"The Best Or None!" Spinsterhood In Nineteenth-Century New England

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Zsuzsa Berend

This study is based on the written documents--letters and diaries--of about forty Northeastern, white, Protestant, middle-class spinsters. Most of them were born in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. [8] These women remained single in spite of opportunities to marry. [9] Yet their choice was not between marrying or not marrying but whether to marry a particular man. The documents they left behind suggest a common mentality and morality characteristic of their social generation. [10] They shared a concept of self and society, and also an ethos, an underlying attitude towards their world. Their behavior makes sense in the context of the overwhelmingly Protestant culture of the nineteenth-century American Northeast in which "the ideas, the convictions, the customs, the institutions of society were so shot through with Christian presuppositions." [11]

To appreciate the novelty of the cultural context within which nineteenth-century women contemplated marriage, we need first to consider the older ideas of love and marriage. Seventeenth-century Puritans affirmed the importance of affection in marriage: to love one's spouse was a duty. However, the Puritans were distrustful of marriages founded solely on mutual affection. Young people were to choose someone they could learn to love. Yet being in love was not necessary; friendship and esteem were the solid foundations of a lasting union. Love, according to Benjamin Franklin, was merely a passion and as such, "changeable, transient, and accidental. But Friendship and Esteem are derived from Principles of Reason and Thought, and ... are lasting Securities of an Attachment." [12] However, by the first decades of the nineteenth century, mutual esteem was no longer regarded as a sufficient foundation of marriage. Love, based on a strong and mystical personal attraction, came to be viewed as the only legitimate rea son for marriage. [13] Rather than marry someone they could learn to love, young people expected to marry someone they did love. [14]

The notion that marriage was to be based on romantic rather than rational love indicates a transvaluation of human sentiments. Catharine Sedgwick's reasons for breaking her engagement illustrate the changing understanding of love and marriage. She explained to her brother Robert that her fianc[acute{e}] "has been so generous as to relinquish the promise I then gave him and all is now ended forever ... He is very unhappy ... I am degraded in my own opinion but I cannot help it. It is strange but it is impossible for me to create a sentiment of tenderness by any process of reasoning, or any effort of gratitude." [15] Sedgwick refers to the earlier understanding of love as friendship, i.e. love as a result of esteem and gratitude, a rational sentiment. But she already believes in the new ideal, the ideal of involuntary love. A later journal entry brings this new understanding even more into focus. Sedgwick was reminiscing about her feelings toward a former suitor: "I liked him, and not knowing quite as much of the heart (or of my heart) as I do I fancied that liking might ripen into something warmer." [16] Knowing the human heart better--and the ideals that influence its emotions, I should add--Sedgwick came to realize that love is not simply an increase in liking but a separate emotion altogether.