In Defense of Old Maids
"If you don’t watch out, no decent man will marry you and you’ll die an old maid!” That was the message that my generation of girls raised in the 1950s received. It’s what I heard from my maternal grandmother, who was anxious that my independent spirit would make me undesirable as a wife. The prospect of dying an “old maid” conveyed the image of a crotchety, frustrated, wizened old biddy whom no one wanted and everyone pitied. In my senior year of high school, Grandma Rose, determined to steer me on the right track, went through my yearbook, pointing to the boys with Jewish names. “What about him?” she asked me. “What about him?”
Times may have changed since then, but the gendered pressures on women’s love lives haven’t.
My grandmother, miserable in her own two marriages, also imparted the unwelcome admonition, “You mustn’t have sex before your wedding night, because why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?” I bristled at being considered a cow — besides, the advice was too late. My boyfriend (an Italian Catholic, by the way) and I had been having sex for a year already.
Terms like “old maid” or “spinster” refer to an “unmarried woman who is older than what is perceived as the prime age range during which women usually marry. It can also indicate that a woman is considered unlikely to ever marry.” “Old Maid” has been used since the 1520s to designate a woman who remains single “well beyond the usual marrying age.” “Maid” was a shortening of “maiden”, meaning virgin. By the late 1690s, “old maid” had become common as a derogatory term.
How old was “well beyond the usual marrying age”? In the 1500s, late teens or early 20s. In the 1700s to early 1800s, mid-to-late-20s. In those days, wives were property, fulfilling their role as wives and child bearers, accountable to husbands and the church. Spending an adult lifetime as an old virgin whom no one would marry was considered a horrible fate. Imagine being socially discarded by age 18 or 28, without any prospect of financial independence or respect from the community. These women were suitable only for spinning wool (hence the term “spinster”) and caring for sick or elderly family members.
"Remember no thought to a girl is so dread, as the terrible one — she may die an Old Maid." From the song, "It won't be my fault if I die an Old Maid", circa early-19th-century US.
“It was a dreaded fate for a woman,” history writer Andrea Auclair observes in her well-researched 2023 piece, “Nothing But An Old Maid”, in which she describes attitudes in American newspapers and fiction in the late-19th century. The old maid was “a ‘tragedy,’ a ‘leftover,’ a ‘public and private nuisance,’ ‘a failure of womanhood,’ an object of derision, scorn, and ridicule. ‘Superfluous’; ‘redundant, pathetic.’” Auclair quotes Eliza Lynn Linton, a popular English journalist of the time, who wrote in 1876, “The natural sweetness of womanhood turned to gall of disappointment […] She fades and withers and grows sourer as she grows older.”
Women’s roles gradually expanded over the centuries with the hard-fought freedom to vote, pursue higher education, work outside the home, control their bodies, and govern their own lives. Yet the stigma of remaining an “old maid” persisted through my own early life and well beyond. I still remember the fear and sting that label carried. It got me thinking: did other women of my generation recall being threatened by the possibility of being an old maid? I reached out to my Facebook followers and newsletter subscribers to ask whether that term had been bludgeoned into their newly emerging feelings of self-worth.
“During the 1950s, when I was a kid, ‘old maid’ was definitely something that I didn't want to be,” one reader recalled. “I was taught that she was pathetic and unattractive. Gender roles and expectations taught us that women needed to behave ‘as women’ and fulfill women's roles of underpaid or unpaid caregiving. Many people today want to bring back this straitjacket for women.”
“Oh, yes, I heard it often,” another reader said. “I was also told, beginning at age nine, that I needed to get used to living a very lonely life because men didn't like women like me — meaning intelligent women. It took me decades to free my subconscious from the grip of my mother’s words. I grew up pretending to be less intelligent to attract men who were threatened by smart women.”
Questionable motherly advice was a recurring theme. As one person put it: “My mom used to say that if you eat the last bite of anything, or the last cookie/piece of fruit/fill in the blank, you'd be an old maid. She also said that men are like buses. There'll be another one along in 10 minutes.”
For others, the old maid was both a cautionary tale and a sort of bogeywoman, a woman “with nothing going for her and no purpose in life except whatever existed in her home and within her fence line,” and someone “no one wanted to interact with.”
