Bachelor Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

woman as happy and young. (The concept of “bloom” figures heavily into many nineteenth-century spinster novels; in Jane Austen’s Persuasion it is mentioned twenty-one times.) Once it goes, the skin is pallid, symbolizing inevitable and rapid decay.
    But it is important now to pause and state that not all women shared this belief in slow evisceration or found it at all relevant to their futures.
    TRUE WOMEN AND THE SINGLY BLESSED
    They are not a widely known group of women. They led no particular movement, formed no political cells, did not even qualify as a peer cohort—still, they made some small history by saying no. No to marriage proposals, in which the concept of “forever,” as Florence Nightingale famously said, slid into “never.” As in never being wholly oneself; never being permitted to make up one’s own mind; never to be able to move about freely. In some sense, buried alive. Especially if one was marrying just to marry. As one Eliza Southgate wrote to a friend in 1841, “Which is more despicable? She who married a man she scarcely thinks well of—to avoid the reputation of ‘old maid’—or she who…preferred to live her single life?”
    She who “preferred to live her single life” lived it most often in New England, from the 1830s through the mid-1870s. This was the era of “single blessedness,” an almost devotional phrase used by a fairly elite and intellectual band of single women to describe a state of unmarried bliss. To sketch a quick composite of this early rebel, we can say that she grew up amid intellectuals, preachers or writers, with left-leaning principles and a love of oration. Household conversation ranged from abolitionism, transcendentalism, or trade unionism to any other radical topic then debated at public meetings and in Unitarian church sermons. She may not have received an education like her brother’s, but on her own she had trained her mind the way others had worked to play delightfully upon the pianoforte, or to sing lieder (not that she lacked these more delicate talents). Living across an expanse of cities, towns, and states, these single women did not create a declaration of their beliefs. But if they had, it might have been this: a desire to elevate singlehood from its status as horrifying fate to “an expression of self-reverence.”
    Dr. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, author of Liberty: A Better Husband, a dazzling book on these women, derived the term “singly blessed”from a letter, written in 1820 by a frustrated young woman, Eliza Chaplin, to her friend Laura Lovell. As Chaplin wrote of marriage and singlehood: “[rather than] endure the unhappiness that exists where minds are ‘fettered to a different mold,’ and rather [than] be subject to the ‘eternal strife’ which…prevails [I prefer] ever to remain in ‘single blessedness’ and deem it felicity thus to live.”
    The list of women who described themselves this way was long: the abolitionist Grimké sisters, Florence Nightingale, the poet and onetime mill girl Lucy Larcom, Louisa May Alcott, Susan B. Anthony, Drs. Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, Vida Scudder, and M. Carey Thomas, second president of Bryn Mawr and one of the first women to attend Cornell. There were even a few men who agreed; commentator Aretemus B. Muzzy wrote during the 1840s: “A single life is not without its advantages; while a married one that fails…is the acme of earthly wretchedness.”
    Single blessedness had its roots in the eccentric nineteenth-century New England household but, more important, in new attitudes toward female education. Starting at midcentury, many middle-class families began to send pubescent girls to boarding schools, and later a smaller number would send their most insistent marriage-aged daughters to “girls’ college.” (Among the elite schools, Vassar opened in 1861, Wellesley in 1870; Smith in 1871, and Bryn Mawr in 1885.) A few of the most determined enrolled in the small number of