Spinster Power: A reconceptualization of constituent power?

Picture Jane Austen’s unpersuaded Anne Elliot or even Charles Dickens’ Miss Havisham. The spinster is often understood as an unpleasant term for a woman of a certain age who has not married and does not have children. In contrast, the bachelors unmarried status gave him a carefree vibe, leaving him available for the roles of the active citizen. Nowadays, as a result of its negative connotations, spinster as a term is rarely used. And indeed, it would be vehemently rejected as a label by many unmarried women without children. Yet, as the spinster disrupts society’s expectations of marriage and motherhood, she subverts woman’s traditional position within modern constitutionalism as being part of the marriage contract that underpins the social contract (Ruth Rubio-Marin 2022). As a subversive figure, the spinster is being reclaimed and making a conceptual come-back. What would happen if we reimagined theories of constitutionalism with the spinster at the centre?

What future for a spinster?

In her theory of spinster ecology, Sarah Ensor positions the spinster as a figure that stands in contrast to both the contemporary anthropocentric environmentalist (or ecofuturist) concerned with the world’s inherited future and the queer (as constructed by Lee Edelman (2004)) who has ‘no future’. In Edelman’s critique, politics conceives of the future Child as paramount and as the ‘organizing principle of communal relations’ (Edelman 2004. 2). One of the problems with this focus on the Child is that it serves to exclude those that cannot or don’t reproduce, and the other is that it reproduces the status quo. Queer theory, through an assertion of anti-normativity, rejects this organizing logic of society and politics. Contemporary environmentalism is future-facing, with its emphasis on sustainability for the children to come, but for Edelman this is a politics of ‘reproductive futurism’ (Edelman 2004, 17), that should be refuted because it reproduces the same heteronormative status quo.

For Ensor, the reproductive ecofuturist and Edelman’s queer both valorise the future. Both approaches are still fixated on a future that is conceived as being out there, ‘at some point down the road’ and it is cognisable and can be acted upon (Ensor 2012, 412). The future for the ecofuturist will arrive (in generational waves of 25 years), and for Edelman it will be refuted or rejected. But as Ensor argues, ‘[v]ehement rejection is ultimately no less invested in futurity than is the process of wholehearted embrace’ (Ensor 2012, 412). In contrast, the spinster is ‘abstracted from time’ (Ensor 2012, 414). Indeed, famously, time for Miss Havisham has stopped (as the clocks in the house are set to twenty to nine; the precise moment in time she was jilted). Unlike the predictable future of the parent, in which their worldly goods and ways will be passed on to the next generation in a linear fashion, Ensor notes that the spinster’s ‘future proceeds far less predictably’ and has the potential for ‘unanticipated effects’ (419). In Ensor’s spinster ecology, ‘the question is not the future, yes or no, but the future, which and whose, where and when and how.’ (414)

For Ensor, the spinster offers a model of stewardship that is more impersonal because she is ‘not saving the planet for her own children’ (416-417). From this more impersonal starting point, a model of care that ‘allows distance [and] indirection’ (Ensor 2012, 410) can be envisioned. Now, Ensor would also argue that the spinster invokes an ‘aloofness to persist’ (410), which should not be read as the idea that somehow the spinster is indifferent to the horrors of climate change, war, famine, and other disasters facing the world, but rather instead this speaks to an approach to societal concepts of progress across time; the spinster rejects social norms of women’s development to wife and mother, and instead persists in the face of critique and derision.

The Spinster as Constituent Power-Holder

Beyond environmental debates, could the spinster intercept in constitutional discourse? She could, for example, be placed in contrast to the individual in liberal constitutional thought, who is often conceptualised as male, White, and autonomous. The cartesian man, capable of separating body and mind is (in theories of constitutionalism) the ideal constituent power holder. He is the Enlightenment individual hurtling towards a future of progress. The figure of the spinster centres a more relational subject and she negates these models of progress. In contrast to the male liberal subject, the spinster, as Ensor argues, slants relations, time and space.

