Five women guide Bolick to the empowering self discovery of “making a life of one’s own” in her debut memoir, Spinster.
by Sara Driscoll
Virginia Woolf tells us what it takes to explore women as both writers and characters in fiction in her 1929 extended essay “A Room of One’s Own.” But what about the act of making a life of one’s own? Kate Bolick writes about her path to self-sustaining happiness in her memoir-cum-historical ode to the women who helped shape her views in her new book, Spinster (Crown), released on April 21.
“Whom to marry, and when it will happen…” these are the opening questions that “define every woman’s existence…” according to Kate Bolick, contributing editor to The Atlantic and freelance writer for Elle, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. “You are born, you grow up, you become a wife.” Or so Bolick has been told. Unaccepting of this predestined path, Bolick raises the question of what if it wasn’t this way? Through documented glimpses into the lives of five spirited, wise and rebellious women who have long passed but whose writing still inspires her, Bolick attempts to answer these questions, and more, by educating the reader on the evolution of the word “spinster,” and how she grew to embrace the term as her own.
Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman are the chosen ones Bolick considers as her “awakeners.” After her mother passes away when Bolick is just 23 years old, she finds solace in the pages these women left behind. In a refreshingly honest and revealing way, Bolick weaves her personal experiences with men, love and work between historical insight on each of her five awakeners journeys. The five women shared a few similarities with Bolick: they were born or spent much of their lives on the east coast, they were aspiring writers, and they believed the conventional institution of marriage was restrictive.
The cast of characters Bolick chooses to reference are no strangers to struggle nor to success. Each woman had to blaze her own trail to achieve her own form of personal freedom. They were Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners, innovators, and writers for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue.
Bolick spends a lot of time comparing and contrasting the societal nuances between the adversities her awakeners faced as single women in the 20th century to those Bolick herself faces in the 21st.
What is most interesting, though, is not only the rich history woven throughout the pages, but the way in which Bolick pairs that history alongside her own personal experiences. She shares the inception of the word “spinster,” one that dates back to the 15th century and was used in an honorable way to describe girls who spun thread for a living. Early colonial America is where the word “spinster” became synonymous with the British version of “old maid.”
Bolick writes that it wasn’t until researching this book that she “…truly fell in love with the word spinster.” Bolick’s research says that any woman who wasn’t married by the age of twenty three was considered a spinster. Bolick, a woman in her forties, owns her identity, and encourages society to allow her to do so.
“The choice between being married and being single doesn’t belong here in the twenty-first century.” Bolick calls for the revision of the word spinster and its stigma as someone who is lonely and old with too many cats, but what should be seen as someone who is independent, strong and follows her own path.
Chock full of a myriad of informative statistics paired with historical context, Spinster offers valuable insight and assurance that the life you are meant to live is the one that you most desire to. “Are women people yet?” Bolick asks. She challenges us to acknowledge that this question cannot yet be positively affirmed. “Until the answer is an undeniable yes, a girl actually can’t grow up like a boy, free to consider the long scope of her life as her own distinct self.”
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Sara Driscoll is a student at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. A native of Chicago, Sara loves deep dish pizza and cold snowy days. She’s hooked on phonics, never leaving the house without a book or magazine in her bag. She loves to write, and is interested in pursuing a career as a copy writer in the advertising industry. Check her out on Instagram at sara_driscoll912 and on Twitter @sara_ndipity_.
