Nothing But An Old Maid
It was a dreaded fate for a woman. Old maid. Short of being a “fallen woman,” it was the worst fate that could befall her. They were pitied and reviled. She was a “tragedy,” a “leftover,” a “public and private nuisance,” “a failure of womanhood,” an object of derision, scorn, and ridicule. “Superfluous; “redundant, pathetic.”
“What girl can hear this opprobrious title in connection with herself and not feel an instinctive shudder and an involuntary shrinking from the very name?” asked a writer in the Bolivar, Missouri newspaper in 1867. “Old Maid; how fraught with meaning those two monosyllables; and yet how often we hear it fall in tones of derision from both sexes, “oh, she’s nothing but an old maid!” The term in itself is a reproach, and seems to combine at once all that is peevish, shrewish and vixenish in the female character.”
Over and over, for decades, newspapers and magazines described this unfortunate woman in articles and short fiction. Many of them were articles in “defense” of the old maid - but the negative tropes would be trotted out repeatedly before getting around to defending her, a ‘backhanded compliment’ at best. Famed preacher Henry Ward Beecher, for example, said in a sermon about the value of old maids that pearls come in a homely shell.
“Think of everything lonely, disagreeable, detestable and worthless in life, and you have a type of that unfortunate race termed old maids,” a possibly satirical piece began in 1860. (It was never made clear whether it was satire.)
Eliza Lynn Linton, a popular English writer, wrote scathingly in 1876 of old maids, this failure of womanhood. “The view of old maids is her utter unloveliness, a hatred of youth…the natural sweetness of womanhood turned to gall of disappointment,” she said. But there was not just one type; Linton categorized six types of old maids. The most “typical,” she said, was “the starched and sour Miss Prue to whom most things are more or less shocking; she knows her neighbor’s business better than they do.” She was filled with prying, slander, gossip and disapproval. “Loveless in her own life, she denies the right of others to the joy of which she has been deprived… She fades and withers and grows sourer as she grows older.”
She was also consistently described as scrawny - no curves - a “vinegary” unpleasant character with a shrill voice. She was easily shocked, disapproving and disagreeable. Older married women were never described as “shriveled” and “dried up,” but the old maid consistently was. And oh yes – she was a “cat lady.” (Though she also poured out her unrequited affection on canaries, and small dogs like poodles, whom she treated as babies).
Interestingly, Israeli scholar Kinneret Lahad found that the old maid-cat connection is widespread, crossing cultures and times. She said scholars have observed that, “the unmarried woman is regularly stereotyped as lonely, miserable, and with no alternative but to fill her empty life with cats. Thus, the presence of cats have come to symbolize the lack of men in single women’s lives, as by this point in their lives they only have cats to keep them company. Moreover, this could be seen as a metaphorical representation of the inferior status bestowed upon single women by society at large.” Her explanation of this follows:
Hence, even though they realize that this image functions as a disciplinary mechanism, they cannot resist the cultural scripts which refer to long-term singlehood in terms of emptiness, loneliness, and loss. This formulation conveys a horrendous future: if they don’t find a partner at the right marriageable age, they will end up living a lonely, mentally unstable, and socially marginal life. The image of the crazy cat lady also represents the pathologization of older women in our society. This process of devaluation is based upon the premise that a woman’s value is dependent on her appearance and reproductive capabilities.
Of course, fairy tales are replete with witches, who are always single, ugly old hags with at least one cat.
Single women, Lahad said - and she is writing of current perceptions, “are often the subject of caustic remarks, sardonic humor, patronage, and scorn, because they are seen to pose the constant threat of pervasive perversion to the normative societal order.”
It is telling that even in 2021 JD Vance called Kamala Harris part of a Democratic bunch of a "childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices they've made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too." Women without children are still derided.
Lahad is talking about the present, but the perception was especially true in Victorian times, with the concept of the “separate spheres,” with rigidly defined roles for men and women, and the middle- and upper-class ideals of True Womanhood. In fact, one newspaper writer defined ‘old maid’ as the unmarried, financially dependent woman. Women who had inherited family wealth with which to support themselves were not called old maids, he said.
Economics
Girls “are taught from their infancy that marriage is the acme of all that is desirable in life,” an 1879 article originally published in Harper’s Bazaar said. “Marry,” says society to a young woman. “Marry. You must marry.” Set all your endeavors on making your semi-existence a whole existence by the addition of a male half…Women are told it is their duty to marry.”
Marriage for most women was an absolute economic necessity. Society severely limited what occupations a woman could work in, paid them one-third to one-half less than men for the same work (teaching, clerical and factory work, typically), and a pittance for acceptable “women’s work” of sewing and domestic service. “Woman is taught from her cradle to be dependent and society… is inclined to shut her out from useful and profitable employment,” a Boston Globe article noted in 1875.