Feminist scholars have sought to reimagine the constituent power holder by centring theories that draw on the experiences of women (Houghton and O’Donoghue). The ‘split subject’, for example, is proffered as a way of centring a more relational political person than the autonomous, bounded figure of the liberal man (Kristeva 1981). Centring the bounded male constituent gives rise to a fixed homogenous image of The People as the core of constituent power. For Julia Kristeva, the split subject draws on the idea that we are all born. In that radical moment of birth, one subject splits from another. As such, we are always relational and always part of a process of becoming. Applying these ideas to theories of constituent power, feminist scholars show how this problematises the construction of a fixed notion of The People.

The Spinster’s People

One of the potential limitations of the ‘split subject’ is its rootedness in Hannah Arendt’s theories of natality and birth. Whilst this challenges the individualistic construction of the constituent power holder in liberal constitutionalism, it can leave unaddressed the overly gendered conceptualisation of constitutional moments as birth (Arato 2016, 278) and relatedly the gendered notion of the feminine state as needing protection from the men (see O’Donoghue 2018). The spinster subverts this link to motherhood. She disrupts the image of a birth of The People. She is relational, as an aunt and as a sister, but never as mother, and as such she is the embodiment of non-linear relations. On a family tree – as Alexandra Hill (2014) points out – the lines between her and her future family members would not be vertical but instead they would be slanted or diagonal.

That said, even the spinster cannot fully negate the overly gendered imagery that looms heavy in discourse on constitutional change. For example, the spinster aunt – like Anne Elliot – might in days gone by be called upon to act as a midwife for family members and close women friends. But the spinster is evocative of the ‘complex networks of cause and effect that work not just vertically [as between parents and children] but horizontally and diagonally’ and crucially beyond heterofamilial relations (Hill 2014, 172). In subverting the heterofamilial dynamic, the spinster opens up new possibilities of forming collectives, through diverse assemblages of kinship. The People of spinster power spills over, and does not remain fixed, it takes in relations that transcend the borders of the traditional unit. In centring these diverse networks – and the multiplicity of relations – a spinster constituent power also sheds light on the (often overlooked) grassroots movements and networks that prefigure constitutional change.

The People of constituent power in modern constitutionalism are predicated on the assumption of a nuclear family, where pater performs citizenship in the public sphere and women remain in the home. Historically, for the wealthier spinster – those with familial wealth and resources – the public sphere might be accessible in a way that it was not for mothers and wives. History is replete with trailblazing childless spinsters who were free to burst into the public sphere. But this flags the issue of class, because the fear of spinsterdom – which underpins much of Austen’s classics, and in particular Mrs Bennett’s anxieties for her daughters – is the fear of financial ruin. To be a spinster was to be financially vulnerable. Here, spinster power offers two further provocations to theories of constituent power; to understand and analyse the material conditions that support the emergence of a constituency and the paradoxical idea of vulnerable power. If constituent power is usually conceptualised as a revolutionary force that overthrows the constitutional order, spinster power highlights the vulnerability of the embodied constituent power-holder (the very people on the streets, protesting in the squares or resisting in the privacy of their own homes, always at risk of being in the direct fire of the constituted powers).

The Child-less Constitution

Without being defined by her production of the next generation, the spinster is capable of invoking both a temporal trajectory that is longer than “generations” as well as being evocative of a more particularized and singular personal history (that is not directly “passed on”). In doing so, the spinster opens up questions about the constructs of time in constitutions. If ‘the image of the Child, not to be confused with the lived experiences of any historical children, serves to regulate political discourse’ (Edelman 2004, 11), what would it mean to have Childless constitutional politics?

