“Very few people indeed are happy as solitaries, and they tend to be seen by their neighbours as peculiar or selfish or worse.”
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside by Doris Lessing, 1987
“The term spinster follows an inverse trajectory. It originated in fifteenth-century Europe as an honorable way to describe the girls, most of them unmarried, who spun thread for a living—one of very few respectable professions available to women.”
Spinster by Kate Bolick, 2015
Kate Bolick shares her experiences as a single woman and outsiders outlook of being an unmarried woman by a certain age that labels these women as ‘spinsters.‘ She also discusses five women whose lives are very similar in nature to her own as living single. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maeve Brennan, Neith Boyce, Edith Wharton, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman are the women that Bolick considers as her heroes in the ‘spinster’ world because the forwardness of these women solitaries shed light amongst peers in their respective eras.
“…if not married by 26, they are past their prime” is the phrase many people use regarding women who have not snagged a man to marry. No one realizes that some women choose to be single and never give a second thought to the commitment of marriage. Bolick does not bite her tongue when she states “…where once I’d gone for emotionally available men, I was now irresistibly drawn to the noncommittal, who had no interest in making me their girlfriend.” Why is it that society pressures woman into thinking that you must marry and multiply by a certain age placing them as outcasts?
Kate Bolick writes about her personal life experiences and shares historical experiences of her five heroes as ‘solitaries’ that the world identifies as spinsters. There are plenty of historical facts and new learning experiences (I gracefully accepted) that all women, married or not, should take the time to examine and discover that unmarried women are not a separate people. I highly recommend to single and married women for personal knowledge and education purposes to add this book to their shelves and recommend for a gifting opportunity.
I received this book free from Crown Publishing and Net Galley book reviewer program in exchange for an honest opinion in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission Guidelines.
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