The Spinster and Her Enemies - Feminish

CHAPTER 5
Spinsterhood and Celibacy
Spinsters provided the backbone of the feminist movement in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Rosemary
Auchmuty, in her unpublished doctoral thesis ‘Victorian
Spinsters’, points out that most of the Victorian feminists we
read about in modern history books, were married women,
such as Mrs Elizabeth Garratt Anderson, Mrs Josephine Butler,
and Mrs Millicent Garratt Fawcett. She argues that in our own
time
feminist movements have tended to address themselves chiefly
to the middle-class wife and mother, so that feminist historians
searching for their Victorian antecedents have naturally
picked out what they see as ‘oppressed’ married women for
the modern liberated lady to identify with. 1
Appended to her thesis is a short ‘Who’s Who’ of about 200
Victorian spinsters notable for their achievements in various
fields. Auchmuty suggests that it would be hard to find a similar
number of married feminists or married women with similar
achievements in that age. She attributes the nature and content
of Victorian feminism to the fact that it was ‘led by Victorian
spinsters on behalf of Victorian spinsters’. 2
The importance of Victorian spinsters has been neglected by
contemporary comentators, living in a society in which nearly
all women marry. In the late Victorian period almost one in
three of all adult women were single and one in four would
never marry. 3
The 1851 census revealed that there were 405,000 more
women than men in the population. 4 They were described in
the press as ‘excess’ or ‘surplus’ women and in the 1860s to
1880s the ‘problem’ of ‘surplus’ women caused great alarm
amongst male commentators. Those men who saw women as
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