Constitutions project an idea into the future – they are the assertion of one constituent power’s dreams over a future constituency – but they are also products of their own specific contexts, histories and times. Constitutions construct a social order that is maintained for the ‘child’; for Edelman, ‘however radical the means by which specific constituencies attempt to produce a more desirable social order, remains, at its core, conservative insofar as it works to affirm a structure, to authenticate social order, which it then intends to transmit to the future […]’ (2004, 2-3). Whilst some approach constituent power as an event in the past that then has a hold over the future, others understand constituent power as an ongoing source of power and source of legitimacy and accountability. For Ensor, the spinster through those diagonal lines on the family tree, ‘practices an avuncular form of stewardship, tending to the future without contributing directly to it’ (2012, 409). Adopting this approach, “spinster power” would reject the approach to constituent power that seeks to dictate the future. The spinster rejects the idea that a previous generation passes on the immutable constitution to the next.

But the spinster also reimagines the view that sees ongoing practices of constituent power, as this more iterative approach would need to be informed by the spinster’s “stewardship” role; not dictating to the future, not producing the future, nor foreclosing its potential, but rather tending to its potential and keeping open alternative possibilities and futures. For Ensor’s spinster, there is no ‘readily reachable’ nor ‘readily identifiable’ future (2012, 417); in subverting the “usual” path for women towards marriage and motherhood, the spinster’s future is rendered illegible. If spinster ecologists should be ‘attuned to these forms of variation, of nonlinearity, of illegibility that constitute the futures in which we already dwell’ (Ensor 2012, 419), perhaps the spinster constitutionalist must ask similar questions. In addition to ‘adjusting the scale of our gaze’ to move beyond ‘generational intervals’ (Ensor 2012, 419), a spinster constitutionalist might slant their gaze to take in the messy and entangled ways that (constitutional) pasts construct presents and futures. Positioned in this spinsterly ‘medial’ (some might say liminal) space, the constitutionalist can ask “whose future is being protected or projected and who is left outside?”.

‘There’s a spinster in the making’[1]

Captain Wentworth says he is in “[…] half agony, half hope” in his love letter to Anne Elliot in Austen’s Persuasion. But such a liminal position could equally be directed towards how the figure of the spinster navigates ideas of hope where there is no legible future against a backdrop of a past that is constructed as being a “failure”. The associated temporalities of the spinster – how she disrupts linear-inheritance-time and society’s projected timeline for women – offers a generative way of rethinking ideas of time and subjectivity in theories of constituent power. In centring the figure of the spinster, I’m not suggesting that all women’s experiences chime with the construction of famous spinsters in fiction nor that only spinsters be given the right to vote in referenda, rather that our theories of constitutionalism might have generated different ideas of the purpose of constitutions and what should be in them, as well as how constitutions should be written, rewritten, edited and changed, if rather than imagining a propertied man as the ideal constituent power-holder, we had started from the position of the spinster.

Ruth Houghton is a Senior Lecturer at Newcastle Law School. She specialises in feminist approaches to constitutionalism, international law, and global constitutionalism.

• With special thanks to Emily Jones for introducing me to Sarah Ensor’s work on spinster ecology. Thanks to Sylvia de Mars, Colin Murray, Henry Jones and Marina Velickovic for reading various drafts.

Arato, Andrew. 2016. Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Edelman, Lee. 2004. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham NC: Duke University Press.

Ensor, Sarah. 2012. ‘Spinster Ecology: Rachel Carson, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Nonreproductive Futurity’. American Literature 84(2): 409-435.

Hill, A. 2014. ‘The Chidless Woman as Failure; or, the “Spinster Aunt” as Provocation for the Future’. Women in German Yearbook 30: 164-174.

Houghton, R and Aoife O’Donoghue. 2026. ‘Feminist Approaches to Constituent Power’ in Peter Niesen, Lucia Rubinelli and Markus Patberg (eds), Oxford Handbook on Constituent Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kristeva, Julia, Alice Jardine and Harry Blake. 1981. ‘Women’s Time’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7: 13-35.

O’Donoghue, Aoife. 2018. ‘“The admixture of feminine weakness and susceptibility”: Gendered Personifications of the State in International Law’. Melbourne Journal of International Law 19(1): 227-258.

Rubio-Marín, Ruth. 2022. Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women’s Citizenship: A Struggle for Transformative Inclusion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[1] Mrs Bennet in the film Pride and Prejudice (2005) (NB this is not a version I have watched)