Saint Flora of Beaulieu

1309-1347

Feast Day: October 5

Patronage: the suicidal, depressed, abandoned, victims of betrayal, single laywomen, converts

Saint Flora of Beaulieu was born in France. As a teenager, she entered the Hospitallers Sisters of St. John of Jerusalem. She had many trials and hardships including being ridiculed and betrayed by her fellow religious sisters. Because of this, she suffered from depression yet kept the faith with fortitude. In spite of this, she experienced the gifts of levitation, the stigmata, and prophetic knowledge. She shows us the importance of forgiving our persecutors.

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)

The media's preoccupation with single women's miseries reared up suddenly in the mid-1980s. Between 1980 and 1982, as one study has noted, national magazines ran only five feature articles about single women; between 1983 and 1986, they ran fifty-three—and almost all were critical or pitying. (Only seven articles about single men ran in this same period.) The headlines spoke bleakly of THE SAD PLIGHT OF SINGLE WOMEN, THE TERMINALLY SINGLE WOMAN, and SINGLE SHOCK. To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.

The press contributed to single women's woes as much as it reported on them, by redefining single women's low social status as a personal defect. The media spoke ominously of single women's "growing isolation"—but it was an isolation that trend journalism helped create and enforce. In the '70s, the media's accounts featured photos and stories of real single women, generally in groups. In the '80s, the press offered drawings of fictional single women and tales of "composite" or "anonymous" single women—almost always depicted alone, hugging a tear-stained pillow, or gazing forlornly from a garret window. McCall's described the prototype this way: "She's the workaholic, who may enjoy an occasional dinner with friends but more likely spends most of her time alone in her apartment, where she nightly retreats as her own best friend."

Just as the press had ignored the social inequalities that cause career women to "burn out," it depoliticized the situation of single women. While '70s press reports had chipped away at the social stigma that hurt single women, the '80s media maintained, with the aid of pop psychologists, that single women's troubles were all self-generated. As a therapist maintained in the New York Times story on single women, "Women are in this situation because of neurotic conflicts." This therapist was even saying it about herself; she told the Times she had entered "intensive analysis" to cure herself of this singular distaff disorder.

The media's presentation of single women as mental patients is a well-worn backlash tradition. In the late Victorian press, single women were declared victims of "andromania" and "marriage dread." After briefly rehabilitating single women as sprightly "bachelor girls" in the early 1900s, the press condemned them to the mental ward once more for the duration of the Depression. In the '30s, Good Housekeeping conducted a poll of single career women that looked for signs of psychic distress. When the single women all said they were quite satisfied with their lives, the magazine inquired hopefully, "May not some of them have hidden a longing that hurt like a wound . . . as they bent above some crib and listened to the heavy sleeping breath that rhythmed from rosy lips?" And yet again in the '50s, a parade of psychoanalysts led by Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg, authors of the 1947 leading manual, Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, marched through the women's magazines, declaring single women "defeminized" and "deeply ill."

-Susan Faludi, Backlash: the Undeclared War Against American Women

I have one more bunch of photos after this 💕

Here's to the single women in their twenties and thirties and forties.

Here's to the single women who collapse on their sofas after work with their pets and smile while they drink a glass of wine and watch their favorite show.

Here's to the single women who travel every chance they get.

Here's to the single women who sew their own costumes for the Renaissance Fair and go with all of their girlfriends.

Here's to the single women with fifteen piercings who save up for a new tattoo every other month.

Here's to the single women who have overflowing bookshelves and messy cars and enough reusable bags to insulate a house.

Here's to the single women who drink too much sparkling water and diet soda, who buy the family sized bag of their favorite candy and smuggle it into the movie theater.

Here's to the single women who plan brunches and book clubs and movie nights just to have another excuse to get together and laugh for hours on end.

Here's to the single women who work two jobs and spend their days off doing laundry and cleaning their apartment.

Here's to the single women who blast music in their cars and dance around their kitchens with headphones in while they bake brownies instead of cooking dinner.

Here's to the single women budgeting every penny to pay for rent, groceries, and student loans, because they don't have a second income from a significant other.

Here's to the single women who have realized their sanity is more important than what society says they should be doing.

Here's to the teachers, the nurses, the minimum wage workers, and every profession in between where us single women are trying to make a living.

Don't listen to everyone telling you that you are doing it wrong. That your hobbies are frivolous or that you should be looking for a relationship or that you should have kids by now. Keep living your life. Buy the book. Take the trip. Lick the spoon. You don't need a romantic counterpart to live a fulfilled life. You've got this, babe.

From Wall St Journal article about single women in retirement:

The risk of running out of money in retirement rises for those with lower pay, longer lives or no partner.

Millions of single women wrestle with all three.

Women earn less than men on average during their working years and are more than twice as likely as men to leave the workforce for more than one year to care for children or aging parents, according to a survey of 5,261 Americans that Goldman Sachs  plans to release Monday.

This shortfall compounds in retirement. Social Security checks are 20% smaller for women who first claim at 62 to 64 years of age, compared with men the same age. 

