In Anglo-American culture, the never-married old woman is a stock character, a bundle of negative personal characteristics, and a metaphor for barrenness, ugliness, and death. Her obvious undesirability forms the basis for the children’s card game, “Old Maids” in which each player tries to avoid coming to the end of the round with the “Old Maid” card in his or her hand. In a phrase, to “get stuck with the Old Maid” is to lose the game.

This view of the never-married woman as an unwanted leftover has inspired more than a parlor game. Such an image enjoys a long...

Clifford Geertz, a leading scholar/explorer of peoples and cultures different from his own, has set as a goal for himself and his discipline of anthropology the determination of “how … people … define themselves as persons, [and] what goes into the idea they have … of what a self … is.” He proposes not only an aim but also a method with which to achieve a faithful understanding of individuals’ conceptions of themselves and of what it means to be a person in a particular culture and time. Geertz obtains this “local knowledge” of informants’ notions of themselves and of...

A commonly held prejudgment of single old women is that their families kept them from living fully or that the women themselves hid behind their families to escape men, sex, work, children, or the unexpected. The 50 autobiographical stories presented to me suggest that the problem of overprotection was encountered by only a few of the group of 50. For most of these never-married women, as for most people, families were a mixed blessing. The women reported finding protectionandchallenge in their families of origin, encouragingandundermining signals, constraintsandopportunities. Predictably, most women recalled more readily the...

Enthronement of the family has made the construction of intimate interdependence among unrelated or unmarried people difficult but, happily, not impossible. Friends outside the family, particularly in Western, industrial, and postindustrial cultures, have proved to be vigorous competitors with relatives throughout the life-course for the attention and loyalty of a family member.¹ Despite the normatively prescribed “inside track” enjoyed by relatives, friends have played as large a role in the emotional and social lives of the women I interviewed as have family members. Indeed, a sizable minority of the women—19 women, or 38 percent—reported that friends eclipsed family...

Whether domestic workers, factory workers, clerical workers, sales people, professionals, or managers, most of the women I interviewed emphasized three themes in their work life: (1) how badly they had been paid; (2) how few were the choices of occupation open to them when they were young, searching for first jobs and training; and (3) how central to their identity working for pay has proved to be. While reporting on the dehumanizing dimensions of work, they also noted the joy and dignity that working had provided.

For the 20 professional and managerial women in my sample, the work itself was...

After retirement, the lives of these 50 never-married women closely resemble their lives before retirement. Indeed, many saw their retirement as a chance to capitalize on the “free time” never before available to them as adults. This meant furthering relationships and activities they had long enjoyed, but in forms more self-determined and idiosyncratic than they had known during full-time employment.

Twenty-three of the never-married women voluntarily retired; that is, they said they had ended their full-time jobs when they wanted to retire. More than half of the women (27) retired involuntarily; that is, they left full-time employment before they wanted...