In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 616-617



[Access article in PDF]

Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660-1850. By Bridget Hill (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001) 219pp. $39.50


Single women have constituted a significant proportion of the English population but have not yet been accorded scholarly attention commensurate with their numbers. Hill sets out to remedy this situation by surveying many aspects of their lives—from employment and other opportunities to their experience of the poor law. The tale that Hill relates is a bleak one: Women without means struggled to procure the necessities for survival; those with sufficient funds struggled to combat social derision for their intellectual accomplishments and to mold the contours of their life to fit the constraints of gentility. All of them endured the crushing burden of social hostility to singleness.

Women alone generally found work in low-paying occupations, and even skilled workers found it difficult to earn enough to cover the costs of accommodation. Domestic service or a position as a family governess provided somewhere to stay, but not even these sources of employment could protect a single woman from destitution as she aged. Although spinsters were entitled to poor relief, in practice, they were viewed as a permanent burden on the community and given very little of it. Most communities wished to force these women out of the village and into domestic service; this pauperized service, Hill argues, was an essential feature of the old poor law. Single women were closely scrutinized by the local community for evidence of loose or lewd behavior, terrified that a child would be added to the taxpayers' burden.

Life was easier for unmarried women who had funds or a family, but Hill documents the frequently aimless lives of intelligent women who devoted themselves to taking care of parents or other family members. Those who tried to engage with the world of learning encountered prejudice and derision, their work "subjected to destructive criticism and denigrating comment" (92). Women with some capital could enterthe world of business and make a living, even if not a lucrative one. Moreover, such avenues of escape or refuge as emigration, cross-dressing, [End Page 616] and female friendship always existed. But the focus of the book is on lives of privation and exclusion.

The question that Hill seeks to answer is, Were spinsters in English history victims or viragos? The simplistic nature of this question encapsulates some of the problems of the work. It imposes categories on single women in the past that they would neither have recognized nor understood. It ignores a host of interdisciplinary approaches that could have re-shaped the question. The book is unruffled by insights or approaches derived from literary theory or the social sciences.

Hill manages to convey information about the experience of single women in the past, albeit in a rather anecdotal manner, but she does not really examine spinsters as a category. Nor does she make any sustained effort to distinguish between those who wished to live alone and those who did not. She does not explore the difference in attitudes toward respectable urban business owners who were women and poor vagrant women. Both groups may have been single, but they were not viewed in the same way by society at large. It is impossible to do justice to the myriad experiences of single women merely by adding up all instances of hostility.

Hill concludes that many spinsters were exceptional people who were prepared, in the later nineteenth century, to embark on campaigns to improve the condition of women. Although Hill is aware that women could evade many of the regulations, because she does not investigate the complicated negotiation between regulations and individuals, it is difficult to understand how the conditions that she details could produce such independent women, with unbroken spirits, ready to challenge the law.

 



Linda A. Pollock
Tulane University

...

pdf

Share