By Mimi
You’ve had a break-up. Maybe several. The term “old maid” is beginning to run through your head. Nonsense, we say. Here, we take some derogatory euphemisms for aging single women down a notch (we wanted to be balanced, but we couldn’t come up with any for single men):
Miss Lonelyhearts. The title of a 1933 Nathanael West novel. Ms. Lonelyhearts was actually a man who wrote a 
newspaper advice column called, you guessed it: Miss Lonelyhearts. Our newspaperman gets so depressed from reading tales of woe from single women that he falls into a deep depression and cheats on his fiancée. A worse fate eventually ensues but we’ll save that in case you want to read the book, see the 1933 film, discover the Broadway production, watch the 1958 film or somehow revisit the 2006 opera. Although West was really commenting on disillusionment with Depression-era America, the dye was cast for single women everywhere. If you really decipher the story, however, it says more about our newspaperman’s frailty than anything.
Old Maid. The nickname was first—then came the card game. It’s a Victorian-era game for two to eight players that includes an element of bluffing. (We love bluffing.) The “old maid” itself is the card that is pulled from the deck at the beginning of the game. Whoever has the old maid’s match loses because the card is “unmatchable.” If you think about it, though, the old maid is actually a power card. Sure, it leads to loss, but that’s still power.
Spinster. The term originally identified women who spun wool and made their own wages. They were generally single without children. During the Elizabethan era, the term grew to indicate a woman or girl of marriageable age who was unwilling or unable to marry and unwilling or unable to have children. Obviously, empowerment didn’t exist in Elizabethan times because what could be more empowering than a woman who controls her own finances?
Bachelorette. Popularized by the often-unsavory pre-wedding girls’ night out and reality TV, the term is primarily an American term for a mature, unmarried woman. And thanks to TV, we can now add the adjectives “whiny,” “back-stabbing” and “shallow.” The more proper word, it turns out, would be bacheloress, since -ess is the standard English suffix denoting a female subject, while -ette is a French-origin diminutive suffix, indicating that the subject is smaller and is of feminine gender. Either way, some object because of the implication that women are in some way lesser than a bachelor.
What’s more, in Canada, a bachelorette is a small version of a “bachelor” pad, “an apartment with only one large room serving as a bedroom and living room plus a separate bathroom.” In New York City, we call this a studio, so does that mean a bachelorette is an efficiency? Let’s take back bachelorette and raise it to studio status, as in, “Shall we retire to my bachelorette for a night cap?”