Spinsters

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article is an introduction to the special issue of the Journal of Family History devoted to spinsters, who are defined as women who have not married by age 35 and are thus unlikely ever to marry. Relatively high propor tions of spinsters in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries raise questions for the history of marriage, the family, and women. After in troducing the articles in this issue, the author discusses differences in the propor tions of women never-marrying in China and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe, and the association of spinsterhood with the timing of mar riage, the sex ratio, economic circumstances, and religion.