Turning full circle: Should we reclaim the word 'spinster'?

Spinster: it’s fair to say the word carries negative connotations. To describe someone as ‘spinsterish’ is to say they are prissy, sexually repressed, undesirable. Unlike its male equivalent, ‘bachelor’, the stigma around ‘spinster’ is so strong it cannot be used to describe an unmarried woman in a neutral way. (Let us not forget the immortal epigraph by that 1990s icon of female singledom: ‘Diary of Bridget Jones, Spinster and Lunatic’.)

This wasn’t always the case. When the term emerged in the Middle Ages – it first appears in writing in the mid-1300s – it was to describe a woman who spun yarn for a living. Scholars believe that its association with singledom came about due to the fact married craftswomen had better access to raw materials and markets, and could afford expensive tools such as looms.

The married, therefore, could take on higher-status work such as weaving, while the single were left with less prestigious jobs such as washing, carding and spinning wool. Nevertheless, it was arguably good work: stable, respectable, self-reliant. Fast forward to the 17th century, and ‘spinster’ began to mean all single women beyond the usual age of wedlock – spinners or not.

When the banns of marriage are read in Church of England ceremonies today, the phrase ‘spinster of this parish’ has of late disappeared. Likewise, in the UK’s Civil Partnership Act of 2005, ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ were substituted with the catch-all term ‘single’. It’s a testament to the humiliation endured by unwedded women over the last 700-odd years that the stigma attached to ‘spinster’ endures to the present day; a reminder, too, of the ways in which craft history is woven into the fabric of our language.

Perhaps the word is due a rethink. In the UK at least, marriage is now more of a symbolic nicety than a socio-economic necessity: in 2019, heterosexual marriage rates in Britain were the lowest on record since 1862. Historically, the spinner’s craft was a source of female independence and financial self-reliance – long before spinsterdom’s association with dying alone, surrounded by cats. In the same way that the slur ‘queer’ was reclaimed by LGBTQ+ people and turned into a proud marker of identity in the late 1980s, could the 2020s see a new spin on ‘spinster’?