Slate, which ran its initial inquiry in 2005, was prompted to revisit the subject by the passage of the new Dudley, Massachusetts law that prohibits residents from owning more than three cats - which was prompted in turn by the out of control cat population of a resident C.L. Of course, one could argue that no self-respecting cat lady (or, for that matter, mere cat fancier) is going to heed any such injunction - either through obliviousness (the stereotypical cat lady isn't exactly glued to local news) or on animal-loving principle. So one wonders how effective such a law might prove.

Of course, as Slate's Daniel Engber points out, most of those whom we consider "cat ladies" are not mere animal-lovers, but those whose compulsion to collect and shelter has led to neglect, and often squalor - circumstances of which the perpetrators seen unaware. People toss the term around, but there's a difference between a woman with cats and someone who's a clinical animal hoarder.

Animal hoarding has also been viewed as an addiction, like compulsive gambling or alcoholism, or as a form of dementia. Though hoarders are usually quite old, many recall a history of neglect or abuse by their parents. Obsessive-compulsive disorder provides another psychiatric model; about a quarter of OCD patients exhibit object-hoarding behavior. No one knows why women are more susceptible than men. One member of the Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium points out that women are also more likely to become veterinarians and less likely to perform acts of animal cruelty.

As the sympathetic new documentary Cat Ladies explains the phenomenon,"It's not the number of cats that defines someone as a 'cat lady', but rather their attachment, or non-attachment, to human beings. They create a world with their cats in which they are accepted and in control - a world where they ultimately have value." Of course, even from the preview, there seem to be a number of different types represented - and not everyone's motivations seem just the same. That's why legislation seems problematic; there are people who can take in a lot of animals and give them good lives. And then there's hoarding, which is a real concern for the Humane Society and the ASPCA.

And while it's clearly a phenomenon more common to women - no one knows why - it's obvious that the tendency has been conflated with witch mythology in ways we don't even question. You don't need to watch the Cat People movies (although you should, because they're fantastic) to know that felines have evil historical associations - and have often been regarded as the familiars of the sort of lone woman who was an easy target in Salem. Take this (which mythology I've long heard, but can't verify or cite to my satisfaction, so take it as lore)

A very early record of the linking together of witches and cats concerns the ceremony of Cat Wednesday which took place in the city of Metz in Northern France. This involved hundreds of cats being burnt alive in the belief that they were witches in disguise. Papal might was brought down upon witches and cats in the 13th century when horrible acts of atrocity were carried out on humans and felines. Black cats in particular were believed to be agents of the devil, especially if owned by an elderly woman.

Clearly, our cultural aversion goes deeper than we know. Of course, when it comes to the Rat Ladies - well, that's another matter. And another documentary.

What's The Deal With "Cat Ladies"? [Slate]

Cat Ladies Documentary

Hot Docs 2009 Trailers: CAT LADIES [YouTube]
Behind Closed Doors: The Horrors of Animal Hoarding [Humane Society]
Witches And Cats [Best-Cat]

It seems the mysterious Jane Doe was one Audrey Mountford, 49. As the Independent tells it, shortly before her disappearance, she'd been "jilted" by the fiance for whom she'd recently converted to Catholicism. When she disappeared, her family assumed she was traveling to assuage her heartbreak. Now, investigators believe she instead fled to the remote cave, where she lived for two years before probably dying of exposure. Scraps of letters found on her person suggest she'd planned on doing some painting in the wilderness. Contrary to all descriptions, there's no indication that she clung to anything wedding-related, whatever the motivation for her flight.

Her nephew, now 65, described her as

an adventurous person who had travelled to Africa and New Zealand. Somewhat "flighty", she would "breeze in and out" of their lives. "I know that being left by a man would have affected her very badly. She was a dreamer and a bit unrealistic, so for her to go and live in a cave is something I would believe suited her personality."

It also seems that none of her family ever bothered to report her disappearance, figuring she'd show up when she felt like it.

