She I Dare Not Name: A spinster's meditations on life

by Donna Ward

Summers’ list was on the money and, fortunately, by the time her book came out Gough Whitlam was in the business of ticking off everything on that list. He abolished university fees and introduced financial assistance to help women get educated for work. He initiated the single mother’s benefit, put the pill on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, established a path to equal wages and maternity leave, brought about no-fault divorce, recognised de facto relationships and based property settlement on a fifty-fifty split of the family home and total superannuation. Women could choose not to marry badly. Single mothers could survive the crush of divorce. But that’s not all. He funded women’s health centres, refuges and rape crisis centres, he brought in free universal healthcare and established the Office of Women’s Affairs (which, in 1983, Bob Hawke renamed the Office of the Status of Women and appointed Anne Summers to lead, which she did until 1987, when she became editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine).

John Howard longed for Wisteria Lane. He, too, had a list of things he thought would not be missed. The year he was elected, 1996, he cast out the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, closed the Women’s Bureau and the Women’s Statistics Unit, slashed the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and directed all complaints to the Federal Court. It cost $1000 to lodge an Equal Opportunity complaint. Complaints plummeted. But that’s not all. He decimated the Office of the Status of Women, cut childcare funding and refused to bring in paid maternity leave. He introduced policies that would eventually push house prices in our major capital cities beyond the capacity of a single working woman, never mind a dual-income family. And he let social housing stagnate. Those on low incomes, mostly women with children, some spinsters, were one pay cheque away from homelessness. Then, in 2004, his treasurer, Peter Costello, instituted a baby bonus of $4000 per child. Have one for Mum, one for Dad and one for the country, he said. The family fertility rate shot up. And into this Wisteria world, one gloomy afternoon, stepped the health minister, Tony Abbott. He believed feminism made women postpone family-making past the time when their bodies were most fertile. Abbott thought it folly for women to seek high office. He thought women’s aptitudes, psychology and interests were different. He thought they could never dominate or even approach equal representation. What the housewives of Austr...

In the spring of 2013, Tony Abbott became prime minister, and he had a bloody list. He gutted women’s refuges, raised the pension age to sixty-seven, presided over an increasing gender wage gap, and watched women’s superannuation shrink to 30 per cent less than men’s. Eighteen months later Malcolm Turnbull became prime minister. Nevertheless, under Wisteria Lane governments an unemployed woman in her fifties finds getting a job difficult and social security insufficient to put food on the table and keep a roof over her head. Unmarried women, childless or not, who work hard and save their money, continue to be paid inadequately and are subjected to humiliation and vilification even if they hold high office. By 2015 Whitlam’s grand tapestry was unravelled. Summers’ shiny ifs screeched like harpies in the night.

Australia is captured in stereotypes only Anne Summers dared name. Bereft of archetypes, we are blind to the potent women standing in our midst. Women, childless or not, with or without a partner, are fair game as they lead our nation or walk home at night. We barely know how we do it, but Australians have passed on this culture to our children since the 26 January 1788. Australia, goddamn.

No. I’m talking about the silence that greets you when the sound of the key in the latch is the first sound the house has known since you left. I’m talking about when your face has been still for twenty-four or maybe forty-eight hours because no one has spoken to you, and you have barely spoken to yourself. I’m talking about how, after so much silence, the sound of your voice seems foreign, too boisterous for company.

My Melbourne friends were doing the same—waking to children, lunching later with family, one would picnic in the country with her new lover. That each was fond of me there was no doubt. If they thought of me they would pick up the phone, invite me to join them, or plan to drop by later. But I was not in their thoughts. On that Sunday morning, the sun on the pillow beside me, I let that truth soak in and I fell through the net.

I want to die, but I don’t want to kill myself, I say as matter-of-factly as possible. My therapist can’t hide her alarm. I don’t want to kill myself, I repeat, returning her gaze with all the calm I can muster. I’m not suicidal. I just want to die.

The only words I have are, I cross the road recklessly. Sometimes I think how easily I could let a Mack truck take me down. Not one person depends on me to exist. I want to die, but I don’t want to kill myself. This is how depression goes. It lays you gagged and bound in raw sensations, verbally etherised on the night.

