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THE AMERICAN SPINSTER

BY AGNES REPPLIER

Author of “The Fireside Sphinx,” etc.

THAT this is the Golden Age of spinsters no one will deny, and that America furnishes the soil in which these hardy plants put forth their finest bloom is equally indisputable. How many years have passed since the “antient maydes” of Boston—which term included all unmarried women older than twenty-five—were pronounced by John Dunton to be a “dismal spectacle”?[3] How many years since a few “acute and ingenious gentlewomen” in colonial Virginia had the temerity to remain single and cultivate their own tobacco plantations, for which unnatural behavior they were subjected to repeated “admonishments”? Now the “antient mayde” flaunts her freedom in the faces of those who are patiently doing their duty to the world. Now if a woman runs a successful apple-orchard or dairy-farm, her exploits are heralded far and wide, and other women write exultant papers about her, intimating that the day of the male agriculturist is virtually over. I am not sure that the attitude of our great-great-grandfathers, who jealously and somewhat fearfully guarded their prerogatives, was not more flattering to my sex than this enthusiasm evoked by achievements which in a man would not be found worthy of notice.

As for age—well, who in these years of grace is frankly and confessedly old? We no longer say, “On a l’âge de son cœur,” but “On a l’âge de sa volonté.” Jane Austen settled down to caps and spinsterhood before she was thirty. Dr. Johnson alluded to Miss Lucy Porter’s “hoary virginity” when that lady was fifty-two. The Ettrick Shepherd stubbornly protested that “to ca’ a woman saxty, and then mainteen that ye didna ca’ her auld, is naething short o’ a sophism.” But now no one gets beyond middle age, or “the prime of life.” I have heard a Boston spinster of eighty-two (a remarkable woman, I admit) casually spoken of as middle-aged; and when, in a desperate resolve to push matters to an issue, I said: “Miss D—is not middle-aged; she is old. If you are not old when you are eighty-two, when are you old?” the remark was taken in ill part. “I should not dream of calling Miss D—old,” said one gallant Bostonian, and all his hearers agreed with him.

The French spinster is a negligible factor. The English spinster has conquered her territory and become a force to be reckoned with. But the American spinster is the standard-bearer of the tribe. Her incessant activities and her radiant self-satisfaction have made her appear more dominant than she is, and have caused her critics much needless apprehension. When Mrs. Van Vorst wrote, in 1903, “Our factories are full of old maids, our colleges are full of old maids, our ball-rooms in the worldly centers are full of old maids,” Americans read these words with placid unconcern. They had given too many wedding presents in their day to have any doubts anent the permanent popularity of marriage. But English readers, who are ever prone to be literal, appear to have accepted Mrs. Van Vorst’s statements au pied de la lettre. Mr. Marriott Watson, chilled to the heart—as well he might be—by the vision of a ballroom destitute alike of girls and matrons, wrote for the “Nineteenth Century” a severe and agitated protest. He asserted that a woman’s “functions” “alone excuse or explain her existence,”—which is one way of looking at the matter; and he pointed out that American women are the most remote the world can show from the primitive and savage type which represents the dynamic force of a race.

The mere fact that the American spinster is so often and so sharply censured marks the strength of her position. No one dreams of censuring the French vieille fille or the German jungfrau. These victims of fate meet with scorn or sympathy, according to the taste and breeding of commentators. In either case, their lives are registered as failures. Nothing can rob the German woman of those vital sensibilities which center in the home and family. “Every great movement of the Teutonic soul,” says Mr. Havelock Ellis, “has been rooted in emotion.” If the women of Germany are demanding “rights,” and demanding them with no uncertain voice, it is because they seek to meet their responsibilities with authority. The sphere of home and child-rearing is their sphere, and they purpose to rule in it.

It is not possible for the Frenchwoman, who understands the structure of society, to welcome spinsterhood. “All her instincts of expansion,” says that acute observer Mr. William Crary Brownell, “are hostile to it. There is no more provision in the French social constitution than in the order of nature itself for the old maid.” Therefore, as the twin passions of the French heart are to be in rational accord with nature and in rational accord with social life, the unmarried woman has no alternative but to feel herself doubly incomplete. She is unstirred by the American woman’s vaulting ambition to be man’s rival, or by an uneasy envy of man’s estate. Perhaps it is because a French girl never regrets her sex that France has produced more eminent women than any other nation in the world. Certainly the only man who ever had the courage to say he would like to be a woman (a beautiful woman, he stipulated) was that distinguished Frenchman M. Jules Lemaître.