Perhaps it's merely a coincidence, but today we also ran across a rather appalling Australian government memo from 1968, via BoingBoing, right around the time the "flighty," "jilted spinster" would have disappeared. In it, the Director of the Trade Commission explains why women are ineligible for postings. "A woman could not stay young and attractive for ever, and later on could well become a problem...a spinster lady can, and very often does, turn into something of a battleaxe with the passing years. A man usually mellows." He goes on to explain that, as such, "I've already begun to regretfully decline my daughter's requests for education and social opportunities, explaining to her that "she could not be regarded as a long-term investment in the same sense as we regard" her brother." Again, this is merely coincidental, but it does point to a distinct attitude towards unmarried ladies of the time: and it somehow seems less bizarre that this woman, and her family, should regard her "jilting," and the prospect of life alone, as a tragedy. In some ways, the story's reminiscent of that of Connie Converse, the folk singer whose disappearance (again, around this same period) seems to have been accepted as the natural consequence of being, presumably, lonely, unmarried, and unfulfilled. When invisible to society, it seems, some people preferred to make it a reality.

Australia's Miss Havisham: The Jilted Lover Who Spent Her Dying Days In A Cave [Independent]
Australian Govt Memo, 1968: Women Become "Spinster Battle Axes;" "Men Usually Mellow" [BoingBoing]
Related: Converse All-Star

Miss Marple was reportedly Agatha Christie's favorite creation — based partially upon her grandmother - and it's said that the author conjured her iconic gentlewoman detective when a director changed a character in a Christie adaptation from a genteel spinster to a beautiful young ingenue. Christie clearly wanted someone different to get her due — and made sure that she did, in twelve novels over 40 years. Miss Marple made her debut in a 1927 issue of The Royal Magazine , and in 1930 got her first starring vehicle with Murder at the Vicarage.

Jane Marple is, to the casual observer, the prototypical British spinster, a tweed-sporting, genteel old lady who's spent her life in the village of St. Mary Mead, devoting herself to her garden, her knitting, and local gossip. And that's the whole point of the character: she is destined to be underestimated. What people dismiss as a tiresome busybody (in early incarnations) and, later, as a muddle-headed woman past her prime, is in fact sharp and intuitive, unafraid of violence and uncowed by authority figures. What people dismiss as a limited life experience in a small village has in fact given Miss Marple an unusual insight into the human condition, and her long memory for village trivia often provides invaluable in cracking cases that baffle the pros.

Writes Kate Mosse on the character's appeal,

Educated and knowledgeable, moral and clear-sighted, Jane Marple is solitary but happy in her own company; she is independent but with a circle of devoted admirers - her nephew, Raymond West, and his wife; old friends such as Dolly Bantry; in later years, grateful clients and, first introduced in The Mirror Crack'd From Side To Side, a live-in companion, Cherry. Miss Marple is a certain sort of English Everywoman, enduring and timeless.

While Marple's status in pop-culture is unquestioned (just check out Facebook) and her many dramatic incarnations have won even more fans, the character is also of literary significance: not only was she a benchmark in mystery fiction - the Underestimated Amateur, if you will — but she was an interesting flip of the familiar gentleman detective trope. The appeal of the novels is obvious, and there's nothing more comforting than returning to the timeless Saint Mary Mead — but as much as anything, Miss Marple is
a testament to the importance of never underestimating — and how useful it can be when people do.

Dial M for Marple [TimesUK]

Related: Old Maids And Spinsters: The Best Female Role Models A Teen Girl Can Have

According to Dorothy Wickenden's story in this week's New Yorker, Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff were both twenty-nine, both well-to-do Smith graduates, and both "uninspired" by their suitors in Auburn, New York, when they responded to a search for schoolteachers in remote Elkhead, Colorado. The mastermind behind this search, cattle rancher Farrington Carpenter, had a secret agenda — luring educated East Coast women to Elkhead to marry local men. It worked — Rosamond married local mine supervisor Bob Perry and, forty years later, Carpenter himself — but this marriage scheme doesn't negate the impact that the women had on Elkhead, or that the town had on them.

Elkhead was a mountain town seventeen miles from the nearest train station, and its school was a single room serving the families of homesteaders in the outlying areas. Dorothy taught the younger children, ten boys and a single girl, while Rosamond instructed the older kids. One former student of Rosamond's wrote, "I don't believe there was ever a community that was affected more by two people than we were by those two girls." Another, who went on to become Missouri's chief forester, wrote, "their impact was immediate, but above all lasting." And although graduation rates in the late teens and early twenties were extremely poor, all six of the ninth-graders Rosamond taught went on to either college or professional school.

