Charlie Fenton’s Reviews > Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England > Status Update

‘This book has revealed a distinct change in the lives of never-married women at the end of the seventeenth century. Demographers long ago found that numbers of lifelong singlewomen were at their highest level of the early modern period in the later part of that century. And this study has shown that urban singlewomen were increasingly active in trade, property holding, and moneylending by the end of the 1600s.’

‘The Reformation led to a distinctly more negative view of singleness. Before the dissolution of the monasteries Englishwomen had a religious alternative to lay marriage: they could dedicate their lives to the Church. Nevertheless, contemporaries viewed nuns not so much as singlewomen but as brides of Christ... After the Reformation the option of being a nun was legally closed off to Englishwomen’

‘It is striking how common it was for urban singlewomen to hold property. The wills of never-married women who lived in the provincial towns of Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and York in the early modern period illustrate this. In Southampton, 44.7 per cent (seventeen out of thirty-eight) of single female testators between the years 1550 and 1750 bequeathed real property.’

‘It could be argued that service was not so much a particular job description as a stage of life in early modern England. In England, as opposed to southern European countries such as Italy, domestic service was seen as an occupation for young people in their teens and twenties. It was something one did before marrying and establishing a household and (ideally) becoming one’s own master’

‘Paradoxically, civic officials required singlewomen to work and support themselves, but at the same time they limited these women’s employment options and channeled them into less remunerative and less autonomous occupations, thus giving never-married women little control over their work or the length of their employment.‘

‘One option for a never-married woman like Shrimpton was to find work in the informal and casual trades such as victualling and huckstering that employed so many wives and widows. But even in these occupations never-married women were treated differently from their ever-married sisters. Widows made up the majority of women working as tipplers and alehouse-keepers’

‘When Southampton’s officials failed to compel independent singlewomen back into household dependency, they forced the women to leave the town. In 1609, for example, they told the charmaid Elizabeth Green to put herself into service within two weeks or to depart from Southampton. In this manner, Southampton’s assembly prosecuted fourteen charmaids between 1607 and 1608’

‘Singlewomen and widows had very different residential options available to them. For one thing, widows had more alternatives from which to choose. The dominance of the nuclear family and household in early modern England meant that once a husband died, his widow did not return to her natal family or go to live with her husband’s family. Instead, she became the head of her deceased husband’s household.’

‘between 1600 and 1750 the average Englishwoman did not marry until age 26, and men waited even longer to marry, or until age 28. Since England’s population was quite youthful in this period this means that a large proportion of its people were single. Moreover, it has been suggested that anywhere from 13 to 27 per cent of persons born between the years 1575 and 1700 remained single’