I have a lot of feels about this book by Kate Bolick, so get ready.
I’m a spinster (although I prefer the term “bachelorette”). I have long said that I will never get married, not because I don’t want to get married as much as because there’s not exactly a line of volunteers at my door.
That used to bother me. I was single all through high school and moped about it the whole way (what a waste of time!) My freshman year of college I finally got a boyfriend and was made painfully aware of just how much that can suck.
So I stopped moping about my single life. I haven’t dated since, not because I’ve sworn of men or anything, it’s just that no one has aroused my interest (also, most of my guy friends are already spoken for). Some would say I’m too picky, but so what? If I get married, it will be because I fell head over heels in love with someone, not because I happened to snag a guy who was “good enough.”
Kate Bolick is the opposite of me. She’s what in my family we call a “serial monogamist.” She’s had a string of long, loving relationships, but she hasn’t fallen hard enough to justify that lifelong commitment.
That really surprised me because, in my experience, the serial daters are the ones who get married. The girls who seem to be constantly assessing the dateability of every guy they know are the ones who end up with the ring on their finger, so Kate’s story is far from what I was expecting.
What I really hadn’t anticipated was her “spinster wish.” Even when she was involved with a guy she loved, she expressed what she called a “spinster wish” – the desire to be on her own. Why would anyone want that?
It was actually just a few days before I started reading this book that I saw the light. I have a big bed all to myself. I can sprawl across the whole thing if I want (I frequently do). If I can’t sleep, I can flop around without having to worry about waking anyone else up. And no one wakes me up. No fighting over/waiting for the bathroom. I can watch TV when I want as loud as I want, and when it’s time for a workout, I can take care of that anywhere in my apartment without getting in anyone’s way. I don’t have to compromise anything. It’s pretty great.
I’m not saying there aren’t advantages to being in a relationship. Of course there are. It’s just that being on one’s own has it’s advantages, too, but for some reason, no one ever talks about those.
Another thing that surprised me was Bolick’s assumption that she hasn’t fully matured until she’s figured out how to live on her own. I don’t believe that’s actually true, because I personally know women who have never lived on their own who are at least as mature as I am. Maybe it’s different for everyone? Maybe some people need that time to be on their own and others don’t.
Anyway, it turns out Bolick is far from the only woman to ever have a “spinster wish”. She did some research into some of her favorite writers from the turn of the twentieth century on and it’s not even a new phenomenon. Beginning in the late 1800s a wave of educated women (mostly middle- and upper-class) decided they didn’t have to marry right away, so why should they? They got jobs of their own, apartments of their own, and lives of their own. Sometimes they had roommates (other “spinsters”), sometimes they didn’t. They were known as “Bachelor Girls”, and it sounds like they had a pretty great time.
I suspect a lot of this was made possible by industrialization, including the lower-class women who worked in the factories. The ones who were lucky enough to get an education got jobs in offices, at magazines and newspapers, where they weren’t paid as much as men, but they made enough to get by on their own.
How had I not heard about these women before? The freedom they enjoyed (social, economic, sexual) is astounding for that time period. Birth control was still unreliable, but there were options and women took advantage of them. That’s not to say that all of these women stayed “Bachelor Girls” their whole lives. Some did. Some got married. Some got married and then divorced. But the thing they all have in common is their total disregard for what other people think. The ones who got married did so because they fell in love. If the marriage made them feel stifled, they got divorced.
This was a time when divorce was still considered scandalous. Divorced women were afforded an outcast status even worse than those who never married. These women simply didn’t care. They valued their freedom and their happiness above social expectations – and believe me, that’s easier said than done!
Personally, I have always known at least two of my earliest idols never married: Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. For a long time I wondered if my worshipping them meant I was “doomed” to suffer the same fate. Now I wonder what I was thinking. Bolick quoted from Alcott’s diary in which Alcott mentions an article she had just finished writing, called “Happy Women”: “I put in my list all the busy, useful, independent spinsters I know, for liberty is a better husband than love to many of us.”
I’m certainly busy. And useful. And independent. And I like it that way.
What have you guys been reading? Anything that really hit home? I want to hear all about it!
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