Life of a ‘spinster’

Victorian society adhered to "separate spheres," where men were seen as belonging to the public sphere of work and politics, and women were relegated to the private sphere of the home, where they were expected to marry and have children.

To be a spinster or the derogatory “old maid”, like Emily Hobhouse, was seen as shameful and “problematic.” They were blamed for being unemployed, yet many occupations and educational institutions were closed to women.  

For example, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first female doctor to qualify in England. She failed to get into any medical school and enrolled as a nursing student at the Middlesex Hospital. She attended classes with male colleagues but was barred after the men complained. She took the Society of Apothecaries examination and qualified in 1865. However, the society subsequently changed its rules to ban women entrants.

Women had very limited legal and political rights, including the inability to own property, vote, or control their earnings after marriage.

Emily Hobhouse never married, and in 1905, she said, “I would rather be an ordinary man than a distinguished woman.” With this statement, she expressed her opinion about society's inequalities.

She was equally frustrated by her education at home with a governess and wanted to go to school and university like her brothers. Still, this opportunity was not afforded to her.  Eventually, she was forced to stay at home and look after her ailing father until his death in 1895.

Even with her family background and support from her family, she struggled at times to make ends meet. By 1921, she was in such financial trouble that South Africans raised £2300 to help buy her a property in England.

“The gentlemen turn them into ridicule ... [they] say ... the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manoeuvres: they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask; -they would answer; sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else,” wrote Charlotte Brontë in Shirley in 1849.

Michael Anderson wrote in a research article that in 1851, there were just over one million unmarried women aged 25 and over in Britain. There were also over three-quarters of a million widows who shared many of the same difficulties faced by single women. In all, the total number of women of this age who had to survive without a husband was over 1.8 million, or 8.9% of the whole population. Over the next 30 years, the numbers increased.

Many of these unmarried women depended on male family members and worked in the “crafts, farm or business sector” within families. Or they had to depend on Poor Relief, charity, domestic service, or by being a governess. However, it is noted that most struggled to save for old age unless they were from wealthy families.

In the labour market, women were almost always paid less than men, in the few occupations, women were allowed to work. Nearly half of all Victorian spinsters worked in the “service industry”, such as domestic services, seamstresses, laundresses, and food services. Only one woman in twenty worked in manufacturing, distribution, and administration, compared with almost half of all men.

It did not help that one of the most eminent scientists of the time, Charles Darwin, viewed women as intellectually inferior to men. He concluded in his book, The Descent of Man, in 1871, that men attain "a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can women—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.”

The word spinster

According to the dictionary, spinster first entered English language in the mid-1300s; it referred to a woman who spun thread and yarn. The earliest use comes from the allegorical poem Piers Plowman: "And my wyf ... Spak to þe spinsters for to spinne hit softe”.

By 1719, a negative connotation and stereotype was added to the word; it was being used generically for “woman still unmarried and beyond the usual age for it”.   

Emily Hobhouse was often described negatively during her life and thereafter as a spinster. After her concentration camp report was published in June 1901, Joseph Chamberlain said, “Joseph, the Empire is not threatened by a hysterical spinster of mature age.”

However, it continued for decades; historian Thomas Pakenham referred to her in his book, “The Boer War” first as a “dumpy, middle-aged English spinster” and then: as “this dumpy forty-one-year-old spinster from Cornwall. Passionate in public, yet inwardly reserved and lonely, a refugee from the claustrophobia of Victorian family life”.

Emily Hobhouse may have been lonely when she travelled alone because Herbert Kitchener refused permission to allow her a female travel companion in a foreign country. And she was neither dumpy – an artefact is our witness that she was 1.72 m tall at 18.

Most importantly, she was anything but “inwardly reserved.” Her actions, when she spoke truth to power, speak for themselves.

Sources

1. Micheal Anderson.  The social position of spinsters in mid-Victorian Britain. Journal of Family History. Winter 1984.

2. https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/people/cp119599/elizabeth-garrett-anderson

3. Online Etymology Dictionary. Dictionary.com Unabridged.