Farmer, Sharon. Froide eds. Singlewomen in the European Past University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. ISBN While, no doubt, many lesbians in history made their peace with the need to accommodate marriage and family life, when designing a character who has the freedom to refuse marriage to a man, it helps to know what social and economic options would have been possible or even normal within your setting.
There have been several excellent collections of papers and even more monographs on the topic of singlewomen, but I believe this was the first significant one to appear. Statistics and demographics can tell us where and when a woman or group of women living independently and unmarried would be reasonably common or even typical. But stories come from particularity. This article looks more anecdotally at how singlwomen were treated and described in medieval Paris: what occupations they might have, what living arrangements, what safety nets.
And sometimes in the midst of dry historic archives you find the inspiration for a story. Sometime in the mid to late 13th century, three women traveled together from Chaumont to Saint-Denis in Paris: Amelot and two unnamed friends. When they arrived, they went to the house of Marguerite of Rocigny, who they seem to have known before coming to Paris, looking for a place to live. Marguerite didn't have room but sent them to her neighbor Emmeline where they took up lodging, with Amelot and one of her companions sharing a bed.
Which would not in and of itself been considered sexual, please note. Shortly after arriving, Amelot suffered from a paralysis in one of her legs and assisted by her friends and by the two Parisian women, she repeatedly visited a holy shrine until she was cured. Doesn't that leave you wanting to construct a story around these women?
Such are the seeds of stories that this project hopes to call to attention. The actual demographics are hard to reconstruct see previous entry , in part because attitudes towards singlewomen affected how records were compiled. The belief that women should be "under men" led to ignoring those that weren't. Tax records didn't list wage-earners so entire classes of single employed women might be absent.
