Found another idiotic accounting mistake from my predecessor that I have to fix and I was like “WILL THE SPECTER OF THAT MAN’S INCOMPETENCE EVER CEASE TO HAUNT ME” and my coworker was like “Why do you talk like that”
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
Just wanted to add that the suffix -ster was originally specifically feminine, a means of denoting a lady known by her profession. Spinster = female spinner, baxter = female baker, webster = female weaver (webber), brewster = female brewer. If one of the ladies named Alys in your village was known for selling her excellent weaving, you might call her Alys Webster (to differentiate her from, say, Alys Littel who was rather short, and Alys Bywater who lived near the pond).
This fascinates me for many reasons, but especially in the case of modern families with last names like Baxter or Webster or Brewster. What formidable and well-known ancestresses managed to pass on those very gendered names to all their descendants, when last names were changing from personal “nicknames” into indicators of lineage among the middle and lower classes? There’s a forgotten story of a fascinating woman behind every one of those family lines.
Resource for the history of the -ster suffix here.
Is there something you planned to do before you got trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?
Are you yelling at yourself to get up and do the thing, but you can’t, because you’re trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?
Consider this your save point.
Put tumblr down, stand up, stretch, and go do the thing you planned to do. Future you will be incredibly grateful.
Things people in the notes have been able to do thanks to this post:
eat breakfast
go to bed
get out of bed
take a shower
write
practice
watch Superman Returns and write a paper on it
retain shreds of sanity
I need y’all to know that you’re doing amazing, and I’m so glad that I was able to help you break out of a procrastination loop you did not want to be stuck in.
Helpful post I’ve added to my queue in case it helps someone else at the random point when it’s posted.
had a dream that started out kind of sexy and for a number of irrelevant dream-state reasons involved my having to explain to a partner that i didn’t want to suck on his titties. i think it was supposed to turn into an anxiety dream about having to negotiate sexual boundaries but instead he smiled and, very sympathetic, told me “of course - i know you’re a freudian, i’m sorry that didn’t occur to me,” sort of saying he should have remembered how i felt about oral fixations, and then the rest of the dream was me trying with increasing desperation to convince him that i was not a freudian and he just laughed and laughed, like i was being sort of foolish and silly, and said he knew how i really felt, and didn’t my unconscious mind reveal the truth about me, and so on. and by then i was so distressed that i was yelling at him in the dream - not that i actually fully realized i was dreaming - and shouted “dream interpretation is a crock of shit!” with such force that it woke me up.
now that this post has largely stopped circulating i feel that i can safely reveal what set this off. my dream partner was. well okay he was lestat iwTV. and the reason i would not suck on his titties is that, well, in the dream, i was deeply and passionately concerned about the possibility that this would cause me to be exposed to some substance called. well.
you need to be earnest. you need to tell people that you love them. you need to speak on how you’re feeling honestly. you need to be sentimental. you need to stop letting the fear of other people laughing at you have so much control over how you express yourself. you need to get over yourself. you need to be embarrassing but true.
