The Young Lady’s Guide to Spinsterhood

Some thoughts on singlehood in… the 1820's?

So apparently MidJourney thinks that all teacups have saucers glued to the bottom. [Image by author, via MidJourney]

To be clear up front — this article is not advice for young ladies, single women, or spinsters. The title refers to a set of mid-1800s American attitudes toward marriage — roughly, a “guide” for how to think of marriage — that led a notable number of women to choose singlehood and service to their communities instead of marriage and children.

I research singlehood, and as a side effect of that I get to engage with its history, as well as the history of related ideas — natalism, feminism, population growth, evolution, and so on. I plan to keep notes on my historic research and write about it as I go. This article covers a time in the American northeast when singlehood was considered acceptable and sometimes even esteemed, in spite of (and one might argue because of) the highly religious climate, due to interpretations of the meaning and role of marriage in life.

J

On Spinsterhood

There’s a wonderful paper written by Zsuzsa Berend about protestant spinsters in the early 1800’s. When you are conducting historical research on a topic like singlehood you stumble across little gems like this often, which crystallize a moment in time, and when you review it you can see the present reflected in the…