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Titus Pomponius Alabamus's avatar

I can't find the exact Lewis (maybe it was Chesterton) quote, but I remember reading in one of their books sometime back that we often love the idea of something without actually loving the something itself. We love the idea of the neighbor more than our actual neighbor. In so doing we can champion causes and feel good in thinking that championing or holding the moral opinion is the same as actually doing the moral thing. It would appear these single women (and to an extent single men) in lack of having something tangible to love, i.e., a spouse and children, try to fill the void that only arduous love can fill with the self-satisfactory and easily attained championing of what they perceive to be righteous causes. Without the boundaries which necessarily form from experience with arduous and real and selfless love, the causes these single women champion necessarily devolve into abstraction and grotesquery.

I don't think this negates the power of these types of women... one need look no further than all that was wrought by the spinster women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hell hath no fury like a Yankee spinster.

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zzz's avatar

“Boredom accounts for the almost invariable presence of spinsters and middle aged women at the birth of mass movements. Even in the case of Islam and the Nazi movement, which frowned upon feminine activity outside the home, we find women of a certain type playing an important role in the early stage of their development” -Eric Hoffer in The True Believer

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