Single women, in particular, have smaller 401(k) and IRA nest eggs. On average, single women between 55 and 64 have about $88,600 in retirement savings, compared with $136,685 for single men and $423,800 for married couples in the same age group, according to Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research.

The writing in this is so funny to me. The WSJ is describing how the current system fucks over women with children and additionally burdens all women, mothers or not, with unpaid endless eldercare as well as constantly having to deal with you know, sexism in the workplace in terms of ohhhh class room opportunities, hiring discrimination, various barriers to entry to higher paying and still-even-now-in-2024-considered-masculine-jobs, promotion discrimination and job security discrimination, without saying the words sexism, misogyny, and discrimination.

Women also tend to live longer, raising the projected total cost of retirement as they have to stretch their smaller savings over more years.

Despite these financial obstacles, single women find ways to pursue new ambitions in retirement, including launching businesses and traveling the world. They could have more time if their caregiving responsibilities have ended. With more freedom than many of their married counterparts, some women can make big changes without needing to compromise or negotiate. 

When the 1851 census revealed that of the population of 20 million people, 2.5 million women were single, and that women outnumbered men by half a million, it triggered misogynistic outrage.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

Single women headed households as independent widows, deserted wives, single mothers and spinsters, earning their own livings, often on the breadline in rural communities, but sometimes very successful in towns: especially in luxury goods and retail business, lending small amounts of money to familiar faces – trusted creditors.

"Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History" - Philippa Gregory

American women are already doing "4b" without fanfare

4B is a movement in south Korea where women refuse to marry, date, and have sex with men. They also refuse to have children and wear make up, heels, etc.

While american women haven't abandoned femininity, many women have taken themselves out of the dating market. Study after study shows fewer US women and men are having sex. A recent study came out showed many women are not even interested in dating.

Most articles on this phenomenon is quite alarmist and negative. But I think many women are looking at their life and the other women they know, and realize it is better to be single than date a man you either don't like or worse one who is abusive and sexists.

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I don’t get why some men think “you’re never gonna get a man or kids and you’re gonna have CATS!” is the sickest burn they could ever lob at a woman when she states a preference for being single and/or not having kids.

I mean, help me see the downside of this life. I have peace and quiet. I have more disposable income. I don’t have to clean up after anyone but myself. I can come and go as I please. I don’t have to be a 24/7 bangmaid in addition to working a full time job. And on top of that, I could have cats. That sounds like the ideal life to me. Are you jealous or something?

And before anyone says “but you’ll be so lonely without a man and kids,” I’m gonna stop you right there. A man and kids isn’t a sword and shield to defend against loneliness. In fact, they can make it worse if all they see you as is a free vending machine and you’re too exhausted from their demands to make any meaningful connections outside the house.

And really, how do they escalate from the "alone with cats" thing? "Oh hey, while you're at it, snuggle up on the couch in a blanket with a nice glass of wine and your favorite book! Maybe take a nice, long bath (gurl, SO relaxing!)"

"I'm insulting you by telling you to do things that sound super enjoyable!" I guess that's what happens when you're dealing with the kind of man who thinks a woman's ultimate fulfillment comes from heating up his chicken nuggets for him.

The pity reserved for single women may well conceal a bid to ward off the threat they represent. Witness the cliché of the "cat lady," where the pet is considered to fulfill unmet emotional needs. Journalist Nadia Daam develops this idea further in her book Comment ne pas devenir une fille à chat: l'art d'être célibataire sans sentir la croquette ("How not to become a cat lady: the art of being single without a whiff of Sheba"). In her show Je parle toute seule ("Talking to myself"), comedian Blanche Gardin describes how her friends advised her to get a cat—a sign, as she read it, that her situation was really desperate: "No one says, 'Get a hamster, they live two or three years, by then you'll have found someone.' No, what they propose is a twenty-year-long solution. I ask you!" Cats are, in fact, witches' favorite choice of "familiar spirit" —usually simply called their "familiar" —a supernatural creature who assists in their magical practice and allows them sometimes to change their appearance. In the original animated opening credits for the series Bewitched, Samantha turns into a cat and rubs against her husband's legs, before jumping into his arms and becoming her human self again. In Richard Quine's film Bell, Book and Candle (1958), the witch played by Kim Novak, who keeps a shop selling African art in New York, asks her Siamese cat Pyewacket—a classic name for a familiar—to bring her a man for Christmas. In 1233, a bull issued by Pope Gregory IX declared cats to be "the Devil's servants." Then, in 1484, Pope Innocent VIII ordered that all cats seen in the company of women be considered their familiars; these witches were to be burned along with their animals. The cats' extermination contributed to the growth of the rat population, so aggravating subsequent outbreaks of disease—which were blamed on witches . . . In 1893, Matilda Joslyn Gage remarked on the persistence of mistrust toward black cats, inherited from these earlier times, which translated into a substantially lower market value for their fur.

-Mona Chollet, In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women are Still on Trial

Last batch of photos of me in the lemon dress❤

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