But what Elkhead offered Rosamond and Dorothy was perhaps greater than what they offered it. Before they left for Colorado, the women's lives were circumscribed by the expectations of their class and time. "No young lady in our town had ever been hired by anybody," Dorothy wrote. And both women, says Wickenden, "were considered by friends and family to be hopeless spinsters." In Elkhead, they learned that, far from hopeless, they were capable of freeing a horse from a snowbank (wearing snowshoes all the while), cracking the ice in a bucket to give it a drink, and then taking a swig of whiskey each to restore their own strength. Though both later married and had children (Dorothy Woodruff was Wickenden's grandmother), they seem like the kind of spinsters Sadie would approve of. And though their tenure in Elkhead only lasted a year, their story remains inspiring: two women whom no one could imagine even having jobs traveled across the country, made their mark on a group of students (without ever having taught before), and learned to "rough it" along with men.

Dorothy Woodruff's husband died in 1930, leaving her to face the Great Depression with four children. Rather than despairing, she took typing classes and pitched in to help flood victims. "She took life by the throat and dealt with it," says her daughter. Her time in Elkhead may well have prepared her for the hardships of her later life. Now that hardship is upon all of us in one way or another, it's comforting to read about women who learned to do without some of what Dorothy called "the frills, which fill up so much of our lives at home" and were strengthened rather than demoralized by it.

Roughing It [New Yorker]

Earlier: Old Maids And Spinsters: The Best Female Role Models A Teen Girl Can Have

According to Liz Hoggard in the Evening Standard, today's fortysomething men won't settle for "sex and great conversation" — they "want poetry and the meeting of true minds" and "dream of being married to The One." It's hardly news that some men want these things, and Hoggard's title — "Men are the new lovelorn spinsters" — ignores the fact that middle-aged singlehood is still way more acceptable for men than for women. Still, it's nice to see men being called "picky" for once. [Evening Standard]

She writes:

I suppose I could Internet date, but the very idea exhausts me. It feels like applying for a job I'm not sure I want. And it's so unfair, so hopelessly based on superficial things that I could weep. Cruise the online personals — just scan the 40- and 50-something entries — and you'll see that even men built like Danny DeVito demand youth and beauty. They say they're seeking "slender" or "slim" women at least 10 years their junior. Do I really need to pay a monthly fee for this sort of rejection?

And of her last love, she says:

[H]e eventually married a woman some 15 years his junior. I went to their wedding. She is lovely, but they divorced within a couple of years. "She has no sense of humor," he complained. "She's so earnest about her career, and she's not all that enthusiastic in the sack."

"Well, what did you expect?" I asked him when he called to tell me they were through.

"I expected somebody like you, only younger," he admitted. We haven't spoken since.

Has Internet dating further calcified male demands, creating a marketplace where only young, thin women need apply? Naylor acknowledges that's not the whole story: "plenty of zaftig women have husbands and lovers who adore them." So does Naylor's penchant for unavailable men predispose her to the kind of douches who find what they want, then look for a younger model, then act shocked when she's not what they were shopping for? Sure, that guy's divorced now, but he's not writing articles about his "sell-by date" and his cats.

Of course it's possible to have mixed feelings about being alone, to relish your independence while sometimes craving for companionship. But I still wish Naylor came off as less of a sad sack and more of a proud spinster. Or more accurately, I wish a woman could live alone with her cats and her TV remote and her "discreet" vibrator without feeling like a reject. Is that too much to ask?

15 Years Without Knocking Boots [Salon]

Earlier: Old Maids And Spinsters: The Best Female Role Models A Teen Girl Can Have

• Happy New Year, little Jewzebels. It's starting off pretty rocky, but we guided you through the rough shoals of the VP debates with a steady hand and a drunken heart.
• This Palin supporter sounded like she was drunk with her garbled endorsement of the moosetest with the mostest.
• Times are tough for this country, and for weepy Prodge Run contestants.
• You know who always has a stiff upper lip and a lot of fun? "Spinsters."
• Thankfully we can reminisce fondly about the days before we knew what a mortgage was. Check out the Jezebel school pictures and remember this: the older they are, the cuter they ain't.
• You know what else ain't cute? Elisabeth Hasselbeck when she gets all yelly.

