Word: spinsterhood
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Unmarried Woman: Aspects of Spinsterhood in Ante-Bellum New England--Lee Chambers--Schiller, associate professor of History, University of Colorado, Agassiz House...
...murder his captives but to humiliate them. He forces a haughty middle-class tourist (Lee Grant) to bare her breasts; he makes cruel fun of the diner's crippled owner (Pat Hingle); he tells a fat young waitress (Stephanie Faracy) that she is doomed forever to spinsterhood. By the time that Teddy departs, his victims have been stripped of their selfdelusions. Meanwhile, the audience has been treated to a headache-inducing avalanche of shouting matches and two-bit catharses...
...little ironies." The locale is St. Louis in the mid-'30s, though that means more in attitude than in geography. The plot is bare-bones simple. Dorothea (Shirley Knight) is a blonde schoolteacher who has read the handwriting on the blackboard. She is spooked by incipient spinsterhood. A recent brief liaison with the school principal, a flighty socialite named Ralph T. Ellis, has lodged the romantic hope in her mind that she is his intended. Bodey...
More problematical is the fratricide to which Constance Kent confessed in 1865. A plain girl evidently slated for spinsterhood, Constance had been blighted by a callous stepmother. At 16, Constance cut the throat of her 3½-year-old half brother with such violence that the head was nearly severed. She then stuffed the body into the family privy. When the judge passed the death sentence (later commuted to life), his voice choked with sobs, and a local paper reported that the jury and "the greater part of the assembly" wept over the severity of the verdict...