Sexlessness and Today’s Spinsters

Writings about unmarried women of past time periods frequently refer to them by the term “spinster.” However, this word has recently fallen out of favor even though our modern culture has many women who do not marry. “Spinster” has connotations that do not fit the majority of today’s never-wed ladies. A sense of domesticity clings to the term from its origin. It came into common use because so many unmarried women earned their keep through spinning. The word also has connotations of celibacy since it entered the lexicon in the 19th Century when chastity was a defining virtue for women.

Many years ago, I read a Dear Abby letter from a woman whose boyfriend had an adult daughter living at home who had never held a job or had a date and so could easily be regarded as an old-fashioned spinster. A friend of mine knew a family in which the adult daughter lived at home and did not work outside it but earned her keep through household chores. However, I think it is safe to say that in contemporary America, domestic spinsters who continue to live in the parental home without working outside of it are a rarity. They are also unlikely to would come to public attention.

The term “spinster” also seems like a misnomer when applied to our (to a large extent unfortunate) multitude of single mothers or our Sex and the City-style female swingers.

However, there are at least two contemporary prominent unmarried ladies who are childless and appear to be celibate and could be considered genuine spinsters. One is America’s Nellie Gray and the other is Great Britain’s Ann Widdecombe. Both women are adamantly anti-feminist but both also appear to have lived their lives according to the precept of radical feminist Florence King that, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

Nellie Gray is President of March for Life, an organization that seeks to criminalize abortion and was formed shortly after the 1972 US Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision striking down most anti-abortion laws. Gray has been President of March for Life since the group has been in existence. Their annual march held in Washington D.C. each year commemorating the decision that, in Gray’s words, “decriminalized, not legalized,” abortion, is sometimes called “Nellie’s March.”

Gray was born June 25, 1924 in Big Spring, Texas. According to a New York Times article published in 1981, Gray describes her childhood as “economically debilitated.” If I recall correctly, the book Enemies of Choice: The Right-To-Life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion by Andrew H. Merton (was that ever a biased volume!) says Gray’s father left the family when she was a child. The NYT piece states that she “worked as a secretary for a year before raising enough money to attend Texas State College for Women in 1941.” The patriotic Gray enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war ended, she went to college on the G.I. Bill, earning first a bachelor’s degree in business administration and then a master’s in economics. Later she attended Georgetown University at night, earning a law degree in 1959.

She worked in Washington, D.C. for the State Department as an economic research assistant and later in the Labor Department. A Roman Catholic, she grew up in the era in which “nice” and “normal” women were expected to marry but for some reason she never has.

She is the author of March for Life’s official principles which reject not only the rape exception that is often made by those seeking to outlaw abortion but even the life of the mother exception. She believes that equal care should be given to both the pregnant female and the unborn. The group’s slogan is, “No abortions! No exceptions! No compromises!” She believes criminalizing abortion should be followed by Nuremburg-like trials of those she calls “feminist abortionists.”

March for Life seeks to criminalize any drug or device that would prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg into a uterus. Gray asserts, “It is equally as heinous to kill a pre-born child in existence at fertilization as to kill a larger pre-born child.”

She frequently refers to “innocent pre-born babies.” Without in any way demeaning her, one can hear the ache and yearning of the childless woman in Gray’s fierce protectiveness of the “babies” in other women’s wombs.

Beaus are notably absent from biographical material about Gray. That does not necessarily mean that she had never had any. However, it could mean that romance and sexuality have been absent from her life as they are from some people’s of both genders for a variety of reasons.

In this writer’s opinion, a person’s position on the abortion issue is formed, in large part, by whether one identifies with the unborn or with the unhappily pregnant female. Women who are not subject to the romantic and sexual desires that most women are would tend to have difficulty identifying with the pregnant woman or girl. This could affect their views in several ways. One of them is that they might tend to grossly overestimate what the law can do in this area in believing that criminalizing abortion would end it or at least radically decrease it. As Eleanor Cooney, a woman who terminated a pregnancy when it was outlawed, has written, “When a woman does not want to be pregnant, the drive to become unpregnant can turn into a force equal to the nature that wants her to stay pregnant. And then she will look for an abortion, whether it’s legal or illegal, clean or filthy, safe or riddled with danger.”

Biographical material on Nellie Gray is as bereft of a particularly close female friend as it is of boyfriends. However, the absence of any visible heterosexual credential coupled with her membership in a religion that opposes both homosexuality and lesbianism may explain her tense relations with a group called the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians (PLAGAL). The group marched with other March for Lifers for several years but in 2002, she ordered them to put their banner down if they wanted to participate in that year’s March for Life. They refused and, as permit holder for the March, she asked to the police to arrest them and they were taken into custody.

The other prominent single woman who apparently qualifies for the old-fashioned designation of “spinster” is Great Britain’s Ann Widdecombe. She is a prominent Conservative Party politician. According to the Wikipedia, she has made a public “claim of celibacy.”

Widdecombe was born October 4, 1947. According to her official website, “From 1987 to date she has been member of Parliament for Maidstone which became Maidstone and The Weald in 1997.”

According to the Wikipedia, in John Major’s government, she became Home Office Minister in Charge of Prisons. The Wikipedia continues, “She made headlines for her policy of applying the standards for handcuffing prisoners in transit to pregnant women, even on visits to hospitals. She claimed that this was necessary because of the risk of their absconding.” Like Nellie Gray, she is an outspoken opponent of abortion. Widdecombe has called “for a zero tolerance policy of prosecution for users of cannabis.”

She was a member of the Church of England until 1993 when she converted to Roman Catholicism because of the Anglican Church’s decision to ordain women. This was not her first encounter with the Roman Catholic faith since, as the Wikipedia writes, “She had been educated at a Roman Catholic convent school in Bath, La Sainte Union, despite the fact that her family were not Roman Catholics, because her parents wanted to ensure that she received a good education in a single-sex school.”

Widdecombe is an accomplished novelist as well as a successful politician. She has published The Clematis Tree, An Act of Treachery, Father Figure, and An Act of Peace. As of this writing, she is at work on her fifth novel, The Idealists.

As befits a traditional spinster, Ann Widdecombe resides with her widowed mother.

There are lessons to be learned from the examples of our contemporary spinsters. Girls and boys, women and men, often feel deprived and isolated in the absence of a romantic and/or sexual element in their lives. The involuntarily childless may experience a sense of desolation. However, our genuine spinsters show that a busy and full life is possible even if all these things are absent.

That does not mean that the absence of such things is ideal. The sound of wedding bells might arguably signal an improvement in the lives of the Western world’s best-known “unclaimed blessings.”

While it is too late for these latter-day spinsters to become biological mothers, it may not be too late for them enjoy connubial bliss. After all, a woman who they might consider a nemesis, feminist Gloria Steinem, wed at age 66. Perhaps Nellie Gray and Ann Widdecombe may yet learn the difference between women and fish and men and bicycles. Many conservatives are concerned about the decline of marriage. The marriages of famous spinsters could signal its renewed vitality. Potential suitors may be happy to know that they will find Nellie Gray’s photograph at http://www.sacredgift.org/LIFE/1MAY.html while Ann Widdecombe’s visage may be viewed at http://www.annwiddecombemp.com.

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