“We have been told we can be and do anything we want but there are still the same expectations about marriage.” Kate Bolick

When Kate Bolick was in her 20s, she never imagined she would stay single. But the American writer never dreamed about white gowns and bouquets and bridegrooms either. As she got older, Bolick, now 42, began to relish her independence. It didn’t mean she didn’t enjoy male company; it’s just that she liked not having any strings attached. She enjoyed being what used to be known as a spinster, a woman of a certain age of independent means. She tells us the glories of singledom in her book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own. Our conversation has been edited for length.

The word spinster has a negative connotation today. One imagines a woman with a dowager’s hump, dressed in black, doing needlepoint. Miss Havisham. But you see the world positively. What is your understanding of spinster?

My boyfriend and I were living far apart. One Sunday I had a perfect spinster wish. I just wanted to read all day and have naps. I wanted time to myself. For me, a spinster was someone who had control of their own time, someone who was self-reliant, autonomous.

I was looking at my diaries and my letters and I found myself surprised by the desire I often expressed to be alone.

The reason I wanted “spinster” for the title is because it invokes a strong reaction from people. Even though social norms and gender have changed so much, we still hold on to the negative words.

You seemed to decide as a child that you wanted to be a spinster.

I wouldn’t say I decided as a child that I wanted to be a spinster. As I entered my 20s and I was thinking about marriage, contemporary culture offered very few good examples of married women. Carrie Bradshaw, Bridget Jones — these were images of single women who were constantly trying to couple themselves. Of course that is the experience of many single women, but it isn’t the experience of all single women.

When I found Neith Boyce, she was my first awakening. In 1898 she wrote a column for Vogue called “The Bachelor Girl” about her decision to never marry. That blew my mind. I had not known there was a public critique of marriage that was so mainstream that it was in Vogue magazine. She awakened me to a different moment in singles history. She began to unravel my ideas about the fixedness of marriage.

When I filled out my marriage licence application in the 1980s, I was directed to put my name in the blank asking for spinster’s name. This in a post-Gloria Steinem period! But I don’t think society had another word at the time for single woman. Later bachelorette was used, but that was a riff on a male word.

We still don’t have a word. Single woman is all we have. The image of a spinster also changes over time. Spinster the word hasn’t always been seen so negatively. It took on its negative connotation in colonial America, although the word has been about since the 1400s to describe a young woman who spooled wool into thread.

During the colonial period, Americans were trying to build their population. You needed women to be wives and mothers. If you were unmarried by 23 you were a spinster. If you weren’t married by 26 you were a thornback. It wasn’t easy or fun to be a single woman during that time period.

The word became the lowest in the 1950s when only 17 per cent of women were unmarried. To be a single woman during that time was difficult. You were ostracized, you were outside of the society. It was about keeping the social order intact. You began to believe, I’d better get married or I’d become an ugly old spinster.

The average age of a woman who is marrying has moved from 23 in the 1960s to 27 today. For men it is 29.

Several women writers influenced you.

Maeve Brennan was very important to me. It was the first time I read about a person writing in the first person about herself not in relation to someone else. She helped me realize how much of my whole life and identity was related to other people. I didn’t have a sense of an autonomous self. Reading her work helped me find that sense of autonomy and self-reliance. I also find her inspiring in that she was living in mid-century, an American woman alone, and she had the strength to do that.

Edith Wharton married at 23 or 24 and was a classic society wife. She kept the household running and didn’t begin to write until her late 30s and 40s. She divorced her husband and that is when she became the world-famous novelist we know her to be. She made me think how it was possible to live alone well. It is not as simple as getting your own place and paying the rent. Learning how Wharton created her time and shaped her spaces was incredibly useful. She was very social but needed time alone in order to work. She designed her country house as a place where she could socialize with friends and still had spaces where she could go off and do the work she needed.

Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay was single for a brief time and seemed to lead a wild life, but she was very close to her family; she had emotional support from her mother and sisters so she could become a wild young single woman.

All of these women arranged their lives to suit their needs either inside or outside marriage.

Is it hard for you to be a single woman in her 40s and resist the pressure that still exists to get married and have children?

It was hard for me to move away from the idea that marriage was something I was supposed to do. We still have social pressures coming from all different directions. And I am someone who likes to be in relationships. I like being in love.

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Now, we’re living in an age when everything is available to us. We have been told we can be and do anything we want but there are still the same expectations about marriage. They are changing. But they are still there.

When I was 35 I was in a relationship that I assumed would end in marriage but I realized that I didn’t want to be married. Then I had a dream about my (deceased) mother. In this dream I said, “Mom, I am breaking up with this guy tomorrow and I am so upset. I thought things would work out but they didn’t.” She said, “Oh honey, I am so sorry. We were really hoping this one would work.” I said, “Mom, I am getting so old. I am going to be 36.” She said, “Ach, you are so young. Don’t worry, you’re fine.” I woke up feeling great relief.

The pressure to get married wasn’t from my family. It was this idea that I had internalized. It was always about what was wrong with me? Do I avoid commitments? Am I marriage-phobic? After the relationship I had ended, I decided I was fine. This was the life I wanted. There was nothing wrong with me. It may happen. I could get married when I am 50 or 53 or next year. But I am relaxed about the fact that it may or may not happen.