They have in common, Bolick writes, “a highly ambivalent relationship to the institution of marriage, the opportunity to articulate this ambivalence, and whiteness - each of which was inextricable from the rest.” She spends a lot of time explaining how their romantic relationships (or lack thereof) affected the work they were able to produce. Vincent Millay, essayist Maeve Brennan, columnist Neith Boyce, novelist Edith Wharton and social visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman. As she recounts her various pairings and breakups, Bolick supplements this personal relationship history with biographical information about a handful of long-dead women who embodied the spinster wish: poet Edna St. Her new book, “Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own,” is packaged as social science and feminist theory, but it’s more memoir than anything else: how one woman made a life of her own.įor the first half of her adult life, Bolick was a serial monogamist - perhaps she longed for spinsterhood because it seemed far from her personal experience. Now in her 40s, Bolick has become an unofficial spokeswoman for never-married modern women living that wish. In her 20s, writer Kate Bolick fantasized about what she called her spinster wish - her desire to let her interior life flourish and to be driven by her own beliefs and goals, not a shared agenda with a partner.
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