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1761
- The term “old maid” is English and means an unmarried childless woman or spinster. Used as early as 1761 for the title of a play by Irishman Arthur Murphy, it also means an unpopped kernel in a pot of popcorn.
www.museumofplay.org/blog/single-ladies-the-history-of-old-maid/
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Sep 24, 2011 · The term "old maid" is English and means an unmarried childless woman or spinster. Used as early as 1761 for the title of a play by Irishman Arthur Murphy, it also means an unpopped kernel in a...
- The Strong
"Maid" was, by the Victorian era, a rather old-fashioned way to refer to a young virgin woman, and the assumption was that almost every maid from the upper working class upward would eventually marry a man and stop being a maid; the two alternatives were that the maid would lose her virginity without being married (which would typically see her ...
4 days ago · Maids were historically kept in massive estates as part of a huge staff. They were not always paid for their services, but were treated humanely enough. They were provided with food, clothes and boarding inside the homes where they were employed.
Nov 26, 2023 · A Satyr Upon Old Maids, published in 1713, describes spinsters as “nasty, rank, rammy, filthy Sluts.” Six years later, Daniel Defoe proposed the creation of an Office for Marriages, which “would be particularly useful to a set of despicable creatures, called Old Maids.”
Spinster or old maid is a term referring to an unmarried woman who is older than what is perceived as the prime age range during which women usually marry. It can also indicate that a woman is considered unlikely to ever marry. [1] . The term originally denoted a woman whose occupation was to spin. [2] .
Dec 2, 2019 · Women who were once called spinsters eventually started being called old maids. In 17th-century New England, there were also words like “ thornback ” – a sea skate covered with thorny spines – used to describe single women older than 25.
