larkandkatydid:

Like, for a harmless example, I’m pretty confident all of the assertions in this post about the origin of the word “spinster” are bullshit.   I can find no evidence that wool  (hand) spinner was ever a profession that paid well or allowed anyone to own their own business.  Nor does it make any logical sense to me to refer to it as an “art” because it’s not like it’s hard or can be done multiple ways. 

But you can find plenty of references to spinning wool by hand as being the shitty, tedious job that hurts your hands, hurts your back,and damages your lungs.    It’s difficult, but it’s mostly tedious and awful and you can basically “master” it as a toddler.  There’s a new book that suggests, after actually speaking to women whose feet were bound as children, that foot-binding was done in no small part in order to cripple girl children to make them better able to sit still for hours on end spinning and carding wool.   

The image of “spinster” people were calling to mind in the 18th/19th centuries was of a “surplus” woman who had to rely on the charity of her nearest male relatives and therefore had to do the shittiest, most tedious job in the household because her only alternative is to starve on the street or get hanged as a witch.

I mean, I”m being weirdly nitpicky about an utterly harmless post that I’m not even some kind of confident expert in…but there’s something troubling to me about anachronistically finding examples of all these economically self-sufficient single ladies instead of the grim, horrifying reality of how fragile a woman’s life was and how terrible it was to be a woman without some man to give you social status.  I mean, if there were all these examples of free-wheeling spinsters (not window with sons) who made good money and (somehow) owned their own property  then what did we even need feminism for?  I mean, hell, a single woman in the US in 1971 would not be able to open her own textile business because a single woman in 1971 would have no access to credit! 

My justification for being a joyless pendant here is that I think it’s Not Helpful to create these myths that there were lots of happy alternatives for women or to downplay how brutal structural oppression was:   A very small amount of women in pre/semi Industrial Age Europe had any kind of genuine financial security and most of those women in a lot of places/times in Europe and America had to genuinely fear having someone call them a witch and take whatever resources they did have.