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

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2000 by Zsuzsa Berend

The spinsters in this study searched for their place in the world so as not to live in vain. I will argue that the search for a vocation instead of matrimony was not the expression of a wish for self-actualization, self-fulfillment and achievement, as some scholars argue. [59] It was not the expansion of autonomy in a secular, modern sense of the term; rather, it was exercising the autonomy of a moral agent, responsible to her God.

The insistence on self-reliance should be placed in the evangelical tradition going back to the First Great Awakening. Young women were encouraged and expected to become their own person. This tradition emphasized the importance of self-scrutiny and self-possession, necessary for Christian life and preparation for death. [60] On this view, autonomy was a duty, not a freedom to do what one pleases. This understanding was shared by a later generation of women who, in the the softer emotional climate of nineteeth-century Protestantism, were less afraid of God's wrath. They were, howe ver, equally convinced that their lives served a higher purpose. Female self-direction, in the world of nineteenth-century spinsters, was not an ultimate good but a stepping stone to a life of usefulness and service, a life in accordance with God's purposes. The dignity of womanhood required that women think and act for themselves; as Alice Carey advocated in 1869: "to teach [women] to think for themselves ... not so much because it is their right, as because it is their duty." She also proposed to protest against "each and every thing that opposes the full development and use of the faculties conferred upon us by our Creator." [61] Self-direction and self-reliance formed the morally responsible path for a woman who "understood/Herself, her work, and God's will with her." [62] The "self" was conceived of as the repository of human potential for good. Thus spinster Abigail May encouraged her niece, whom she brought up: "I think you will be better for beginning to depend more upon yourself ... What you want to do in life, is to help along the world in any little way that God permits. Another first best step towards helping others, is being able to do for yourself." [63] The English authoress Dinah Maria Mulock Craik sounded a resonant chord with her appreciative American audience when she wrote: "Self-dependence ... is only real and only valuable when its root is not in self at all; when its strength is drawn not from man, but from that Higher and Diviner Source whence every individual soul proceeds, and to which alone it is accountable." [64] Myrtilla Miner shared the conviction that one was responsible only to God and should follow one's own moral conscience: "Keep your heart pure and true; that will secure you a higher, holier opinion than all the world combined could bestow.... Self-consciousness of good or evil is the great law, and the only one for which you or I shall be held responsible before the Judge ... " [65] Emily Howland also wanted to live "truly and freely": true to her higher principles and free o f the world's opinion. "Never shall any amount of suffering of the earthy slough off the divine." [66] It was in this vein that Mary A. Dodge wrote: "There is nothing in life but to go on perfectly self-poised ... While we should pay proper deference to man's opinion the real dignity of life is to be independent of it.,, [67] This, however, is not proto-feminist self-assertion; to be independent of men's judgement was possible for these spinsters because they shared the conviction that "human judgement is a most fallible tribunal; that if there is no higher and wiser power to decide the standard, we are at the mercy of unreason. [68]