Curious Femme

Introduction

The nineteenth century represents a decisive stage in the history of single women. At the start of the century, the legal doctrine of coverture remained firmly in place, rendering married women economically dependent on their husbands. By contrast, single women retained the status of feme sole, which gave them rights to own property, enter contracts, and retain earnings. Yet cultural narratives increasingly stigmatised single women as “spinsters” or “old maids,” and economic opportunities were constrained by class and gendered norms. Reform came incrementally through the Married Women’s Property Acts, which began to equalise wives’ legal status with that of single women. At the same time, a parallel revolution occurred in higher education. From the 1860s onwards, women began to enter universities, gradually overcoming institutional barriers to degrees. This period thus marks the foundations of both legal and educational independence.

Higher Education and Professional Beginnings

Parallel to property reform, a revolution was unfolding in higher education. Women’s access to universities was initially piecemeal but gained momentum from the 1860s:

• University of London: the first to award degrees to women, in 1878.
• Scottish universities: opened to women under the Universities (Scotland) Act 1889; Edinburgh graduated its first female students in 1893.
• Durham: awarded degrees to women in 1895.
• Oxford: resisted until 1920.
• Cambridge: allowed women to sit examinations from the 1870s but withheld degrees until 1948.

These developments legitimised women’s intellectual contributions and created pathways into teaching, medicine, and science. For single women, university study provided both social status and economic security, though institutional barriers remained severe.tion in this period became pioneers in teaching and science, despite institutional barriers.

Coverture and the Married Woman

At the start of the nineteenth century, the legal system defined a married woman as feme covert. Her property, wages, and legal personality were merged with those of her husband. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England described husband and wife as “one person in law,” with that person being the husband (Blackstone, 1765–1769). Married women could not sue or be sued, nor could they control wages or inheritances, except through trusts designed to bypass coverture (Holcombe, 1983).

This legal regime reinforced patriarchal marriage as an institution of economic dependence. Wives were effectively minors in law, denied the independence that single women retained.

• Married women lost their legal identity under coverture; all property and wages defaulted to husbands.
• Married Women’s Property Act 1870: wives gained control of earnings and inheritances up to £200.
• Married Women’s Property Act 1882: wives gained full ownership of wages, property, and contracts.
• 1893 Act: consolidated reforms.

For single women, these changes merely extended rights they already enjoyed, but they rebalanced the status of all women in law (Holcombe, 1983).

Single Women as Feme Sole

Single women, including widows and never-married women, continued to enjoy legal independence throughout the nineteenth century. They could inherit property, run businesses, and engage in contracts in their own name. Erickson (1993) shows that these rights were longstanding, but they were rarely celebrated. Instead, single women were often treated with suspicion, their independence interpreted as a failure to marry rather than an achievement.

Class mattered enormously. Wealthy spinsters and widows could live comfortably from inherited property or investments, while working-class single women often endured insecure labour as seamstresses, servants, or factory workers. The label “spinster” was applied indiscriminately, flattening these distinctions into a single stereotype of inadequacy.

Economic Roles of Single Women

Employment

Industrialisation opened new roles for women, particularly in textile mills, factories, and clerical work. For unmarried women, these occupations provided wages they could control in their own right. Yet pay was markedly lower than men’s, and opportunities for advancement were restricted (Crompton, 1997).

Property and inheritance

Widows with property could continue family businesses or invest in land and housing. Middle-class single women increasingly became landlords or small investors, benefiting from expanding credit markets (Shanley, 1989).

Service and teaching

Domestic service remained the largest employer of unmarried women. However, teaching and clerical work gradually became feminised professions, enabling educated single women to achieve modest economic independence (Dyhouse, 1989).

The Married Women’s Property Acts

The most important legal reforms of the nineteenth century were the Married Women’s Property Acts.

• 1870 Act: Allowed wives to retain ownership of their earnings and inherit up to £200 in their own right. This marked the first statutory breach in coverture (Holcombe, 1983).
• 1882 Act: Gave married women full control of property, wages, and contracts, effectively placing them on the same legal footing as single women.
• 1893 Act: Consolidated these reforms, removing lingering ambiguities.

These Acts did not expand the rights of single women, they already possessed legal independence, but instead extended similar rights to married women. The reforms highlight the irony that, until this point, a spinster had greater legal autonomy than a wife.

Cultural Stigma: The Spinster and the Old Maid

Despite legal independence, the cultural position of single women remained negative. Literature, satire, and popular discourse portrayed the spinster as undesirable, embittered, or eccentric. The “old maid” became a stock figure, pitied or mocked for lacking marriage and children (Shanley, 1989).

This stereotype reinforced marriage as the expected trajectory for women. Men could be bachelors without disgrace, often celebrated as independent and sociable. Women who remained unmarried were cast as social failures. The disparity illustrates the cultural policing of gender roles: men’s singleness was freedom, women’s singleness was deficiency.

Feminist Critiques of Marriage

By the mid-nineteenth century, feminist writers began to critique the institution of marriage as a site of economic dependence and potential abuse. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that coverture rendered wives little more than slaves, deprived of property and autonomy. Early feminists such as Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon campaigned for property law reform, drawing attention to cases where married women lost control of inherited assets to abusive husbands (Holcombe, 1983).

These critiques framed singleness as a possible site of independence. While many women did not consciously choose to remain single, the feminist movement reframed autonomy outside marriage as legitimate, laying intellectual groundwork for twentieth-century debates.

Critical Evaluation

The nineteenth century demonstrates the tension between legal autonomy and cultural stigma. Single women, in law, were free agents with property and contractual rights, while married women remained legally dependent until the late century reforms. Yet society portrayed singleness as failure and marriage as success.

The Married Women’s Property Acts transformed the legal landscape, aligning the rights of wives with those of single women. However, social attitudes lagged. The “spinster” stereotype persisted, ensuring that singleness was culturally undervalued even as it was legally empowered.

Historians must therefore read the nineteenth century not as a simple narrative of progress, but as a complex negotiation between law, culture, and economy. Single women stood at the heart of this negotiation, embodying both the freedoms and the anxieties of an age in transition.

Conclusion

In the nineteenth century, single women enjoyed greater legal independence than wives, yet they bore the weight of cultural stigma. The reforms of the 1870s and 1880s equalised property rights, ensuring that marriage no longer stripped women of legal identity. Yet this levelling did not erase the negative cultural associations of the “spinster.” The paradox of autonomy and stigma persisted, setting the stage for the twentieth century, when demographic upheaval and feminist activism would begin to reshape the meanings of singleness.

The nineteenth century thus witnessed both legal reform and educational beginnings. The Married Women’s Property Acts removed the stark inequality of coverture, while university access created the intellectual and professional foundations for women’s future independence.

References (Harvard style)

• Blackstone, W. (1765–1769) Commentaries on the Laws of England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Crompton, R. (1997) Women and Work in Modern Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Dyhouse, C. (1989) Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Erickson, A.L. (1993) Women and Property in Early Modern England. London: Routledge.
• Holcombe, L. (1983) Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
• Shanley, M.L. (1989) Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895. Princeton: Princeton University Press.