this post is... a gigantic, ahistorical mess. there are a variety of reasons why women would choose not to marry, depending on the era. but regardless, it wasn’t about the desire to have or not have sex.
i guess i’ll start with the “[...] sexless or homosexual hoydens” mentioned above. which, by the way, the first mention i could find of that being quoted is in a book called Lesbian Teachers: An Invisible Presence.
[image ID: an excerpt from “Spinsters, Bachelors, and Other Gender Transgressors in School Employment, 1850-1990″ by Jackie M. Blount.]
please take particular note of the “threat to traditional gender order” comment and the observation on the development of the study of human sexuality.
the stereotypes of spinsterhood are inextricable from lesbophobia, and the fear that heterosexual society has of women who reject men in any way.
and by the way, a researcher, Katharine Bement Davis studied these spinster teachers’ romantic experiences and found hey, about half of them have been involved with other women.
obviously, spinster teachers weren’t all lesbians. and yeah, i’d bet a lot of them weren’t interested in men OR women. but even as recently as this, it gets a bit thorny trying to assign modern labels to people. our society and our ideas of sex and sexuality have changed so much, and so much of sexology has either been manipulated to support oppression (see above) or destroyed if possible. would some of these spinsters have identified as asexual, had the modern concept of asexuality been around then? i mean... probably, at least a few! but it’s inappropriate, homophobic, oversimplifying, and just plain incorrect to label spinsterhood as some kind of asexual movement. it literally was not.
what it boils down to is this: spinster teachers weren’t feared and punished for not having sex, they were feared and punished for being “bad at being a woman”, basically. and again, that’s something that is inextricable from lesbian history.
victorian spinsters sometimes remained unmarried not due to a lack of desire for marriage, but to a highly idealistic view of marriage and a religiously motivated need to find a “purpose” in life.
honestly, i don’t know enough about specifically victorian era spinsterhood to write about it here, so i won’t. but i do want to observe that it seems to be a complicated thing that is tangled thoroughly up in gender and sexism among many other issues - a product of its time with little relevance to modern notions of sexuality.
if an asexual woman looks at the history of spinsterhood and feels a connection to it and finds comfort in it, that’s fantastic! women of all orientations may feel a connection to it, because it’s a history of all types of women - lesbian women, asexual women, straight women, bi women, trans women, dysphoric women, nb women.
TL;DR: spinsterhood is complicated. women have been spinsters for all sorts of reasons - non-heterosexual orientation, religion, sexism, opportunities for work - and it’s not the unique history of asexuality. nor of lesbianism! it’s very often intertwined with lesbian history and societal fear of lesbians, but not always. it’s dishonest to erase all of that and bundle it all into “asexual history”. just... chill.
