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"The Best Or None!" Spinsterhood In Nineteenth-Century New England

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Zsuzsa Berend

Reflecting on her single life, Catharine Sedgwick wrote in her diary: "I certainly think a happy marriage the happiest condition of human life ... [I]t is the high opinion of its capabilities which has perhaps kept me from adventuring in it." [1] This entry epitomizes the seemingly paradoxical connection, in practice, between the nineteenth-century idealization of marriage and the reluctance of many women to marry. Although Nancy Cott has made passing references to this connection, it has been largely overlooked by the literature on women and the family. [2] Spinsterhood has usually been viewed either as individual misfortune or as a manifestation of protofeminist assertion of autonomy. To be sure, the latter view has been more conducive to the exploration of spinsterhood, given the tendency in women's studies to search the past for the roots of the present. [3] Since they could be construed as pursuing autonomy and rejecting wifely dependence, spinsters are readily seen as "foremothers" by contemporary femin ists. Because a number of the women who were active in reform movements or distinguished themselves as writers or professionals were single, this interpretation has seemingly even more credence. In her monograph on nineteenth-century spinsters Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, for example, defines elective spinsterhood as a "dramatic new form of female independence," rooted in the "individualistic ethic of the Enlightenment and the American Revolution" and emerging in the early nineteenth century. Women's rejection of marriage was the outcome of a "rigorous assessment of the marital institution that found it wanting and in conflict with female autonomy, self-development, and achievement." [4] Carl Degler, in a chapter of At Odds on nineteenth-century women's "challenge [to] the family," attributes the increasing incidence of elective spinsterhood to a "feeling that married women lacked sufficient autonomy." Owing to women's challenge to the family, Degler claims, female autonomy had increased during the ninetee nth century. Some women "spurned marriage and family altogether"; others "abandoned marriage when it did not provide autonomy or satisfaction. " [5]

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However, this reading of the "progressive" character of nineteenth-century spinsterhood distorts its cultural context, its meaning and significance in its own terms. In this article I will focus on the cultural milieu within which young middle-class women pondered questions of love, marriage and vocation. I will argue that middle-class spinsters, as well as their married peers, took ideals of love and marriage very seriously, and that spinsterhood was indeed often a consequence of their adherence to those ideals. Today, ideals are understood as "existing as mere mental image[s], existing in fancy or imagination alone," but in the nineteenth century an ideal meant a "patterning idea, the archetypical idea," [6] the ultimate measure of existing things. Ideals, in this sense, were central to nineteenth-century moral experience.

As their diaries and letters show, nineteenth-century women took ideals to be an ultimate, unchanging, God-ordained reality, while the existing reality was seen as imperfect and transitory. This view was in keeping with the highly voluntaristic and perfectionist outlook of the time. I will also argue that middle-class women's insistence on self-development was not antagonistic to marriage but, in their view, a necessary preparation for it within the larger context of a Christian life. The ideals of self-development and self-relience had a strong affinity with Evangelical Protestantism and were disseminated in the Christian culture of the 19th century, rather than having their roots in the Enlightenment.

As I will argue in more detail later, the nineteenth century saw the elevation and spiritualization of love and marriage. The new understanding powerfully linked love with marriage, and linked both with the larger social and moral universe. Marriage's importance transcended the temporal happiness of the couple; yet marriage was also conceived of as an ultimately private arrangement. Thus, by the nineteenth century the ideal of marriage based on love--mysterious and unintentional love--had gained wide acceptance. At the same time a religiously grounded morality informed the ideal of character, in the sense not simply of a "complex of mental and ethical traits" but also of "moral excellence." [7] High ideals of love and marriage came together with high standards of character, and it became socially and personally acceptable not to marry if marriage involved compromizing one's moral standards. During this time there emerged a new, morally charged conceptualization of women's love and its mission which allowed f or a broader understanding of women's usefulness. As a consequence of the above developments we see a strikingly novel portrayal of spinsters and spinsterhood: the image of the spinster as a highly moral and fully womanly creature. This implied a change in the conception of the purported reasons for remaining single--that spinsters could have married if they had chosen to compromise their moral principles for the sake of matrimony. They remained unmarried not because of individual shortcomings but because they didn't find the one "who could be all things to the heart." Spinsterhood was increasingly viewed as an outcome of intricate choices and spinsters as champions of uncompromising morality.

"The Best Or None!" Spinsterhood In Nineteenth-Century New England

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Zsuzsa Berend

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