List of “old maids”

More interesting info & links here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinster

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_singlewomen

Very interesting!!! I have 2 great-great aunts who lived to be 90+ without marrying & added them to this project: Unmarried Women, Maiden Ladies, Old Maids.

I am SOOOO excited to see the fabulous ladies remembered. So many are my heros growing up. How do we go about getting more entered? Just invite on their profile? I know that Erica entered a number. I would love to see Willa Cather who said that "Marriage was for women who have no art." I will go check to see if I can get that one added.

Chick site! The world needs more of them.

I really want to know about this woman: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock (1295–1344): An English peasant woman who made the rare decision to remain a lifelong spinster.[12]

[12] Bennett, Judith M. (1999). A Medieval Life: Cecilia Penifader of Brigstock, C. 1295–1344. Michigan: McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 978-0-07-290331-7.

I hope I can find this book. Can you fathom what that was at that time?

Apparently there were a lot more spinsters than we realize - maybe as many as a third of Northern European women at times. We need stats & myth-exploding.

In England in 1377, about one-third of adult women were singlewomen.[1] In Florence city of Italy, in 1427, about one-fifth of adult women were single.[1]

[1] Bennett, Judith; Froide, Amy (1999). "A Singular Past" in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. pp. 2–15. ISBN 0812234642.

Private User is this true? My head is exploding.

https://books.google.com/books/about/Singlewomen_in_the_European_Pa...

Erica Howton sounds reasonable. For one thing, married women died off a higher, much higher, rate, due to the high rate of childbirth deaths.

So it would stand to reason that the women who didn’t marry made up a substantial percentage of Living Women Who Weren’t Dead.

Private User, I just worked on a profile of one of my aunts from late 1800s who died married at 15 leaving a child age born 8 months earlier. Sadly, I suspect her death was complications from the first birth or worse, a second pregnancy. She was just a child having a child. Her husband who was 19 married again and had a number of children by his second wife. I just shake my head.

Yes, very common.

And everybody knows that Henry VIII had one wife who died from childbirth -- but the wife who survived him also died of it, after finally marrying the man she was going to marry before she caught Henry's eye.

So how many women avoided matrimony as a survival mechanism? My first thought had been “women out numbered men” but now this is looking more cultural / historical.

I know it’s pretty unheard of for Jewish medieval women (and men) to have been unmarried for example.

https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/medieval-ashkenaz-1096-1348

“ All Jewish women in medieval Ashkenaz were expected to become wives and mothers. The option of not marrying was almost non-existent in Jewish society, as opposed to the ideal of celibacy that existed in surrounding Christian society. Women were often promised by their fathers or other relatives in early childhood and then were betrothed and married before reaching the age of twelve, which was considered the age of majority. ...”

It’s about the Black Death ?

https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty_pages/nico.v/Research/EMP.pdf

In contrast to the rest of the world, Europeans began to limit their fertility long before the onset of modern growth. As early as the 14th century, a "European Marriage Pattern" (Hajnal, 1965) had emerged which combined late marriage for women with a significant share of women never marrying. West of a line from St Petersburg to Trieste, where the European Marriage Pattern (EMP) was prevalent, Europeans avoided 25-40% of all possible births. The average female age at first marriage was 25 and 26.4 in England
1
literature has focused on documenting EMP’s key features – the age at first marriage, the percentage not
2
(de Moor and van Zanden, 2010).
that EMP only became fully developed after the Black Death in 1348-50 (Herlihy, 1997; Hajnal, 1965). Christian religious doctrine is therefore necessary but not sufficient to explain the timing and scale of the rise of EMP.
In this paper, we argue that the Black Death contributed crucially to the rise of fertility limitation in Europe. By killing between a third and half of the European population, it raised land-labor ratios. Land abundance favored the land-intensive sector – animal husbandry. Because plow agriculture requires physical strength, women have a comparative advantage in livestock farming (Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn, 2011). Hence, after the Black Death, female employment opportunities improved. Working in husbandry mainly took the form of farm service – a contract that required year-round labor services in exchange for money, room, and board. As a condition of employment, all servants had to remain celibate – pregnancy and marriage resulted in termination of employment. Because many more women began to work in the booming pastoral sector after 1350, marriage ages increased. This lowered fertility in the aggregate. In a Malthusian world, there were second-round effects: Lower fertility reduced population pressure, ensuring that per capita output never returned to pre-plague levels. ...

In fact many less women than men ...

Bardsley, Sandy. “Missing Women: Sex Ratios in England, 1000–1500.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 53, no. 2, 2014, pp. 273–309. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24701864. Accessed 27 Feb. 2020.

(More head exploding)

Judith M. Bennett, Compulsory Service in Late Medieval England, Past & Present, Volume 209, Issue 1, November 2010, Pages 7–51, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtq032

In June 1349, as the plague wreaked its first and worst havoc on the people of England, Edward III and his councillors issued the Ordinance of Labourers, a set of rules about service, labour and prices which was revised two years later in the Statute of Labourers. Although born of short-term crisis, these labour regulations flourished in the decades and centuries that followed. They were honed in the later parliaments of Edward, Richard II and the three Henrys who came after; they were digested in the Statute of Artificers in 1563; they were still enforced, at least in part, in the eighteenth century; and only after heated debate were they removed from the statute books in 1814. The English economy became more pastoral, more commercial, and more industrial over these centuries, and its labour markets were transformed accordingly, but the shadow cast...

Some “uppity women” noted here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=Gtk4W3WcJloC&lpg=PR9&ots=...

Uppity Women of Medieval Times

Front Cover
Vicki León
Conari Press, Jan 1, 1997 - Humor - 247 pages
3 Reviews
Vicki Leon, tireless explorer of the past, has gathered a treasure of information from sources written, etched, carved, and painted, to reconstruct the lives of wild women who wouldn't keep their places. From Queen Elizabeth to Joan of Arc, from Artemisia Gentileschi to Damia al-Kahina, this collection of medieval women who took history into their own hands will mesmerize, amuse, and inspire you.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ancient.eu/amp/2-1345/

The Beguines were all devoted women who lived lives of poverty, good works, and charity but were not nuns and could leave the group whenever they chose to. These women took care of each other and the surrounding community through the manufacture of goods and by providing services and so were able to get around the new strictures of the guilds and live life according to their own values without having to marry or join a religious order.

I think I have a hard copy of "Uppity Women of Medieval Times" somewhere. Must find it. I think I would have made a good Beguine. I used to say that all I wanted was a space for women to make art and garden.

@ ann lavender. I have a g.g.aunt jessie mackenzie b 1803. She opened a school for girls in edinburgh and ran it with the help of her family. I looked up her will and found what a shrewd business woman she was. Dying in 1887 she left ,£5.500.

Private User, send me the link to her profile - url is fine and I can send you a request to add her to the project, I think. Susanne

@ jessie mackenzie b1807

@ jessie mackenzie b1807

Private User can you send me the URL link?

Is it this one? Jessie MacKenzie Might want to add a bit of bio to her about the school and all. It sounds like a wonderful story. I can send you a request to add, but you are also a collaborator and can do "add to projects" tab on right and it should pop up for you. Just let me know if this is the right one.