Why I'm reclaiming the phrase 'maiden aunt'

I celebrate this about myself

At the Llyn y Fan Fach lake in Wales last week. I went away with my mum for a lovely few days.

I have long been curious about the phrase “maiden aunt.”

“Maiden,” an unmarried woman, or, apparently, “a former Scottish beheading device”. Alternatively, a virgin, or, if you’re young and unmarried, a juicy target for the lusty local farm boy: “Good day, fair maiden.”

But if you were over the age of say, 25, popular lore had it that you must have something wrong with you if you were unmarried, and you became a “mad maiden.”

During this period, you became too old to have children but your siblings started to procreate, and when all of them had given birth, the moniker was complete: Mad maiden aunt.

This lore is still pretty current, unfortunately. Statistically, more women in England and Wales have been married to a man by age 35 than haven’t, and having not been married can be seen as something a little suspicious, or that there’s something “wrong” with you.

You are “too picky” if you’re a woman and “still” single after 35. People ask why you’re single (you must never ask those people why they are still married) to help them get to the root cause of your plight. Similarly with not having kids (the average age for women to become parents is 31; for men it’s 33.7): people ask whether you have them to satisfy their own curiosity, or they say roundabout things like “What’s your situation?” 

But I want to reclaim “maiden aunt” as a positive, celebratory phrase, and the label is part of the reason this newsletter exists.

In December 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, there appeared a newspaper article reviewing men’s winter jumpers.

I tore out the feature and have the scrappy piece of paper next to me now. “Not even that handsome smoothie Colin Firth can look cool in a sweater that appears to have been knitted by his mad maiden aunt, after one too many passes of the mulled wine tray,” the author quips, referring to Firth’s turn as love interest Mark Darcy wearing a novelty jumper in the film Bridget Jones’s Diary.

“Mad maiden aunt” is dropped into the sentence lazily with the assumption that everyone knows what it means. The “mad” bit is patriarchy speak for “older woman,” and the phrase is a jokey shorthand for ha ha, let’s all have a laugh at her expense.

Reading that phrase stirred something in me, a need to express myself, to talk honestly about life and my experience of essentially being a maiden aunt, and in doing so hoping others feel heard. So, emerging from lockdown in 2021, I jumped in and started writing.

I am single, and I don’t have children, and I love and adore the aunt bit: being part of my little nephews’ lives is a total joy. I am now living proof that there is life on the ‘other side’.

I am seeking out other maidens - the writer Glynnis MacNicol, for example, whose memoir I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself revels in the fact that she has “consciously exempted” herself from partnership or parenting.

Approaching 50, she wrote in The New York Times: “Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.” (Here is a gift link to the piece, and she also wrote a juicy feature about her summer in Paris in the Guardian here.)

There is also Ruby Warrington, who published a memoir “Women Without Kids” last year. In an article for OK! magazine she wrote: “I always just knew that motherhood was not for me. It was less because I didn’t want to be a mum and more that there were simply other things I wanted for my life. Like all women born against the backdrop of the women’s liberation movement, I was raised with the message that I could do, and be, whatever and whoever I wanted.”

I love reading these women’s stories, and I’m happy to add my voice to this growing choir. It isn’t always straightforward: sometimes I have delighted in not being part of those government averages, other times despaired. But mostly I feel I’m fortunate to be getting curious about what has and hasn't happened in life - a maiden aunt for the roaring 2020s.

And there's no knitted jumper for that.

What do you think? Do you relate? Let me know!

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