Indeed, the majority [of single women] “have no income or home of their own,” the author of a December 1867 article in the Phrenological Journal said. “ …what a second-rate place they are compelled to occupy in existence. [They] are forced to become tolerated appendages of other families. Perhaps a married brother offers them a home in grudging sort of way, as if he were throwing a bone to a dog; perhaps a sister, who finds the cares of her family too burdensome for her unassisted shoulders, takes her in lieu of nurse or servant to make herself “generally useful!” However, this was a near-impossible task, the writer said. “Never, until you have been hunted into your grave, will people be satisfied that you have been “useful” enough. …she is only a convenience to others….She sews on buttons; she mends zig-zag rents; she sits up with sick children; she scolds servants per special instruction; she checks off washing bills; she runs after people picking up things, shutting doors, dusting tables, and setting cushions straight.”
All of this was not her fault. It was circumstances beyond her control, the author said. She had to wait for a marriage proposal, and when one was not forthcoming, this was her fate. “People look at her as they might regard an unsalable piece of calico left over the season on the merchant’s back shelves…It is general opinion that she is very much to be pitied.”
In 1855 the Brookville, Indiana newspaper printed a sarcastic opinion piece about the Indiana State Legislature, “which has to provide for benevolent institutions and even colonization for free blacks. It seems that every class of unfortunates, except bachelors and old maids, are gathered under the wing of the state.” Bachelors can support themselves, but not women.
The writer had a solution to the problem: The state should purchase a fine farm and erect a handsome dwelling for the Old Maids’ Asylum, where old maids who reached an age - to be determined - could live. “The farm should be well stocked with cats and birds and such other nic nacs [sic] as old maids may prefer.” It would be maintained by a tax on bachelors.
The Old Maid Game
A cruel illustration of an old maid from a 1902 "comic" valentine. Older single women were subject to this kind of derision.
Who hasn’t played the “Old Maid” card game? There were few in the Baby Boomer generation who didn’t. The object of the game was ending up with the most matched pairs – but whoops - the Old Maid had no match. Get stuck with her at the end of the game and you lose. The old maid was always depicted as a little old lady circa about 1890, with a black gown that went up to her neck and covered everything except her hands and face. She had a cameo brooch at the neck, a prune-like face, wire-rim spectacles, and her thin white hair was pulled back in a severe little bun. No wonder she had never been “picked.” What man would ever have wanted her? An innocent card game, right? But the message was clear.
Ironically, one woman who looked strikingly like this image was the writer who attacked old maids, writer Eliza Lynn Linton, mentioned earlier. Linton married a widow with seven children and after nine years, the two permanently separated. She supported herself independently as a writer for the rest of her life, a sharp critic of the women’s rights movement. She was described as, “Publicly a virulently anti-feminist, privately an utterly emancipated woman, beholden to no man.”
The Old Maid in Fiction
The old maid was frequently a character in short fiction. The stories in which she was the protagonist generally fell under three general categories: comical; those reinforcing the stereotype (and in which she gets her comeuppance for being meddling and disagreeable); and “happy endings” in which she manages to secure a husband. Mary Agnes Early, who wrote under the pen name Cousin May Carleton, was one of the highest paid women writers of her day. “The School Marm," an 1859 tale, was a comedy.
“Little did I think that I…would sit here…with rouge on my cheeks and tears in my eyes deploring the fate which left me a broken-hearted, sharp-nosed old maid,” the character Dorothy Diddle said. “Ah! What a melancholy fate it is to go through life a solitary spinster splashing your affections on a miserable consumptive tabby cat, like a drooping dandelion, alone and uncared for.”
She’d once had a suitor, Nicodemus Cowcabbage, but a new school marm, Liza, came to town and captured his affections. This newcomer was only toying with his heart; Nicodemus was made a laughing stock by Liza and left town, leaving Dorothy bereft.
In “Leaf From an Old Maid’s Diary,” an 1885 story, the 33-year old protagonist goes to visit a married friend in the country. She arranges for her landlady to keep her cats and canaries; she experiences prejudice from the hack driver and a male passenger who mutter under their breath about dealing with an old maid.
At her friend’s, she sees a content woman whose husband helps her, who regularly meets with friends, and finds time to read and discuss books. She earns her own money from selling butter and eggs, and buys the books of her choice.
The old maid comes home struggling with envy. But a week later, she receives a letter that is a proposal from a childhood friend - the second time he asked. This time, she happily accepts and wants to add ‘thank you!’
In Defense of the Poor Old Maid
Such a reviled and/or pitied figure needed her defenders – and she had them. Typical of the poetry-loving Victorians, this was even declared in verse. Following is the first stanza of a poem that ran in newspapers around the country for at least two decades in the 1850s and 1860s.
