Fast-forward 70 years. We rarely use the word spinster to describe women anymore. It has faded from our daily language like color fades in the sun. Yet spinster has always been a lovely word to me—mysterious, indicating independence and eccentricity. To me, the traditional spinster was a happily unmarried, happily childless woman who had a magnificent heirloom flower garden. Confusing to some people, worthy souls loved her with devotion and affection. She laughed a lot and shared a joyous companionship with the natural world and quite possibly another woman. She was a woman that I, as a young girl, wanted to be.

Of course, most of my girlhood world did not share this positive interpretation of the word spinster or of the spinster’s lifestyle. Maligned as unnatural, unlucky, and sexually frigid, the spinster was viewed with fear and pity. What was wrong with her that she never married? Was she able to have children or was she defective in some way? The mystery surrounding the spinster was fraught with assumptions of deficit, defined by what was lacking in her life. Certainly, there were spinsters who would have liked to marry and have children, but for whatever reason, did not. Such a woman may have been a doting old maid aunt, a church busybody, or the bitter old lady at the end of the lane. However, amidst these assumptions, it was never assumed that, perhaps, the woman had intentionally chosen her life and was content. For a world steeped in heterosexist expectations, intentional spinsterhood was unimaginable. The word spinster could never be spun as anything but negative.

Even so, my girl self wanted little to do with marriage or the formalities thereof. For years, I ingeniously used my Bridal Party Paper Doll Collection not to dream of my own white wedding, but to experiment with cross-dressing and homosexual coupling. After all, the best man looked better in the pink bridesmaid dress than the maid of honor ever did. Not to mention, the bridesmaid was busy getting naked with the bride while the groom languished alone in a cardboard box. Sifting through that box of photos in the San Francisco antique store, my innocent disregard of the original intent of my paper doll collection was stirred as I imagined the lives of two women, embraced by one another’s arms and laughter, staring back at me from an aged photo.

Searching the World Wide Web for information on spinsters, I find several websites in which contemporary women seek to embrace the word spinster in a modern context. Most of these websites are created from a heterosexual viewpoint, one going so far as to explicitly assert that all spinsters are “heterosexual or asexual unmarried women.” Several carry defensive overtones and emphasize demanding careers and the absence of available men, suggesting spinsterhood by default. Few are celebratory and none that I find mention the lesbian potential of spinsterhood. Mostly, they reflect the lives of heterosexual women who are sorting through what it means to be unmarried, childless, and over 30 in a culture that still makes women feel wrong for being so.

This summer I turn 34. Although I welcome the possibilities of marrying a man and having children, I also welcome the possibility of these things not happening. I have been re-energized by the concept of spinsterhood and reclaim it for my own, at least for the time being. In this conceptualization, however, spinsterhood is not inherently heterosexual nor is it arrived at by default. Instead, spinsterhood is an intentional choice, made possible by years of feminist and queer activism that has changed the socioeconomic context of our culture. Inspired by girlhood fantasies and the imaginary lives of two women in a found photo, I am, by divine choice, a neo-spinster.

Neo-spinster: a woman who, past the common age of marriage and without children, shamelessly remains unmarried and childless; who likely prefers the company and affection of women; who recognizes the feminist and queer history of her chosen status; and who lives her life—socially, sexually, creatively, and otherwise—as a joyous exclamation rather than as a whispered apology.

Rhonda’s monthly column, Third Eye uses truth telling to draw connections from women’s most intimate decisions and experiences to the continual unfolding of third wave feminism. Honoring that women’s lives reflect diverse realities, she seeks to illustrate how feminist truth telling can simultaneously embrace and extend beyond the personal and the political.

Rhonda Chittenden, MS, is a creative writer, collage artist, and queer neo-spinster. Her career includes serving women and girls as a reproductive health counselor, a sexuality educator, and an advocate for those in the juvenile justice system. Most recently, she has begun work as an advocate for women who have been abused by their intimate partners. Making her home in the Midwest, she has organized feminist conferences, film festivals, and fundraisers and spends her free time saving innocent grasshoppers from deformation and death in the jaws of her carnivorous cat.

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