She needs to accessorize properly.
Posted on 05/15/2015 2:39:28 PM PDT by BJ1
Even though Kate Bolick makes a solid case for older women on their own, the tropes and mindsets of the past are hard to overturn.
“You are born, you grow up, and you become a wife.”
“But what if it wasn’t this way?” asks Kate Bolick, the author of Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own.
What if women did not have to worry about getting married, or agonize about when and if it will happen—two questions, Bolick claims, that will hound a young girl into her adult life, regardless of where she was raised, or her religious association.
“Men don’t have the same problems,” she argues.
And she’s right. They don’t.
So what if women were like men? What if marriage was not an end goal, but simply a choice—a choice to not settle, a choice to not search, or even the choice to forgo waiting for Mr. Right to magically appear?
What if women could save themselves and carve out a life of their own—on their own terms, and be content with that choice, or at least free from the judgment of others?
Bolick’s book, which reads more like a memoir than a manifesto on the single life, manages to deliver an honest confession about the perils of being alone. She does not gush. Instead, she tells.
She recounts childhood and puberty with a wry and self-deprecating fondness, honing in on how young girls are quickly evaluated on their looks—and marketability. Then, there is the confusing joy of hormones and high school, and the gradual transition into college, and the debauchery and free love that follows. From that, women come to a point where they can settle, push on, or wait. Does one venture out into the real world, where solo cups of beer and parties are not always present or available? Or should we resist and go our own way?
For all of the focus on women’s empowerment and the new feminism, spinster still has a sting to it.
In Spinster, readers will find a voice that is honest about her ambivalent relationship to marriage. She admits that she has had moments of anxiety about ending up alone. Spinsters are human after all!
Bolick complements her memoir with a tribute to her literary heroes, who she refers to as her “awakeners.” Maeve Brennan, a staff writer for The New Yorker, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edith Wharton, and Neith Boyce, who penned a column for Vogue, called “The Bachelor Girl” in 1898 —all make up this impressive roster.
Although the passages about her literary influences —the women who made her look outside of herself and question the status quo—are enjoyable [everyone likes to know where a certain writer gets his or her influence], the best passages are her own her recollections, where her voice comes through— a voice that is sure and, yes, feminine.
For Bolick, spinster-hood is a choice, not an inevitability.
Nor does it start to loom until one actually becomes an adult, which she claims is not until you’re 40.
And, if you’re 40 and unmarried? Have you missed your “chance”?
Not for Bolick. She threw a party, celebrating her independence. Prior to her 40th birthday, she had written her 2011 claim-to-fame article, “All the Single Ladies,” in The Atlantic. The article caused a firestorm of debate about whether women were truly content to be alone, leaving behind the traditional roles of wife and mother, to become contented spinsters. And it led to a book deal for Bolick.
Questions surrounding the decline in women getting married or getting married later surfaced. Was this a trend or a result of women becoming more successful than men? So why settle? Or were the pickings too slim by the time you are in your 40s, or even your 30s? Or was there something else at work in her article?
So four years later, we get Spinster. Not the single lady, waving her hands to Beyoncé’s anthem. But for all of the focus on women’s empowerment and the new feminism, spinster still has a sting to it. Sure, things have changed, making the much pitied spinster a thing of the past.
But has the stigma really gone away in our feminist-enlightened times? Don’t we still conjure images of the neighborhood cat lady, or the porch-rocking crank, resentfully taking care of one parent or both parents when the word (which we all reflexively avoid) is uttered? Have things really changed since Neith Boyce wrote her Bachelor Girl papers for Vogue more than a century ago? Probably not.
Why?
Because spinsters—whether they are confined to the country, or a stuffy apartment, are still a part of society, and in every community and family. And society still judges women—even women who claim they don’t care.
Bolick was judged in 2011 with her article in The Atlantic, and so was Anne-Marie Slaughter in 2008, with her Atlantic article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”
Slaughter had been a rising star, and important and well known player working alongside the most powerful woman in American politics, Hillary Clinton. Then she walked away, not in retreat, but assertively and unapologetically, and then lived to write about it. It was her choice.
Bolick may differ from Slaughter in that she is not married and has no children—but she is similar in that her decision to remain alone has been her choice—and she has made this choice unapologetically.
Like Slaughter, she recognizes how culture can quickly shape a woman’s view of herself. And part of that view includes marriage. Her “awakeners” certainly had their own view of themselves. They were not silent or submissive in their decision to question the status quo or to fulfill some expectation. They could be disappointed with themselves, but themselves only.
