Chapter Two Hundred Six: Spinster

When Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own by Kate Bolick came across the circulation desk at work, I knew I had to check this book out.  While women are increasingly writing about their experiences as single women and studying the experiences of single women more broadly, there still isn't an overabundance of books, at least that I've encountered, on the topic, and I was interested to read Bolick's take on the matter.  She takes an interesting approach, interspersing her own experiences as a never-married woman from her twenties through her early forties with the lives of five successful female authors from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  (Many of these women authors did marry at some point, though few of them stayed married for the duration of their lives.)  By no means a manifesto against marriage or coupledom or cohabitation or family life, by no means a long and rambling screed against men (whom Bolick generally portrays kindly), Spinster instead strives to consider how marriage (or its absence) still shapes a woman's personal and professional lives.  Bolick isn't out to tell anyone else how to live her life; rather, by considering her own life thus far as well as the lives of the five female authors she's found particularly inspirational, as well as her late mother's short life, she offers a way to think about modern womanhood that includes but is not limited to marriage.