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A spinster (or old maid) is a woman who has never been married, though it is usually applied only to women who are regarded as beyond the normal age for marriage, which has varied between cultures and eras. "Spinster" was a legal term appended to the name of a woman whose occupation was spinning as early as the 14th century, but in the 17th it came to denote a still-unmarried woman.

There used to be quite a stigma related to being a spinster^{[citation needed]}, but this has somewhat disappeared in modern Western Civilization along with the establishment of women's rights to vote, own property, and pursue career goals as well as changing social mores regarding non marital sexual relationships and advents in birth control. Stereotypes historically perpetuated about spinsters include sexual and emotional frigidity, frumpiness, depression, moral virtue, religious devotion, victim of an oppressive mother and family caretaker.

The term is also of legal use in some places; in the United Kingdom, for instance, until the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act 2004 any woman never previously married was categorized as a "spinster" on a marriage licence, regardless of her age at the time the licence was issued (with a never-married man being listed thereon as a "bachelor").

In Australia parties are held for young single people to meet and socialise (particularly in the rural areas), these events are known as Bachelor and Spinster Balls or colloquially 'B and S Balls'.

Spinsters were another sad result of the two World Wars, where male war deaths drastically reduced the number of males available for marriage. For example, in the First World War, Britain lost approximately one million young men, and France and Germany each lost approximately two million. This made it impossible for millions of younger women in these countries to find a man to marry. The image of the old spinster with a fading photo of her dead World War I soldier/boyfriend on her mantlepiece was common in movies of the 1950s and 1960s.

The notion of the spinster has been adopted by some in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a positive and even empowering lifestyle choice, one not necessarily linked to romantic or sexual abstinence. The website Spinster Spin exemplifies this attitude in "Love and the Modern Spinster" (excerpt):

Granted, most people think of a “spinster” as someone who doesn't have romantic relationships. Historically, a spinster was a woman whom love had passed by, who had never “been chosen” for marriage or motherhood.

As modern spinsters, however, we do our own choosing. We embrace romance and relationship, but with a consciousness of both the joys and the costs involved. We know that it’s nice to wake up next to a warm man, but that the trade-offs are that he’ll likely leave the toilet seat up and forget to pick up his underwear. We understand that the ideal and the reality of love must be taken together, and so we feel no impetus to radically change the men we become romantically involved with. And as permanent single people, we also do not invest energy in evaluating whether men are "marriage-material." This orientation gives us a power in relationships that is (sadly) not always accessed by our married (or marriage-minded) sisters.

Contents 1 Popular culture 2 Notable spinsters 3 External links 4 See also

Stereotypical spinster characters have been portrayed in various films, including Charlotte played by Bette Davis in Hush... Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964) and Katharine Hepburn's Rosie in The African Queen (1951). A common theme in the fiction writings of author/poet Sandra Cisneros is marital disillusionment; she has written the poem "Old Maids" (1994).

• Louisa May Alcott
• Carole Cherry
• author Sandra Cisneros (as of 2006)
• Emily Dickinson
• Queen Elizabeth I
• Georgia Engel
• Helen Keller
• Shirley Mason
• Wil McKnight
• Florence Nightingale
• Kate Smith
• Harper Lee
• Jane Austen
• Christine Garnier

• Spinster: An Evolving Stereotype Revealed Through Film, by Deborah J. Mustard
• Spinster Spin

• weaving (mythology),
• Moirae