Oh! Sages may preach of the world and its duty,
And prosers may boast of their purse-filling trade,
And poets may rave of the magic of beauty,
But I’ll say a word for poor slandered Old Maids.
Unfortunate Old maids!
Unappreciated Old Maids!
I’ll always speak for poor slandered Old Maids!
Many an article extolled the virtues of the old maid living exactly the life described in the Phrenological Journal, only with an entirely positive spin. Authors remembered their maiden aunts warmly, “Aunt Bea” types who lived with them, or rotated as needed among her siblings. She was a second mother who was a comfort to her nieces and nephews and a great help to the ‘woman of the house.’ She was pleasant, “lived for others and is glad to be useful, invaluable as a friend, she acts as a servant and counsellor to her married sisters,” one writer said. She was, “Large-hearted, generous and self-sacrificing. She feels no hostility to men.” She was “not soured or unhappy with her lot.”
This saintly soul had her counterpart in the few internationally known women leaders in the alleviation of human suffering - one of the very few acceptable ways for women to lead. Florence Nightingale and Dorothea Dix were two frequently mentioned positive examples of the single woman.
Then there was the point of view that old maids were links to heaven, a ministering angel. “For our part we never could discern either the justice or the propriety of the senseless twattle denunciatory of old maids, which prevails to considerable extent in every community,” wrote a Norfolk, Virginia editor in 1860. “We know many a lovely one…whose presence is ever welcome at the sick bed or the couch of death, and whose gentle and kind hearts are ever prompting them to blest deeds of love, in alleviating all around them the cares and toils and pains of suffering ones….Who does not sympathize with her in her loneliness…and wish her better luck in the world to come?” He closed by saying they are a connecting link to heaven, mediums for the angels.
Work With a Living Wage
There was debate about just when women became old maids, and under what circumstances. Was it at age 25? Or was it 30? What if she was able to support herself? Did independently wealthy single women qualify as an old maid? Regardless of age, if the problem with single women was that they were financially dependent on others, then the solution was having work women could do that paid them enough to support themselves.
“Women with money and independence are not pitied or regarded as old maids,” a Harper’s Bazaar article stated. “The solution is “uncontrolled, unrestricted work. The old maid will cease to exist as soon as woman is emancipated from the so-called women’s sphere.”
Not all women would suddenly be married when that day arrived, of course, but she wouldn’t be the “victim of many of the sorrows that poverty can inflict on mankind.”
The St. Paul Globe said in 1887, that the day already arrived. “Not many years ago it was considered an almost unpardonable crime for a young lady to have attained the age of 25 without having assumed the duties of wifehood, or at least secured the prospect of being the helpmate of some desirable young man.” Now, 30 is the cut-off but, “The sting and stigma have left the term, and when used they don’t seem one-half or one-tenth as bad as they sounded fifteen or twenty years ago.” Now she is “reverenced as a monument of American independence.”
The difference was that earlier she had few ways to earn money, but now she had “a hundred invitations to honest and honorable employment.”
Women supporting themselves in shops and offices are not pitiable. However, the article ends with, “She is a jewel, is the old maid….may some deserving bachelor appreciate her worth and act accordingly.” The best case scenario was still marriage.
Closing With One More Perspective
Then there was the rare old maid, or at least an article supposedly written by one, presenting her situation in a positive light, even if many stereotypes were included. In 1869 a piece appeared in the Troy Times (New York) that was sent over the newspaper wires. She wrote that she had many suitors in her youth, but didn’t regret staying single. This perspective is so unusual that it’s worth quoting at length:
My life is a pleasant one. No one annoys me. No husband flirts with other men’s wives or young girls, breaking my heart. No husband calls me “my love” in public and “old brute” at home! He does not growl at milliner’s bills…He isn’t watching me continually to see if I fulfill all my duties as a wife; to criticize every movement, to be annoyed at the weakness of the tea, the toughness of the steak or the lateness of the breakfast.
I am a free woman. I do as I please, go where I please, think, breathe, sneeze, wink, eat, sleep as I please. Old Mother Hubbard had her dog…but I have my cat! She never speaks a cross word; neither do I! Tabby has a quiet temperament, and we never quarrel.
Would I give up my jolly life as an old maid? Never! My hair is growing gray but I don’t use Hall’s Hair Restorative. My face has some wrinkles but I don’t use Laird’s Bloom of Youth….I don’t have to sing Italian ditties in a languishing manner to some sentimental youth in tight pants and a waxed mustache….I am far more independent… with my hair in a little knot, than Miss Flora McFlimsey in her silks and sparkling diamonds.
I can enjoy my friends’ successes and riches, feeling no envy.
This illustration accompanied an 1897 story about old maids.
