The apparent rise in the seventeenth century in the number of women who never married has interested many recent scholars. Amy Froide and Judith Bennett previously coedited an authoritative collection of essays about never- married women called Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, 1999). Together, they forged an academic insistence on the term “singlewomen” as it was used in the ordinary parlance of past eras. Never Married is the monograph resulting from Froide's own doctoral work on this subject.

Froide's subject is women in the urban economy, and she offers detailed studies of nonmarriers in Southampton, York, Bristol, and Oxford. Such never-married women constituted a third of Southampton's adult women in 1696. Into the eighteenth century their economic horizons and prospects seem to have widened. From the second half of the seventeenth century there was a significant rise in women's ability to trade, and we are taken furthest in our understanding of propertied women; yet Froide does not underestimate the restrictions in the lives of never-married women in terms of residency or employment. Furthermore, although singlewomen and widows are often placed together in works of women's history, Froide shows that their access to independence was altogether different. In Southampton, for example, the entry fee paid on a market stall by a singlewoman was markedly higher than that paid by men or widows. This raises the question that none of the scholars working on the subject seem to have been able to satisfactorily answer: why was not marrying a viable option for women in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? One answer for the upwardly aspiring family is, of course, that the single female relative could be a financial asset—and if she did not marry, her father or brother would not have to find a portion. Froide's research also adds to that recently undertaken by Judith Spicksley, Natasha Glaisyer, Anne Laurence, and several others on women's investment in the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century economy. These scholars have looked at investment across a range of formal institutions and less formal openings—in banks, trading companies, credit networks, and so forth. Froide's particular contribution is on women's role in municipal investment, in the corporations that governed the local politics and economies of English towns. By the eighteenth century, despite the acute limitations on women's political representation, there was a handful of singlewomen included in the prominent citizenry of York and Southampton, a situation that was unknown in such towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In Froide's hands, this subject reaches new heights of thoroughness and quality. She has formulated an entirely original way of looking at the early modern family but remains modest in drawing this out. Singlewomen had neither spouses nor children; their world of personal relationships would have placed far more emphasis on siblings and a wider kinship network. These bonds are shown by some canny research in probate records and burial place records. Never-married women tended to leave their estates to their sisters if they were alive; otherwise, the legacies went to nieces. When a significant proportion of women did not marry, as in late seventeenth-century Southampton, this could have amounted to a concentration of capital along the female line. Moreover, the book's implications amount to a subtle refutation of the universality of companionate marriage in the early modern period. At least for some women, not marrying meant not only deliberately sidestepping the patriarchal path that they were expected to follow but sidestepping it in a much more effective way than women were able to do in either earlier or later periods.