-nearly-universal-among-americans-and-has-been-decades.
[97] Katherine Barak, “Spinsters, Old Maids, and Cat Ladies: A Case Study in Containment Strategies,” doctoral dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2014. Retrieved from https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=bgsu1393246792&disposition=inline
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