Did you hear that Kirstie Allsopp had pontificated on how young women should plan their lives? Surprise surprise, she thinks they should all do as she did and not bother going to university but just go out and get a job. That is easier said than done though she probably found it a simple task as she went to a posh school, the sort of place that people send their kids to so that they can rub shoulders with wealthy and influential families and gain lots of contacts for use in later life. Education is the least of their wishes.
Well we don’t all have those sorts of advantages (?) in life and nowadays a degree is required for just about any career, gone are the days when you could just get a job and work your way up the career ladder, learning by experience.
What really annoyed me though was her assumption that all women wanted to get married and have children. According to her we should all be married and sprogged up by the time we are 27 because apparently your fertility falls off the edge of a cliff as soon as you are 35. That’s absolute nonsense of course and I speak as a person who was born to a 36 year old woman, and she wasn’t even trying to get pregnant, in fact she was trying to dodge that particular event as she already had four kids before having me. I’m the product of a failed ‘Dutch cap’ apparently so I wasn’t so much an afterthought as an aftershock!
Coincidently Jack’s mother gave birth to him at the age of 36 and he came as a bit of a shock too, what can I say, – our parents were just careless I suppose. My paternal grandmother had her eighth and last child when she was in her 40s, she didn’t leave the house for months, she was so mortified to be in that state at such a great age. And think of Cherie Blair who was pregnant in her 40s twice, each time unplanned.
At the same time that all the Kirstie Allsopp stuff was in the papers there was also an article in the Guardian by Claudia Connell, which you can read here. It’s called Don’t Call Me a Spinster and it’s about her experiences as an unmarried woman, at the hands of her supposed friends, she writes:
There have been so many occasions when I’ve revealed that I’m single only to have the person I’m talking to say: “Really? But you seem so nice.” That’s because I am nice. I don’t kick puppies for fun or push old ladies down manholes – I just don’t have a husband and it doesn’t bother me half as much as it seems to bother everyone else.
My honest answer to the question “Why did you never marry?” would be the same as my answer to why I’ve never visited Canada, ridden a horse or broken my arm: I don’t know, it just didn’t happen.
and also:
The unattached woman is to be pitied and mocked while the unattached man is to be envied and respected. A simple game of word association is enough to hammer home the point. Think of the word “spinster” and what images pop into your head? Now do the same with “bachelor”. A Miss Marple figure surrounded by cats and coupons for us and a suntanned hunk in a sports car for him – am I right?
I of course have never had any such experiences as I got married at the crazy age of 17, and no I wasn’t pregnant! But I do think that the word ‘spinster’ should be reclaimed and brought back to its original meaning. A woman who was designated a spinster was describing herself as an independent woman who was in no need of a man to support her as she was able to do so quite well herself thank you. A woman with the ability to spin wool could keep a roof over her head and feed herself at a time when the production of wool was very lucrative.
Apart from that though, I have an old family friend who never married and she said to me that when she looked around her church at the husbands that the women had to put up with, she was very glad that she had never bothered with marriage and children, she is however a wonderful aunt. Each to their own I say.