• Even less cute: a mother and son who do it. That's like, the inverse of cute. That's etuc.
• You know, some people think Michael Cera and his Earnest Fumbling Manchildren are pretty adorable, but we beg to differ.
• We might be irked by EFMs, but they're still more enlightened than what ladies had to put up with in the days of Joan Holloway.
• But you know, it's Friday, and guess what? WEEKEND JEZEBEL is here! So kick back, relax, and enjoy the new content.

The article's author, Gena Haskett, is initially put off by the batterie of "sexually repressed librarians" she encounters in her search: a raft of African Queens and Now Voyagers ripe for sexual rehabilitation; tragically lonely Miss Brills; the comical eccentrics of Jane Austen novels. She finds a little redemption in the form of Jill Clayburgh's sexy divorcee choosing independence in An Unmarried Woman or the solitary protagonist of Rachel, Rachel. That's swell, but to my way of thinking, these women aren't really spinsters. And I don't think you even need to break away from that essentially negative archetype to find positive inspiration. I do fully believe that the single woman is a historically thorny issue for people, and filmmakers, writers and generalizers alike, when they can't quickly transform their lives via heroes ex machinae, slot them into 'sinister witch', 'terrorized old maid' or bitter, sexually-repressed misanthrope, essentially tragic and fearful. The thing is, though, the spinster is too complicated — and too awesome ‚ an archetype to dismiss like that.

To me, a spinster isn't just an unmarried lady. Rather, I've always thought of her as a woman who, for whatever reason, chose not to define herself through a man, in a time when that was de rigeur. Maybe that's a reductive definition, but I think a substantiated one. Sure, sometimes there were circumstances for spinsters' single states: Barbara Pym would have liked to have married in her youth, and Marianne Moore was essentially chained to an ailing mother. But the point is that women like these ended up forging lives and identities that were rich, full, and completely independent. In this sorority I place such literary lionesses as Eudora Welty, Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, the forementioned Stevie Smith, Pym and Moore. It's surely no coincidence that these women had the time, the serenity and the inclination to turn out some of the richest poetry and prose in the English-speaking cannon. There is certainly an asexuality and a smallness of scale to the work of, say, Barbara Pym, but it is this which gives it its charm and richness and, dare I say it, a distinctive Spinster Lit flavor not found in the work of women who took a different path. Her characters, too, are often single women building small, rich lives; while there's sometimes a possibility of romance in her work, it's almost uniformly incidental to a character's lifestyle or essential makeup.

Film gives us such stalwarts as Lillian Gish's heroic child-defender in Night of the Hunter, Marilla Cuthbert, or weird as it sounds, the fairy godmothers in A Sleeping Beauty — benevolent characters who, while maybe secondary, manage to provide a singular tartness and goodness which, whether people realize it or not, is as essential to our cultural view of the spinster as is the bitter recluse. In a sense, it's an archetype with the energy to be sensible — you could argue there's a backhanded misogyny to that, the notion that asexuality is a sort of pathway to wisdom — but one which is every bit as enduring as the negative stereotypes discussed. Was I a teenage goofball? Obviously. But the impulse towards the spinster paradigm was in no way an unwholesome one, and it's a badge anyone can still claim and wear with pride. And no, you can't have my email address.

In Search of Cinematic Spinsters and Unmarried Women [Blogher]

• Eating chocolate is more of a turn-on than kissing, says a new study. Bullshit! Everyone remembers their first kiss! Who remembers their first Hersheys? [DailyTelegraph]
• The Bush Administration's expensive abstinence-only programs were colossal failures. Expensive? Failures? Bush Administration? Definitely a theme continuing on here. [CNN]
• Girl Power: Making spinsters out of millions of girls and young women. [Feministing]
• More and more health providers in the UK are refusing to perform abortions. [BBC]