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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Zsuzsa Berend

Influenced by romantic notions of oneness and prevailing understandings of womens supreme capacity for emotions, many women questioned their own feelings, measuring them against highly idealized expectations and finding them wanting. One young woman wrote, "All the time I feel within me that I do not love you with that intensity of which I am capable." [32] Lucy Larcom, at thirty, wrote about her fianc[acute{e}] to a friend: "I love him warmly, but not passionately, as some do, or as perhaps I might love ... I shall refuse and defer no longer." [33] But a year later she was still hesitating: "I love him still, better than other men, but not as I could love, and he knows it," she wrote to friends. [34] A few years later, at Frank's urging, she was again scrutinizing her feelings: "I could almost believe I love him enough to go to him at once," yet "I am sure there are chambers in my heart that he could not unlock ... I do feel that it is in me to love, humanly, as I have never loved him." [35]

Many found it difficult to imagine how their high ideals of marriage could possibly be realized. Harriot Hunt, who never married, described her ideals as "that holy union of truth and good, that sum of light and warmth,--approach it reverently; dare not ridicule it by sneers, slights." [36] William Barton recalled how his aunt, Clara Barton, "said she had her romances and love affairs [37] ... but ... though she thought of different men as possible lovers, no one of them measured up to her ideal of a husband." [38] These women did not define their emotional life in terms of interiority, purely personal sentiments. They constantly contrasted their own feelings with ideals that set an impersonal standard offering criteria to evaluate emotions.

Thus Ella Lyman, at twenty-seven, wrote to her suitor: "Choosing to marry is choosing to live a dual life, to bring two different lives into union and we don't do that unless the tie which unites them, the life in common, is holier, higher than the work of either apart." [39] For two years, she could not decide whether to marry Richard. In answering his marriage proposal, she assured him of their closeness, yet was unable to accept: "Marriage is so vital and earnest a responsibility that even to spare you suffering I cannot answer now." [40] Two days later she wrote in the same vein : "Dear Richard, I am glad of this deeper knowledge of you, glad in your love ... As yet I have not realized the meaning of marriage, and it is so sacred a tie that I must grow into the knowledge of it before I enter its presence. I am unworthy to share your life unless I can give myself to you with perfect oneness and I cannot now." [41] Here Ella Lyman pointed to a crucial feature of the contemporary ideal of love-marriage: "pe rfect oneness" was not only an achievable goal but the goal to achieve. Given her belief in the possibility of perfect fusion, it is no surprise that she was still hesitating a year later.

Lucy Stone was similarly unconvinced by Henry Blackwell's ardent courtship: "You are dearest to me ... but all that you are to me, does not come near, my ideal of what is necessary, to make a marriage relation ... If there were real affinity between us--the elements by which a true marriage could be made, I do not think that I should so instinctively recoil from the thought of it." [42] Suffragist and women's rights advocate Lucy Stone, who firmly resolved never to marry, was nonetheless willing to enter such a union if, as she assured Henry, "my love for you had in it, that glad self-surrender, and boundless trust which is a wedded love ... no nothing ... should or could prevent my public recognition of it ... So now, I ... wait for full assurance." [43] Ellen Rothman has argued that in spite of culture's idealization of marriage, middle-class women did not want to marry so badly that any men would do. My argument is the opposite: it was precisely because of the idealization of marriage that middle-class wo men were severely selective in choosing husbands. [44] Ella Lyman wrote about "perfect oneness in marriage, Lucy Stone referred to the "glad self-surrender ... which is wedded love," Lucy Larcom understood matrimony as "two spirits made one." These spiritualized images of love and marriage were closely linked to the rise of "moral motherhood." [45] The maternal ideal emphasized women's emotional qualities, which during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came to be more highly valued. [46] As affection took on a moral and religious connotation, [47] feminine affection was conceived of as above lust, passion, or sensuality. "The higher women rise in moral and intellectual culture, the more is the sensual refined away from her nature, and the more pure and perfect and predominant becomes her motherhood." In this spiritualized understanding, feminine love was inseparable from woman's motherly nature and distinctive moral qualities. [48] "Love is the very nature of woman. She may be said to possess it in a general sense, independently of individual applications. All the passions of woman relate in the last analysis to her maternal role." [49] Feminine love was caring, tender, and selfless, not only in the prescriptive literature but in women's private accounts of their aspirations.