Spinsterhood is powerful - success and determination of non-feminist women who did not marry and have families - Column

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Florence KIng

IT IS TYPICAL of America that having invented efficiency apartments, singles bars, Soup for One, and That Cosmopolitan Girl, we have dropped spinster from the language and consider old maid a sexist slur.

I make a point of using both. If I fill out a form that asks for my marital status I skip the printed selections, write in spinster, draw a block beside it, and check it. When an aluminum-siding telephone salesman asked to speak to the "man of the house," I said, "There isn't any, I'm an old maid," and derived enormous satisfaction from his audible gulp.

Spinsterhood was powerful long before feminism hit the fan. Point to any area of "sex discrimination" and you will find that old maids have always sailed through unscathed. Businessmen know all too well that the hand that rocks the cradle rocks the boat. Most married women with children are no use to anybody unless the stock exchange is hiring amok runners, but spinsters give females a good name. We come to work on time with no visions of babysitters and day-care centers dancing like rancid sugar plums in our heads; we can work overtime on a moment's notice, and there is never any spit-up on our paperwork.

Credit ratings? An old maid and a divorcee with three children to support are both "single," but the resemblance ends there. Instead of urging women to conceal their marital status under the muzzy blanket of "Ms.," feminists should have encouraged the inclusion of spinster on applications. It would have pulled up women's overall credit rating and eliminated the automatic discrimination against them caused by the bill-paying problems of liberated divorcees.

Remember the classic old-maid joke. Before going to bed she spent an hour locking the doors and windows of the house that she occupied alone. Sounds like a big house, doesn't it? She also hired lots of "hired men," and when she begged them to marry her she always reeled off a long list of her economic assets to sweeten the deal: the "feminization of poverty" was nowhere in evidence.

Auto insurance? Old maids look at the road, not at what Jason did to Debbie's dress. As for life insurance, take a peek at the tombstones in Old Maid Gardens:

Susan B. Anthony--1821-1906

Anna Dickinson--1842-1932

Elizabeth Blackwell--1821-1910

Clara Barton--1821-1912

Dorothea Dix--1802-1886

Elizabeth Peabody-1804-1894 A certain teacher and reformer little known today is the undisputed star of Old Maid Gardens. Here she is, that perennial unplucked flower of reform politics:

Emily Howland--1827-1929

By God, that's what you call a good set of bowels. Have you ever noticed that there are no old maids in laxative commercials? They beam the message that women are three times more likely to suffer constipation, yet the sufferers portrayed are always matrons and their married daughters, who conclude that the problem comes from "doing so much for others"--an unconscious gem of truth-in-advertising hinting that marriage and motherhood are the ties that bind.

I WISH my fellow conservatives would tone down their plangent testimonials to the Great God Family. I also wish that feminists would try to harden women, as real feminists should, by preaching renunciation, instead of tearing them apart by simultaneously promoting masculine work and condemning masculine work habits, e.g., Adrienne Rich: "I want to make it clear that I am not saying that in order to write well, or think well, it is necessary to become unavailable to others, or to become a devouring ego. This has been the myth of the masculine artist and thinker; and I repeat, I do not accept it."

Bull, madam, bull. If you really reject it, why not say so simply and briefly, instead of dragging in defensive preambles and italics?

The "myth" of the masculine artist and thinker--or any worker--is not myth but fact. Its real name is concentration, and it is achieved by making oneself unavailable to others. He travels fastest who travels alone, and that goes double for she.

Mendacious pep talks such as Miss Rich's keep married women in a perpetual state of conflict and make them jealous of unencumbered women. The jealousy crops up in a phrase I hear regularly: "If I could do what you do

Write the same goddamn page twenty times? Write all day Christmas? Get halfway through a book only to realize that you started too late in dramatic time and the whole thing is turning into a flashback? Anybody who chose that moment to ask "When's dinner?" would get killed, ladies, and liberal Adrienne Rich knows it. She won't tell you; I just did.

Of all the benefits of spinsterhood, the greatest is carte blanche. Once a woman is called "that crazy old maid" she can get away with anything.