C is for … Cliché

      It was Danny who gave me the idea to reclaim the word ‘spinster’.

      ‘Why not? I mean, you reclaimed queer, after all.’

      Which is true.

      Queer.

      Dyke.

      Nigger.

      Personally I’ve always thought the last a little premature, bearing in mind not everyone in the world has a burning desire to use it with affection. And I was about to say But that’s another story … And then I thought maybe not. Because all insults come from fear, after all. Witness my cousin Fleur in her Frau Goebbels days, her shoulders doing those delicate little convulsions beneath her cashmere cardigan.

      ‘I’m sorry, Riley, but I’d just be terrified at the thought. I mean, to be on my own. When I got older.’

      I decided to do a little research on the subject of the spinster. One evening I drove the twenty-five miles to Bristol to use the library of the university where I did my degree as a mature student what seems like yesterday, but is actually twenty years ago. I always go in the evening. It’s almost empty then. You could have full sex in Philosophy and no one would notice. I tapped in ‘spinster’, expecting a list to show up. You know the sort of thing, textbooks pretending to be something more interesting with racy covers and titles: Niggers with Attitude: Black Pride in the Nineties; Queering the Pitch: The Law and the Homosexual; Finger in the Dyke: A History of Anti-Woman Humour…

      Instead it came up ‘Word Not Recognised’.

      ‘I felt like I’d committed some crime against the state. I thought a grille was going to come down, some card-carrying cadre was going to escort me from the building.’

      Danny grinned. He said, ‘I guess someone PC-ed the PCs, girlfriend.’

      ‘Listen, they got so scared of spinsters back in the 1850s they hatched a plan to ship them off to the colonies.’

      ‘Wooooh. Imagine it. All those brawny farmers.’

      ‘Hey, hey. It wouldn’t be like The Piano, you know. There’d be all that ringworm and tapeworm. And it wouldn’t be like Harvey Keitel or Sam Neill would be waiting for you.’

      Most people think of post World War One as the high spot of spinsterdom (or the low spot, according to which way you look at it) but the rot had set in long before then. In the 1850s, thanks to a demographic imbalance, there were 400,000 more women than men. One in four women was single and one in three would never marry, a situation referred to in the letters columns of the daily papers as a ‘disturbance’ and a ‘mischief’, and debated in Parliament under the title The Problem of Surplus and Excess Women. The spinster became the scapegoat and all-round repository for society’s perceived ills, among her most vocal critics being her married sisters. Consider, for instance, this little number, from the allegedly liberationist Freewoman, in which the spinster is described as ‘a withered tree … an acidulous vessel under whose pale shadow we chill and whiten … silent, shamefaced, bloodless and boneless, thinned to the spirit … our social nemis …’

      It’s amazing just how much the spinster has been left out of history, feminist history in particular, more’s the shame of it. Plenty of married women in there, gay women galore, but precious little of the defiantly straight and single. All I managed to turn up in Women’s Studies that day was one measly chapter on spinstas. Still it contained details of that old spinster Export Plan. It foundered in the end, that plan, but only on the rock of sheer impracticality, the problem, according to one regretful letter in The Times being ‘the mechanical conveyance of these women to where they are wanted, given the average passenger limit of fifty persons per ship,’ a shame, this, since it almost certainly deprived some waggish old salt of the chance of urging every last woman on board with a cackle of laughter and some corny crack about not wanting them to miss the boat second time round.

      ‘Missing the boat’ is a cliché when applied to spinsters. So is ‘left on the shelf’ and ‘old maid’ and that very word ‘spinsterish’. But then, spinsters attract clichés.

      ‘So what? So do married women.’ This from my sister, Cass.

      ‘No they don’t. At least not in the same way.’

      Which I believe to be true. Because while it may be the case that somewhere in an alternative reality, accessible only to ad men through some wormhole of time, there are indeed mothers whose major concern in life is the softness of the wash and the germ-free nature of their kitchen floor (asopposed, for instance, to how they can slide into work late without anyone seeing them because they had to take little Johnny to the doctor, or how they can get away from some garrulous over-shot meeting to pick him from the child-minder), still clichés no longer cling to the married woman the way they do to the spinsta, sticking to her like burrs, and turning her into some metaphorical horse chestnut.

      ‘Hummph …’

      It’s the nearest I can get to the sound Cass makes but from it you can deduce that she is unimpressed with my campaign to reclaim ‘spinster’.

      ‘It’s