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self-sustained family home. Most stayed there. Yet there were some who lived independently, dealing for themselves with weavers and textile merchants and often earning their praise. As late as 1783, in a Description of Manchester, we learn that “weavers were…obliged to pay more for the spinning than theprice allowed by the merchants ‘but darst not complain…lest lose the spinner.’”
    Long before the industrial revolution—and before the implementation of a restrictive British common law—single women worked on their own in other ways. Town and city records, portions of which have been published in academic papers, indicate that unwed women in medieval France, England, and Germany traded in raw wool, silk, and rare spices. Some engaged in foreign trading and owned their own ships, and a few are said to have managed large estates and breweries.
    On into the seventeenth century, spinster was used to identify a respectable employment category. When later that century the French began using spinster to indicate an unwed woman, the term was understood to be descriptive: a woman on her own, for any number of reasons, and in need of an income.
    In England, however, another spinsterly model was in the making: the Old Maid, who first took form as a loud, bosomy theater grotesque known as “the Dame.” Here was a new female creature so vain, so rabidly flirtatious she seemed unaware that the men she desired found her repulsive. For best effect, the dame was played by a man. Even in France, where the view of the serious, dedicated spinner prevailed, the playwright Molière created a protospinster, his own prehistoric Old Maid, in the form of Bélise, a conceited and oblivious character in Les Femmes savantes (1672). Bélise has never wed, and without companionship, talking to or arguing with herself or whomever happens to be standing there, she has come to believe that she’s a genius. Just as the British recognized the dame as a harridan with access to rouge pots, so French spectators recognized this blathering female as a deluded idiote .
    By the late eighteenth century, these apparitions—the spooky lone woman who was neither brilliant nor beautiful—had coalesced. The resulting character, often set down at the edges of good society, appears first in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett (1771), a novel reexamined in a 1990 doctoral thesis, “Singleness of Heart,” by scholar Susan Leslie Katz. The spinster part is small but highly detailed, as if the curtain had risen on a sitting-room drama and there, standing rigidly farstage left, was an odd-looking woman in conversation with herself. As the creature inches her way center stage, a male voice relates the woeful tale of one Tabitha Bramble. (The name Tabitha is classical spinster—similar to Tituba, the Caribbean servant at Salem, Massachusetts, who allegedly taught the spells and charms that led Sarah Good and nineteen others to be burned or hanged for witchcraft. And “Tabitha” would be long associated with single women—tabbies, tabby cats, would become common nineteenth-century single nicknames—and with witches. The baby witch on the beloved 1960s TV series Bewitched was named Tabitha. The grandmother witch, Endora, was exceptionally catty, a real Tabby. And, to switch popular forms, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey called his troops of excellent war-widow detectives “the Cattery.”) But back to the tragically appointed Miss Bramble:
    In her person, she is tall, raw-boned, aukward, flat-chested, and stooping; her complexion is sallow and freckled; her eyes are not grey, but greenish, like those of a cat, and generally inflamed…. her forehead low; her nose long, sharp,…her lips skinny, her mouth extensive, her teeth straggling and loose, of various colours and conformation; and her long neck shrivelled into a thousand wrinkles—In her temper, she is proud, stiff, vain, imperious, prying, malicious, greedy, and