Why does she have to be a spinster? What about and Old Maid or a Maiden Aunt?
I hope she finds someone.
She needs to accessorize properly.
What is the ratio of cats per children? Is it 1:1 or do you need more than 1 cat per?
25:1
I won’t have more than three.
I call it the “poop limit.”
Men and Women are different. The fact that women cherish family and children is ingrained in biology.
Social planners can’t make men and women become interchangeable cogs in a machine, no matter how hard they try.
I’ve got a 10 pound cat now that produces 6 pounds of poop and 4 pounds of hair a week.
Another nail in the coffin of Western Civilization.
I am a spinster, old maid, maiden Aunt or whatever term people want to throw at me. Do I obsess over it? No. Do I let other people’s comments get to me? Rarely.
Would I like to be married? Of course.
Actually the worst comments and “pity” generally come from other single women. I don’t hang around with them because everything devolves into a disfunctional support group about not meeting anyone.
My married friends accept me as the one who never met anyone to settle down with and after watching the messes some of my siblings and cousins have made, my parents are fine with my life.
>>>Actually the worst comments and “pity” generally come from other single women. I don’t hang around with them because everything devolves into a disfunctional support group about not meeting anyone.<<<
What do they say? And why do you suppose these women are still single when they obviously don’t want to be single?
It would never occur to me to care about old or new or in between “tropes”. Don’t know why women do. Don’t much care. Live your life, die, go to judgment.
The First World War left nearly a million British women without husbands. Although Britain survived, its empire crumbled.
The War on the Family has had a much larger effect. The ultimate effect on Western Civilization is unknown.
Ladies, if you were in your 50’s or above and were looking for a man, what would your first thought be about a man your age who had never married? Would you consider him without concern?
It would make me do a lot of thinking. But then again, I’m not a spinster.
“You’ve got to meet someone or you’ll lose friends. They dump you for their man” is my favorite.
“It’s just so hard to meet somebody. Of course you can’t meet anyone.”
“I just don’t understand why someone as cool/pretty/smart/nice as you can’t attract someone.”
Imagine these repeated ad nauseam for hours. Seriously, except for the year I made the New Year’s resolution to “put myself out there” and brought it up myself, the subject never comes up in groups with married women.
Most older single women are that way because they aren’t attracting the man they want to be with. Either the bar is set by weird shallow things(he must make 250K but be home by 5:30 and have washboard abs, but I don’t want him going to the gym because he might flirt), they make choices/exhibit behaviors that put them in a position that men who would commit shy away from, or their lifestyle/career choices limited opportunities for meeting eligible men at a younger age.
I may just may have a little bit of all of these issues ;)
Typical “cat ladies” DON’T look like that! She’s way too attractive and feminine.
Issues: It’s why I went abroad to find a wife (I simply wanted a traditional woman that wasn’t obsessed with materialism). Marriage seems like a scam to me as a man. The man MUST pay child support and divide his assets. But the woman can leave at any time for any reason.
So I think that it may be easier for an older woman to get married once the fear of child support is over because the woman can’t have any kids. And that is one less stumbling block for a man. Of course by the time the woman is 40ish, will a 40ish man be interested in her back? Or will she have to settle for a 50ish man......hence going back to your point about unrealistic expectations.
“Most older single women are that way because they aren’t attracting the man they want to be with”
A lot of decent women don’t marry, because they’re not encountering decent men.
I waited a long time to marry, because it seemed like every guy I met wanted to hop in bed on the second or third date. The ‘sexual revolution’ had made sex so easy for men, that they didn’t bother with someone who was conservative when it came to sex and its responsibilities. They were also pretty dumb - not father material.
I didn’t even meet the man I would marry until I was almost 40.
There are no ‘rules’ about these things; it all happens for right-minded people when it should.
On the other hand, there have always been both men and women who had no interest in marriage, for various reasons- they were either asexual, or just interested in other things, and lived productive lives without marriage.
But nowadays, people like that are immediately branded as “gay”. People don’t think beyond their own natures, and can’t imagine that another person’s nature may be different.
“I’ve got a 10 pound cat now that produces 6 pounds of poop and 4 pounds of hair a week.”
Multiply that by four and you’re at my house. Sigh. And never a day goes by without cleaning up a pile of vomit somewhere on the premises.
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