When the banns of marriage are read in Church of England ceremonies today, the phrase ‘spinster of this parish’ has of late disappeared. Likewise, in the UK’s Civil Partnership Act of 2005, ‘bachelor’ and ‘spinster’ were substituted with the catch-all term ‘single’. It’s a testament to the humiliation endured by unwedded women over the last 700-odd years that the stigma attached to ‘spinster’ endures to the present day; a reminder, too, of the ways in which craft history is woven into the fabric of our language.
Perhaps the word is due a rethink. In the UK at least, marriage is now more of a symbolic nicety than a socio-economic necessity: in 2019, heterosexual marriage rates in Britain were the lowest on record since 1862. Historically, the spinner’s craft was a source of female independence and financial self-reliance – long before spinsterdom’s association with dying alone, surrounded by cats. In the same way that the slur ‘queer’ was reclaimed by LGBTQ+ people and turned into a proud marker of identity in the late 1980s, could the 2020s see a new spin on ‘spinster’?