WHILE FEMINISM has been widely attacked for making the lives of mothers more difficult and for destroying perfectly decent marriages, it has generally remained immune from criticism regarding the condition of the unmarried woman without children. It is here that feminists who harbor doubts remain absolutely certain of progress.

The unmarried woman once faced shame and ostracism. If she hadn’t found a man by the time she was 25, she was designated an old maid. She could only teach or work as a nurse or secretary. She didn’t go to bars alone or travel to ashrams in Asia and, most horrific of all, she likely never had a sex life. She didn’t eat, pray and love.

All that has changed.  Today, she is not a spinster but a success. She can be a CEO or lawyer. She lives not with her parents, but in a house of her own, complete with the sort of household niceties married women have, such as full sets of china and antique dining tables. She’s just as likely to read Martha Stewart and host fancy dinner parties. People hardly ever ask her why she never married. They’re more interested in her job, and she is most certainly not a virgin.

But this rosy picture is misleading. Does the unmarried woman have it better today? Yes, she may be richer, but is she happier?

When my maternal grandmother was raising her four daughters, she sternly told them that she was not “running a school for spinsters.” That’s because there was a long and exalted line of spinsters in my grandfather’s family. These women lived well and served as tempting role models. There was one difference between them and their contemporary counterparts. They lived in the bosom of their families and in the heart of vital communities. They knew no more real loneliness than anyone else.

Three of my grandfather’s sisters, Marge, Clare and Agnes, took up residence together as adults. Clare and Agnes worked to put my grandfather and his brother through medical school. Marge kept house. They were later joined by their sister Dot; her husband was a prison warden who was shot by an inmate a year after the wedding.

They lived in a Victorian house on a hill, immaculately tended and amply decorated with cut-glass candy dishes, doilies and lace. They had a poodle who begged for chocolate kisses. To a child, theirs was a world of feminine enchantment, filled with a crystalline delicacy that can only be created by true female celibates.

When my grandmother went with my grandfather to a sanitorium in North Carolina, in the hopes of finally conquering the delayed after effects of the respiratory injuries he sustained from mustard gas attacks in World War I, the aunts took care of the remaining children at home.

 They had spinster aunts too, who lived together and worked as schoolteachers. (They died within a year of each other.) Spinster schoolteachers in a bygone era were the torchbearers of civilization and these aunts were exemplars of that proud tradition. They brought to their work all the dedication they might have devoted to family and were possessed with a contagious enthusiasm for their subject matter. The spinster schoolteacher was not a bureacrat doing time. She was a priestess of high culture. By the time she was 30, she had given up looking for male friends and devoted herself to her work. Her mind was in one place: the classroom.

Some of the best female writers have been spinsters, women like Emily Dickinson and Jane Austen. These were not single women. These were old maids. Yet they led passionate inner lives and wrote vividly on matters of love. There’s no question that sublimation enlivened their art. They lived with their families and had stable, if uneventful, lives. Compare their situation to that of, say, Simone de Beauvoir, who most certainly would have been a spinster in an earlier age. Instead, she was able to entangle herself with the egotistical Jean Paul Sartre and stand by while he entertained a long line of mistresses.

Compare the lives of Dickinson and Austen to that of today’s lesbians, who are sometimes, it seems, suited to spinsterhood. Perhaps some turn to lesbianism because the alternative is solitude. But one girlfriend can’t create a whole life; the homosexual subculture provides a community, but such a narrow one. A spinster was once protected by her family. She lived with her parents or siblings. She babysat and cooked for others. She wasn’t expected to work herself to death and possess the ambition of a man. A modest income was enough or, if her parents were well-off, no income at all.

Of course, there weren’t as many spinsters back then as there are today. There was genuine pressure on a woman to get married early. A woman knew by as early as 25 whether she was going to spend her life without a mate or not. Today, a woman might not find out her true lot in life until she’s 40. She delays decision. She wastes time with men whom she never marries. She spends years navel-gazing. By the time she accepts that she’s never gong to marry, she’s too old to mature into the role and make it a dignified calling. Her virginity was wasted.

Unmarried women today probably have more fun and more money. Certainly, many have very close networks of friends. But as old age closes in around them, there is not the firm network of support there was in the past. Their siblings do not consider them a responsibility. They are much less likely to even have siblings and they may live far from nieces and nephews. I think it is wrong to conclude that their lives are generally better than the old maids of yesteryear.

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