Note: Eliza Lynn Linton identified six types of old maids, only one of which was described above. The others were:
1. The Women's Righter - she "shrieks aloud to a gaping sisterhood" about what tyrants men are, rather than protectors and guardians of women. She wants to "ape" men and be in charge of both the male and female sphere. She believes women are superior to men. She teaches women to despise motherhood and see it as degrading; she values dogs more. She is evil and has wrecked marriages and ruined women's lives.
2. The Young Old Girl - She is a "painted, frizzed, frippery" woman who used face powder, hair dye and false hairpieces to try to cling to her glory days of youth, playing the coquette at fifty. She is desperate and keeps a figurative fishhook out trying to lure any man. With her giggling and coquettishness she makes herself ridiculous and men steer clear of her.
3. The Prudish Spinster - This is the type described in the article above, the uptight, killjoy "Miss Prue."
4. The Best Aunt Maid Type - No one can understand how such a loving, generous, wonderful, womanly woman is still single. She is a servant to her sisters, a second mother to her nieces and nephews, and a kind and helpful friend.
5. The "Utterly Helpless One" - She is timid and afraid of men, and uncomfortable around children. She lives under her mother's thumb. As time goes on she becomes more eccentric, more devoted to cats and knitting. She doesn't keep up with fashion, withdraws from the world, and has few, if any friends.
6. The Nun By Nature - She never thought of marriage and motherhood with anything but horror. Too bad most are Protestant as she belongs in the convent.
Sources:
Newspapers:
Hall, Mrs. E.B. “The Fear of Being An Old Maid,” Carlisle Weekly Herald (Carlisle, Pennsylvania), 20 Aug 1851, p. 1.
Ann, Hannah. “Old Maids,” Gonzales Inquirer (Gonzales, Texas), 8 April 1854, p. 1.
“Banking-Old Bachelors,” Indiana American (Brookville, Indiana), 9 Feb 1855, p. 1.
Carleton, Cousin May. “The School Marm,” Holmes County Republican (Millersburg, Ohio) 1 Nov. 1859, p. 1. [Originally published in The New York Mercury.]
“Old Maids,” The Day Book (Norfolk, Virginia), 27 Jan 1860, p. 3.
“Old Maids,” The Rutland Weekly Herald and Globe (Rutland, Vermont), 28 Dec 1860, p. 1.
“Old Maid,” Bolivar Bulletin (Bolivar, Tennessee), 11 May 1867, p. 1.
“Unmarried Women - Their Place in Society,” The Jackson Standard (Jackson, Ohio), 9 Jan 1868, p. 1.
“An Old Maid’s Views,” Staunton Spectator (Staunton, Virginia), 6 April 1869, p. 1.
“What I Think of Old Maids,” The Lawrence Standard (Lawrence, Kansas), 15 Dec 1870, p. 1.
“Old Maids!” The Charleston Daily News (Charleston, S.C.), 15 March 1873, p. 2.
“Redundant Women,” Boston Globe, 26 Jan 1875, p. 4.
“A Group of Old Maids,” Smyrna Times (Smyrna, Delaware), 5 July 1876, p. 1.
“Old Maids: To the Editor of the Tribune,” Chicago Tribune, 15 Sept 1877, p. 10.
“The Old Maid,” The Madisonian (Virginia City, Montana), 26 April 1879, p. 1.
“Belated Sisters,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 4 March 1882, p. 12.
Paradise for Old Maids: Manitowoc Pilot (Manitowoc, Wisconsin), 29 Oct 1885, p. 3.
“Beecher Defends “Old Maids.” Protestants Who Devote Themselves To Others’ Welfare,” The Journal Times (Racine, Wisconsin), 2 Nov 1885, p. 1.
“A Dissertation on Old Maids - What a Prominent Physician…Thinks of Them,” The Cecil Whig (Elkton, Maryland), 14 Nov 1885, p. 3.
“A Leaf From An Old Maid’s Diary,” The Weekly Wisconsin (Milwaukee), 28 Nov 1885, p. 3.
“An Old Maid. What Is It That Makes a Woman Deserve the Appellation?” St. Paul Globe (St. Paul, Minnesota), 23 Oct 1887, p. 15.
Other:
Allingham, Phillip V. “Eliza Lynn Linton, Nineteenth Century Professional Woman Writer (1822-1898), The Victorian Web, https://www.victorianweb.org/authors/linton/intro.html
Lahad, Kinneret. “Facing the Horror: becoming an “old maid,” from A Table For One, A Critical Reading of Singlehood, Gender and Time, Manchester University Press, 2017.
MacPike, Loralee. “The New Woman, Childbearing, and the Reconstruction of Gender, 1880-1900,” NWSA [National Women’s Studies Association] Journal, Vol. 1 No. 3 (Spring 1989), pp. 368-397.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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