Holding Her Life In Her Two Hands

Your late twenties are an interesting time. Your brain finally fully developed around 25, so you’re much more ‘mature’. You’ve pretty much worked out who you are as a person, what you like and what you don’t like.

You’ve spent a good few years in the workforce now; maybe you’ve worked your way up the ladder a bit. You’re paying back your student loans month by month through your paycheque. You contribute regularly to a pension. You look at government schemes designed to help you save up for your first home, and you might choose one to start saving money in.

Some of your friends start buying houses. Some get engaged. A few even become pregnant. People you went to school with many years ago flood social media with pictures of sparkly engagement rings, puffy white dresses and pudgy pink babies.

Education, job, house, marriage, baby. This is how life is supposed to go. That’s what people have been doing for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. That’s what your parents did. It’s still the prevailing social narrative. It’s what the government wants, with all those incentives and tax breaks they offer to married couples. It’s what everybody expects you to do too. Few people question the cultural norm, and many follow the societally-prescribed trajectory of their lives very happily. But it’s not for everybody.

Just before my 29th birthday, I gave it all up. I handed in my notice at the ‘good job’ I had worked my way up in over the last five years. I ended the lease on the flat I loved in my favourite part of London. I played my last game of netball and said emotional goodbyes to my teammates. I bid farewell to flatmates and friends. I picked up all the pieces of my life and moved them into the attic of my parents’ house. Then I packed a few things into a rucksack and left the country.

I can perfectly understand why people don’t go against cultural conventions: it’s terrifying. To admit that you don’t want the things that you should want, and that everybody else wants, is difficult. To leave your job and your former life without a plan is daunting. To step off the path and into the unknown is frightening. But once you face the fear and take the plunge, it’s incredibly liberating.

As a child, I never played with dolls or pretended I was a mum. I never saw a baby I thought was cute. (Sorry!) I never dreamed of white dresses or planned my wedding day. In fact, I’ve never really thought about getting married at all, even when in relationships. I remember telling people in my teenage years that I would never have children. “You’ll change your mind when you’re older,” they would say. Well, I’m older, and I haven’t changed my mind.

By leaving a good job, a nice apartment, a stable life, I know I’ve made myself unmarriageable. People aren’t interested in women over 30, particularly unconventional ones without a secure career path who plan on moving countries every year or so (I’m an ESL teacher). But I’ve accepted that, and I’m happy with my decision.

Unmarried women have always been viewed with suspicion and even contempt. Throughout most of recorded history, a woman’s sole purpose in life was to marry and produce children for the family and the state. In Ancient Rome under Emperor Augustus, women were expected to be married by the age of 20 or they would be punished. Widows were forced by law to remarry within 10 months of their husband’s death. There is not a single record of an unmarried, aristocratic Roman woman during the Republic.1

In the Middle Ages, unmarried women were often considered prostitutes or witches (or both at the same time) and made to suffer for it. Of course, up until very recently women were barred from proper education and prohibited from owning property or money, so their only real option was marriage. One of the only job opportunities available to single women in the Middle Ages was spinning thread and yarn; they were known as spinsters. These were the only women allowed to earn wages, sign contracts and own possessions, married women being completely under the control of their husbands.2

Over the years, the term ‘spinster’ was given a negative connotation, and unmarried women began to be viewed with derision and disdain. Spinsters in popular literature at this time were mocked, belittled, and portrayed as pathetic, bitter and pitiful characters, while newspapermen began to view them as a threat to the social fabric. A magazine article written in 1862 titled, “What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?” lamented the fact that 30% of women had never married and argued that “We must do nothing whatever to render celibacy easy or attractive.” It claimed that women choosing to remain single was not “the natural order of Providence.”3

In the late 19th and early 20th century, single women began to fight back, most clearly with the suffragette movement. By this time, many women were now receiving an education and entering into the workforce, and a growing number of women were able to support themselves and live independently. There was an increasing number of female authors and writers who penned dissertations on the status of women. One of America’s most famous essayists of the time, Agnes Repplier (who lived to the age of 95 and never married), wrote a wonderful piece in 1913 in defence of the spinster. One of the most powerful lines from this essay struck me vividly:

“What if, holding her life in her two hands, and knowing it to be her only real possession, she disposes of it in the way that she feels will give her most content, swimming smoothly in the stream of her own nature, and clearly aware that happiness lies in the development of her individual tastes and acquirements?” 4

So here I am at the end of 2021, a modern spinster 100 years later, holding my life in my two hands. For as long as I can remember, I never dreamed the same dreams as other people. I was never ambitious in the usual sense. I never desired high status, or aspired to be rich, or hoped for a luxurious house, or wished for a fancy car. My ambitions were always novels I wanted to read, or languages I wanted to study, or places I wanted to travel to.

My only physical possessions of meaning are my books, kindly safeguarded by my parents back in Britain, and my jewellery, which I’ve collected in my travels over the years, each piece imbued with significance and memories. (Jewellery is also small and light enough to carry around with me wherever I go.) I’m not waiting for a man to give me an engagement ring. I swim in the stream of my own nature, and I buy my own jewellery.

1. Feminae Romanae: The Role of Women in Ancient Romehttps://depts.washington.edu/hrome/Authors/boogieon/FeminaeRomanaeTheRoleofWomeninAncientRome/pub_zbarticle_view_printable.html

2. Why are increasing numbers of women choosing to be single?https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/jan/17/why-are-increasing-numbers-of-women-choosing-to-be-single

3. What Shall We Do With Our Old Maids?https://www.proquest.com/openview/fa9b22e859b91fd1/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=1795

4. The Spinster https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Compromises/The_Spinster