‘An unmarried woman is a buffoon’

November 2, 11:50 AMSpiritual Life ExaminerRabbi Ben Kamin

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There may yet come a time, but it still seems far off, when women are at last liberated from the stigma of being unmarried—and therefore unwarranted in some way.  The stigma applies to men, as well, but hardly at the same level of speculation and scrutiny.   A high school teacher of ours, female, just a generation ago, stated the above-quoted “buffoon” conviction in front of our classroom. 

For a woman, at a numerical age indiscriminately applied by society, friends, a mother, or most difficultly, by herself, being or remaining single seems the equivalent of being branded in some horrific way.  She is incomplete, incapable, or even indiscreet.  A man in this position is basically seen as just having fun.

You must know again my reluctance to marry.                                                                                    

In 1933, on her wedding day, a thirty one year-old bride named Amelia Earhart handed her groom a letter.  An excerpt from this extraordinary missive appears in a recent New Yorker piece researched and written by Judith Thurman.  Interest in Amelia Earhart, the almost ethereal, fiercely independent, possibly androgynous, certainly valiant aviator who vanished over the Pacific in 1937 (with her male navigator) may be getting a bump with the current motion picture starring Hilary Swank.

The letter includes the following remarkable paragraph:

“You must know again my reluctance to marry, my feeling that I shatter thereby chances in work which means so much to me. . . . In our life together I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all the confinements of even an attractive cage.”

Now, there is a lot to be said for faithfulness and no case is being made here for open marriage or a lack of covenant between husband and wife.  What does resonate here is the yearning of a creative person, a human being of dreams and science, to (literally) FLY and experience and take risks and engineer and calculate and perhaps even fall.  Judith Thurman intuitively suggests that “the place” to which Amelia Earhart longed to return is the cockpit of her twin-engine Lockheed Electra airplane; but every woman (like every man) has a place.

In her bold declaration of eschewing “even an attractive cage” in favor of her right to work in the field of her choice and to be herself professionally, resourcefully, sexually, Amelia Earhart was the true sky pioneer.  Was the only solution for her to disappear into the horizon?

Image; Pilot Amelia Earhart (Wiki)

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