Spinning The Spinsters

In the eyes of some historians, 19th-century New England spinsters were pioneering protofeminists who spurned marriage in the name of autonomy and feminine empowerment. Berend, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, says that portrayal is all wrong. In her study of diaries and letters of some 40 white, middle-class, Protestant spinsters of the period, she found that, though the women elected to remain single, they regarded marriage as the highest expression of God’s will and “earthly happiness.”

By the early decades of the 19th century, Berend says, friendship and “mutual esteem” were no longer regarded as a sufficient foundation for marriage, as they had been by 17th-century Puritans. The evangelical movement of the 19th century changed that. Love—understood as God’s will—became the only legitimate basis for marriage.

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