I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
I hope this a shit post cause that’s not even close to being true.
Please. I am very curious as to why you think I am incorrect.
The OP’s etymology for the word spinster is correct, but the way in which that information is framed, and the way in which medieval women’s economic status is characterised, is if not outright incorrect than pretty skewed. (Not to mention that some of the sources marshalled as evidence, like links 2 or 5, are outright online trash, while the last link goes to a journal article from 1925 which takes the concept of the Frauenfrage as established historical fact. Will we ever be free of the ghost of Grundmann?)
Women were certainly a large part of the labour force in medieval cloth production. That is undeniable. However, while the concept of a “Golden Age” for economically liberated medieval women is one current in a lot of pop history, and it was also common in the historiography through at least the 1980s, it has been greatly complicated by a lot of subsequent scholarly work. Historians are now much more suspicious of neat narratives of Golden Ages and/or declines for women.
Edit to add: Also, while for sure no male member of the gentry was going to do any kind of manual labour, the concept of, say, a twelfth-century Cistercian monk turning up his nose at working in cloth production? That distant sound you hear is the garbled screaming of Bernard of Clairvaux.
theclumsiestninja 