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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 6, 2005
Of spinsters
���All that is needed for evil to prevail,” says a modern proverb, “is for good men to do nothing.”“Surely you mean, ‘men or women’,” says the neurotic editor on my shoulder. (Not a real, but an hypothetical person.) No: I wrote “men”, for the proverb came into being before political correctness was launched, as a kind of bird flu to cut down all folk wisdom. I first heard it from the mouth of a woman (Miss Quinn of sainted memory), who if she were alive today would be the first to explain that “men” includes “women” in such a construction. As a diligent English teacher, she would then establish that the sentence becomes rhythmically insupportable if you insert “or women”. And she would add that, anyway, the saying was intended for the instruction of males, because women are the weaker sex, and men since Adam have had the solemn responsibility to protect them from evil. “So that, putting aside considerations of age, ability, and opportunity, it is a worse crime when a man takes advantage of a woman, than when a woman takes advantage of a man.” She is dead, you will not be able to challenge what I imagine she would have said. Were she alive today, she might further add, “Curiously enough, the feminists still believe this.” Though her term, c.1961, might instead have been the already antiquated “suffragettes”. Miss Quinn was a fine old spinster lady, of the kind our civilization can no longer replace. Confident in mind and spirit, self-depending and self-supported (often by invisible means), they had no time for drivel. And “votes for women” was as often as not placed in that category. Finally, she might enter into a disquisition upon the history of the proverb, tracing it perhaps to Edmund Burke, who wrote, about 1770, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” The evolution of the phrase she might use to illustrate the interesting fact, that quotations are often improved in the transfer from page to tongue. “There are even a few lines of Shakespeare’s, that have been improved in common usage.” Ontario was full of these ladies once. I remember several from my childhood here, though Miss Quinn is remembered from Pakistan -- where she had simply remained, after her Anglo-Indian forebears had faded away. Despite the great distance between these locations, the species was essentially the same. They were products of something “British”, though they had their equivalents in American tradition, and in most other European cultures, and in some far beyond Europe. I realized this, later in life, when I attended the wedding of a Chinese girl, to an American boy. The two mothers were sat together at what became the head of a large round table. They did not speak a word of each other’s language, but both were widows of a type we might call “honorary spinsters”. Perhaps “matriarchs” would come closer to the fact. They understood each other perfectly. They were the twin centres of magnificence at that table. They were the twin guarantors of what would necessarily become a very successful marriage. In my column last week, I implied the question: What has happened to all the men in our society? (There are a few left: I mentioned some firemen.) But another question that vexes me is, What has happened to all the women? We have “professional women”, to be sure -- whatever the reader understands by that phrase. I take it to mean, women who have mastered a role that was traditionally male. But what I don’t see, very often, is women who have mastered a role that was traditionally female. The case of the missing magnificent spinsters being Exhibit “A”. For part of the answer to this question, I return to Miss Quinn, and a distantly remembered (all-boy) class, in which she was expounding the exploits of Florence Nightingale, or possibly Grace Darling (the once-famous Scottish lighthouse-keeper’s daughter, who rowed out to rescue a shipwrecked crew -- a legend since rewritten and subverted in a feminist historical novel). Miss Quinn said, “A fine son is his mother’s achievement, a fine daughter is her father’s.” What she meant, I think, was that men grow in the expectation of women; women in the expectation of men. We have today a failure of expectations. Blame it, chiefly, on men who do nothing. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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