Title: Spinster Author: Kate Bolick
Published: April 2, 2015
Genre(s): Nonfiction
Page Count: 337
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Whom to marry, and when will it happen - these two questions define every woman's existence. So begins Spinster, a revelatory and slyly erudite look at the pleasures and possibilities of remaining single. Using her own experiences as a starting point, journalist and cultural critic Kate Bolick invites us into her carefully considered, passionately lived life, weaving together the past and present to examine why she - along with over 100 million American women, whose ranks keep growing - remains unmarried.
This unprecedented demographic shift, Bolick explains, is the logical outcome of hundreds of years of change that has neither been fully understood, nor appreciated. Spinster introduces a cast of pioneering women from the last century whose genius, tenacity, and flair for drama have emboldened Bolick to fashion her life on her own terms: columnist Neith Boyce, essayist Maeve Brennan, social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and novelist Edith Wharton. By animating their unconventional ideas and choices, Bolick shows us that contemporary debates about settling down, and having it all, are timeless - the crucible upon which all thoughtful women have tried for centuries to forge a good life.
Intellectually substantial and deeply personal, Spinster is both an unreservedly inquisitive memoir and a broader cultural exploration that asks us to acknowledge the opportunities within ourselves to live authentically. Bolick offers us a way back into our own lives - a chance to see those splendid years when we were young and unencumbered, or middle-aged and finally left to our own devices, for what they really are: unbounded and our own to savor.
Very much like Kate Bolick, I have a “spinster wish”—a yearning for solitude, freedom, independence, the option of spending my afternoons alone in bed or out with friends without having to seek anyone’s approval but my own. I’m not saying that I’m the same woman as Bolick, or even very similar to her (far from it), but I am saying that Spinster, in its exploration of what it is to make a life of your own, on your own terms, is one of the most reassuring, even validating, books I’ve read. Through her own personal anecdotes, historical “lessons”, and social commentary, Bolick’s Spinster speaks about women and singleness in an illuminating way that I, personall, found to be highly relevant to someone in my position, a woman in her early twenties just starting to understand and explore her own “spinster wish.”
In its opening paragraph, Spinster cuts right to the chase:
Whom to marry, and when will it happen—these two questions define every woman’s existence, regardless of where she was raised or what religion she does or doesn’t practice. She may grow up to love women instead of men, or to decide she simply doesn’t believe in marriage. No matter. These dual contingencies govern her until they’re answered, even if the answers are nobody and never.
Even today in the twenty-first century, so much of a woman’s life centers around her decision to marry, in addition to her decision to have children (which is a whole ‘nother subject). The majority of adults in the United States do go on to get married at some point, and Bolick doesn’t condemn that decision; instead she offers the idea that marriage (or not-marriage), isn’t the only defining label you can ascribe to someone, particularly a woman.
[The] question I’d long posed to myself—whether to be married or to be single—is a false binary. The space in which I’ve always wanted to live—indeed, where I have spend my adulthood—isn’t between those two poles, but beyond it. The choice between being married versus being single doesn’t even belong here in the twenty-first century.
And those two quotes, which bookend this text (the latter comes from the final chapter), hit the truth so precisely, for me. This idea that there are two kinds of women: married and single, and that the single most important attribute of a woman is either of those two labels—it doesn’t fit in our modern society. Nor should it.
Of course, Spinster touches on more than just the “married vs. single” debate. Bolick uses five “awakeners”—women who seemed to exemplify her “spinster wish” as the framework for a narrative that is a highly successful amalgamation of memoir, historical analysis, and social commentary. Each of these five women (all writers), serve to show Bolick in some way how to pursue her own desire and, once obtained, how to sustain it.
[To] live happily alone requires a serious amount of intellectual thought. It’s not as simple as signing the lease on your own apartment and leaving it at that. You must figure out what you need to feel comfortable at home and in the world, no matter your means (indeed, by staying within your means), and arrange your life accordingly—a metaphorical architecture.
More than that, Bolick suggests that women should reclaim the word “spinster” from its derogatory connotations and return it to its original roots, a term that was respectful and descriptive of a single woman’s valuable place in society. Even a married woman, the author claims, can in some way be a spinster. She offers the word up “as shorthand for holding on to that in you which is independent and self-sufficient, whether you’re single or coupled.”
The essence of Spinster, I feel, is an examination of women living life as they choose, according to their own internal compasses, whether that’s married or single or dating, reclusive or vibrantly social. Or any combination thereof. As I said, this book was wildly validating for me, as somewhere between the charming anecdotes and history lessons, I saw myself reflected in Bolick’s own journey towards embracing spinsterhood, and was able to recognize and grasp on to my own “spinster wish” with an idea of how to shape my future to see it realized.
