“The time was when an old maid was a blighted being,” explained Good Housekeeping magazine in 1887. The suspicion was that unmarried meant unwanted.

“How utterly devoid of tenderness and of every amiable sensation must that female be who never felt at any period of her life the desire to engage in the duties or to share the delights of the state to which all human beings are invited by the voice of Nature and reason!” (“Whether all single ladies endorse that sentiment or not, I cannot tell,” he admitted, then doubled down and pronounced “the happiest and most contented Old Maids” as those who took “unaffected delight in contemplating the domestic joy of their married sisters.”) The male author of A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Essay on Old Maids (1785 in three volumes) termed himself “A Friend of the Sisterhood” but nevertheless reviled those who might remain single of their own accord. Simply put, an unmarried woman was an aberration in eras when marriage and motherhood were considered woman’s “natural” state, and one to which all must aspire. The old maid was “the most calamitous Creature in nature” (1673), “a cursed thing” (1683).

The term goes back at least as far as the sixteenth century that it is what the Oxford English Dictionary calls “frequently derogatory” is confirmed by a quick review of the list of usages that follows. The game first appeared around 1890, but terrifying portrayals of old maids had been around long before then. If, like me, you grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, you may have played the game with a special deck of cards, perhaps one that featured a particularly ugly rendition of the Old Maid. Whoever gets stuck with the odd card out is the loser trying to stick other players with the same is where the fun comes in. The classic children’s card game Old Maid is a simple one based on matching pairs. One in a series of posts, about forgotten fads and figures, by historian and HILOBROW friend Lynn Peril.

History of the old maids card game