Not all the stories were negative, though. Some reported “old maids” in their family who led full, productive, happy — even sexy! — lives.
“My great-aunt Lula never married,” a reader told me. “My mother said it was because she was ‘too selfish.’ But Aunt Lula enjoyed an adventurous life as a traveling music saleswoman, selling sheet music in the western [American] states. And she did have boyfriends! She was laid off during the Great Depression but eventually got a wonderful job with the WPA as a music librarian.”
“My Aunt Ruth was an old maid, born in the 19th century,” another reader shared. “Her priceless comment in her old age was ‘I could have married as well as any of my brothers and sisters. I wanted to do better than they.’”
“I also had an Aunt Ruth who never married. She had a male friend for many years — I was too young to understand what that involved, but she seemed happy. She traveled a lot, sometimes by herself, well into her 80s.”
“I am 62 years old and never married. A family story says that my mother put a curse on her daughters so that they would never marry and have an unhappy marriage like hers. Although I would love to have a relationship, I have a successful, thriving business, a rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn, and I like not having to answer to anyone. I come and go as I please, stay up all night reading or binge-watching Netflix, wear my pajamas all day, and eat what I want. I don’t have to share my bed, closet, or bathroom. You tell me, am I an old maid or happily single?”
“The Spinster” by Nicolaes Maes, circa 1652–62
“It's good for young people to read the cultural baggage that previous generations of women had to endure and overcome,” historical romance novelist Linda C. McCabe wrote to me. “I copied this from a crusty old book that my mother gave me when I was a teenager: On Becoming a Woman (1958) by Mary McGee Williams and Irene Kane. My jaw dropped when I read this passage, which still annoys the crap out of me:”
"Girls are more anxious than boys to go steady, because girls are the ones on the worrying end when it comes to dating. Girls have to be chosen; they can't ask the boys. Even when a couple breaks up, the boy has the easier time. He can go right out and phone somebody else, while the girl is forced into retirement, and the hope that some other boy will come along to rescue her soon.”
In the 1970s, the feminist movement popularized the line “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” The clever saying, seen widely on T-shirts and signs, is often misattributed to Gloria Steinem but was first written on public toilet doors in Sydney, Australia, by social activist Irina Dunn when she was a university student. But did we really throw off the stigma, or does it live on in our society and under our skin?
To us in 2025, the term “old maid” may sound archaic and amusingly quaint, but the concept behind it has not entirely disappeared. Young women still hear, “When are you getting married? Tick tock!” Never-married childless women are still pitied, devalued, and, especially if they have cats, openly mocked. They’ve failed somehow. Why couldn’t they “catch” a man? Were they too ugly, too fat, too intelligent, too pushy, too bitchy, too emasculating? As for unmarried men, incels and the manosphere have introduced new stereotypes, yet the trope of the wealthy, high-living, high-status playboy is still alive and thoroughly enviable, not pitied. Men’s worth does not hinge on marital status.
In the perfect version of our world, independent, unmarried women would be envied rather than stigmatized. Rejecting marriage is a viable choice and no longer requires abstaining from sex or romantic connections. This isn’t a new idea. A whole host of notable never-married women paved the way for us to celebrate single life, including Jane Austen, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Louisa May Alcott, Jane Addams, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Coco Chanel, Greta Garbo, and Condoleezza Rice.
But even in the modern world, we are constantly bombarded with negative messaging that diminishes the worth of girls and women. Women are still often forced to choose between career and motherhood, told they cannot “have it all”, and regarded as objects of mild sorrow if they decide not to pursue family life. Similarly, the “old” part of “old maid” is still very much stigmatized, demeaned, and feared. As an advocate for ageless sexuality, much of my work with senior women is helping them unlearn the negative messages about sex and aging that still impact their self-image, autonomy, and feelings about their bodies. At an early age, parents, church, and society taught them blame and shame that they internalized. Half a century or more later, that messaging tells them that wanting sexual pleasure is shameful — and who’d want them anyway when they’re old and saggy?
There is a notion deeply ingrained in society that there is but a narrow window in life within which to secure the things that matter, be they pleasure, partnership, or a place of worth. Miss this window, and you’re just playing out the string of an empty and hollow existence. But it’s just not true. As long as you’re alive, it’s never too late for a new chapter. Your happiness is for you to decide.
Published Aug 08, 2025
