Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800-1865 (review)

Southern Single Blessedness explores the lives of wealthy, white "spinsters" in, primarily, Charleston and Savannah. Notwithstanding the overweening importance of marriage in slave society—the institution of marriage modeled paternalism and hierarchy—more than one-half of Charleston's white women were unmarried at mid-nineteenth century. Carter argues that these women served as the "glue that helped keep elite social networks . . . [and] individual families intact" and that, rather than challenging the ideology of southern womanhood, they perceived themselves as acting within gendered protocols that demanded "womanly piety, usefulness, and devotion to family" (5, 7).

The author challenges the classic notion that northern women were quicker to celebrate the positive attributes of "single blessedness" than their southern counterparts. Only when the Civil War forced a reconsideration of both manhood and womanhood, and decimated the population of marriageable men, did southern women embrace the notion that remaining single and "useful" represented a higher calling and yielded greater happiness than marrying the wrong man.¹ Carter provides convincing evidence that throughout the antebellum decades, "significant pockets" of unmarried women in the South's key urban centers thrived on their intimate female friendships, benevolent work, social and intellectual societies, and their much-needed service to family members (41). Carter further argues that southern spinsters distinguished themselves from their northern counterparts in that, like married women, their identities remained firmly rooted within their families. They "did not pine for economic independence or vocational purpose" as did middle-class and wealthy women of the North (6).

In five chapters focused on the antebellum years, Carter describes and analyzes the physical and intellectual milieu of her protagonists. She uncovers a "surprisingly positive" southern literature about "spinsters" adapted from northern and European writers (47). The author plumbs traditional manuscript sources—letters, diaries, and church and organizational records—as well as literary sources to provide a detailed chronicle of the familial duties of unmarried women from which they derived their identities as "useful, needed, and loved women" and "cement[ed] places within their extended families" (66). Also documented are the female friendships "that sustained and occupied" unmarried southern women and the benevolent work that "provided a sense of purpose, community, independence, and a public role" (117, 118).

In her final chapter, Carter provides multiple examples of how unmarried, white, southern women "had the time, inclination, and, especially in the cities, a strong tradition of antebellum benevolent work that led them directly" into war-related service. Now their "mantra to be useful" shifted; "it demanded service to . . . [the South's] massive, unprecedented needs" (151, 170). More innovative is Carter's assertion that impending war ended the "relative permissiveness" about spinsterhood (153). Many young women rushed into marriage, often lowering their standards significantly and thus bringing greater scrutiny upon those who did not follow suit. Unmarried women were forced "under the microscope" as debates raged about their proper roles and their fates (153). One wonders if the war precipitated similar public discussions in the North as all Americans increasingly pondered the horrendous loss of life.