Both my colleague and my friend check in, once each. I reassure them I will not kill myself. They suggest I reach out to other friends. I don’t. I could. But it is dangerous to reach out when friends are unavailable, dangerous to speak of such things to the uninitiated. And I have no energy to explain.

Losing friendship, intimacy and work in equal measure is dangerous. To lose friends to family-making is to be abandoned, left tainted and wanting in the village square. To lose a job is to lose an identity, a sense of agency, direction in the world. Losing a fiancé is to lose a future. Losing one’s parents is to lose the past. All that remains is a ghosting filament.

The majority of twentieth-century theories on psychological development identify marriage, or coupling and parenting, as proof of a person’s psychological maturity. Hence the vast literature on forming and maintaining lifelong loving relationships, and good enough parenting. Family-making, its creation, fluctuations and continuity, is the basic social, political and economic unit of humanity, so understanding its dynamics is paramount.

Being single is, I think, the same as being a parent. You have to step up to the project every day. It is different to being coupled. If a person no longer wants to step up to their coupling commitment, they can end it and face the fire of termination. But being single and being a parent don’t end, except by the onset of love and coupling, or, in the case of being a parent, some kind of misadventure. Even when a parent or a single person doesn’t want to, they must step up and face the fire of endurance. And each time they face that fire an unexpected vigour comes of it.

The message was unavoidable. A woman alone at the end of the millennium could choose a brilliant career to ease her spinster stigma, but without some kind of man handy, and a child on her hip, she would wither in the presence of motherhood and drink more than she should. Unsurprising, since in the 1990s terrorism was on the rise.

I work and live alone. It’s just the way life has turned out. I live 3387.1 kilometres from my family on the scarp. My gay best friend moved 1932 kilometres from Melbourne to some tropical haven in Queensland. I have close friends in Sydney, Adelaide, Perth and Castlemaine, who keep in touch frequently when life doesn’t otherwise preoccupy them. I have close friends and neighbours in Melbourne who know I’ll call them when the chips are down. But it could take longer than a week for someone to come for me, such is the rhythm of my life. It might take two weeks. That’s how often my cleaner comes. She has a key to get in. She will find me. I might be dead.

Friendship is a loose bond, intermittent, with no promise to stay around for the duration. Each friendship offers a unique set of commitments. Friends may prick fingers and mingle blood in a pledge to care for you like a sister or a brother, but life can easily take them in a different direction. Asking friends with partners, children and siblings, nieces, nephews and grandchildren, ageing parents, or a best friend of higher ranking, and maybe a lover, to add me to their list of people to care for risks snapping the bond. Friends have to want to do such a thing, and one must intuit which friends will be appalled by such a request. Divining who not to ask foxes me.

And if the days go by and all these things are done, you may say to yourself, What a lucky person I am. And if one or none of these things are done, you will say to yourself, I have been betrayed and abandoned. And there will be feuds, blood hatreds and spells. Who will know my history and wishes? Who will represent me, protect me when I am frail, fight my fight, turn off the machines, assist my dying when I want? And do I dare to know when I would want the end? Will I have the capacity to know, and the time to tell my designated friend? So, you see, organising such a gathering is not easy. An independent, responsible woman must be courageous, and most of those I’d invite to such a gathering live at least one aeroplane flight away. I only have myself to blame for leaving things undone.

You do not know the exhaustion of turning up to life every day wondering at the meaning of it.

I direct you to everything Bella DePaulo ever wrote. She discovered that, except for an extended honeymoon period, life satisfaction, or cognitive satisfaction, or affective wellbeing, or relationship satisfaction or whatever the specific study calls happiness, it does not increase over time. (Note the statistical trickery around defining happiness.) In fact, over time people appear to be less satisfied as a result of getting married.

But I know the course of friendship, its ebb and flow, the way it comes in real close, then goes. In fact, friendship is the only relationship I know. Being single lets you linger with the most interesting friends, spend nine hours without obligation. All is fair when it comes to love. Friendship vanishes in the wake of it, turns into catch-ups, often when the chips are down, re-abandoned when love rights itself, or work exacts its due, or both. There is no legal contract, no matter how hard you work at it, no matter how close it comes, no matter how long it lasts.

I can tell you that solitude comes of the fortitude to choose against coupling badly. It brings resilience. I can tell you that loneliness transformed into solitude is hard won and embroidered with the presence of those absent. Spinsters