On Friday, a friend and I visited Uniacke Estate Museum in Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia. The estate was the country home of Richard John Uniacke, a wealthy lawyer who was Nova Scotia’s longest-serving attorney general.
Construction on his country estate finished in 1815. I’ve always enjoyed this location with its trails that run through the forest and the lake named after Uniacke’s first wife, Martha, who never lived to see the house (the family also had a home on Argyle Street in Halifax on the same site where the old Halifax Herald building was located).
We toured the home’s dining room, parlour, guest bedrooms, and the kitchen in the basement, which now serves as a tearoom for visitors. But one room stood out to me: it was Elizabeth’s room, as shown in the photo above.
Elizabeth was one of Uniacke’s 12 children and the only daughter to never marry. She remained a spinster. Elizabeth’s mother was just 12 when she married Richard. She died at the age of 40. I kept thinking these were the two options for women; they got married young and had a bunch of kids, or they were spinsters. The outcomes of women’s lives were determined by their marital status.
My friend and I chuckled a bit about that line in the sign in Elizabeth’s room that says, “A young lady not married by the age of 30 would have been referred to as spinster or old maid.”
Notice the spinning wheel in the corner of the bedroom. As I wrote in this post, the word spinster originated with the trade of spinning wool and had nothing to do with a woman’s marital status. Otherwise, I think Elizabeth’s room looks lovely and peaceful. She would have slept like a starfish in that bed.
When I read that sign at the entrance of Elizabeth’s room, I thought of my maternal grandmother, also named Elizabeth, who married at the age of 28. That was in the 1940s and even then, she would have been approaching the age of a spinster.
My grandmother also advised me never to get married before the age of 30; it looks like I outdid her advice by 23 years! I can guarantee had I married in my 20s, which actually was an option for me, I would have been divorced by the age of 40.
That visit got me thinking of the spinsters of history, including women like Elizabeth Uniacke, who never married for one reason or another. There’s almost no information about Elizabeth online. As the sign in her bedroom, now museum exhibit, says she travelled with her sisters and enjoyed gardening and tending to roses. But I’m sure there was far more to Elizabeth than what that sign tells us.
The Uniacke estate was completed during the Regency Era in England. Of course, that’s the era Jane Austen wrote about in her novels. Austen wrote about great love stories, including Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy, but Austen herself never married.
“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony,” Austen wrote in her own letters.
For many women then, as it is still now, marriage meant survival.
There were spinsters in Austen’s novels, though, including Miss Bates in Emma. I saw the latest film version in March 2020, just before the COVID-19 lockdowns. Miranda Hart starred as Miss Bates; Hart is also excellent in Call the Midwife, by the way.
Miss Bates’ spinsterhood and the 2020 film is a topic of discussion in this blog post by Tea with Anastasia, in which she writes about the difference between spinsters with money and spinsters who are poor.
This distinction between the poor old maid and a rich one may strike the 21st century reader as ridiculous. But I invite you think about our contemporary discourses on single women. A single career woman can find acceptance, even adulation, for being a #GirlBoss. But if one is unfortunate enough to have neither a career (or even a job) nor a partner, one might be subjected to the same kind of contempt and pity as any poor spinster in Regency England.
As Katie Jgln wrote in this recent Substack post, even Jane Austen’s obituary didn’t include a mention of her novels. To this day, Austen’s work inspires the work of others, including Julia Quinn, who wrote the Regency-era series of romance novels called Bridgerton, which then inspired Shonda Rhimes to produce the hit Netflix series of the same name.
But what of spinsters of history who weren’t privileged? Poor women, including single women, often ended up in poorhouses. Nova Scotia author and advocate Brenda Thompson wrote about women’s experiences in poorhouses in this blog post from February 2021.
Imagine yourself as a woman in a poorfarm or poorhouse, scared that you will be there for the rest of your life, stigmatized if you left, unable to get a job that pays you enough to live on (and we are STILL dealing with that issue, both men and women, in 2021 but women are still paid less than men) and a man in a position of power over you, your body, your food, your children, offers you a break if you will have sex with him. What would you do? You really do not know until you are in the situation. Postering and theorizing about what you would do is just that -posturing and theory. As men used sex as a tool of control, we used sex as a tool of resource to help ourselves and our children. We used the poorhouse to develop communities for help and support amongst other poor women.
In Nova Scotia, there were still poorhouses in the 1960s. I mean, I had a child out of wedlock, so I certainly would have ended up in a poorhouse.
I like digging up stories of people from our past, you know, anyone besides the white men who dominate the history written in the books we had at school. There are so many stories of spinsters of history lost to living in a time when women were given few choices and punished for the options they did have.
If I could, I’d sit down with Elizabeth Uniacke to ask her about her life, her thoughts, her opinions, and her goals. I would also ask her about the roses she tended to in the garden. I wonder if anyone did the same during her lifetime. I would ask the same of any woman in history, including the spinsters, whose lives were controlled by their marital status and connections to men and whose stories, even in death, weren’t preserved.
Even today, we see how women’s choices are being denied, shaped, and controlled by men. The spinsters of history have their stories to tell, too.
As always, thanks for reading,
Suzanne
Modern Spinster Storyteller