POPULAR SPINSTERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3672, 29 July 1924, Page 65

POPULAR SPINSTERS.

(By

Ella Hep-worth Dixon.)

The . popular spinster begins to be a favourite at five years old and continues till 35 —which nowadays looks 10 years younger. Then comes the difficult age in society, which, if it can be triumphantly passed, may cause the lucky spinster to remain popular until she has achieved three score years and ten. It is a singular fact that in the length and tenacity of her friendships she usually eclipses her married sisters. There is something narrowing and stultifying about marriage which does not permit of real friendships outside that sacred entity, the family. It is in the nature of things, but it does not make the average British matron exciting company at a little dinner. The popular spinster does not talk about illnesses and operations any more than does her bachelor contemporary, whereas it requires the most dexterous skid, when talking to the Anglo-Saxon matron, to steer the frail barque of conversation over those two deadly rocks. Up to now (when the whole edifice of woman s position is being rebuilt) marriage, birth, illness, and death were the great events in the history of the average wife. Small wonder her thoughts ran on these topics to the exclusion of all else. Meanwhile, the unmarried had leisure to learn to talk and not merely to chatter. The popular spinster is trusted with other people's husbands—indeed, she often has to take charge of them for an entire day or evening. But she is not trusted with her married friend’s admirers —there the lino is drawn. The reason is obscure, for notoriously she does not wish to annex them. Possibly her sense of humour and comradeship might cause a defection from what is often an insipid attachment. In the last century to bo middle-aged and unmarried was, save in rare cases, to be in a hopeless position. The spinster was literally nobody, and the highest ambition she could rise to was that of that unpopular relation, an aunt. Literature is full of ridiculous aunts. But with the growing matrimonial unrest and the frequency of divorce, no more stigma attaches to the spinster than to the bachelor of her own age.