Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful

The words of Edna Ferber — “Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.” — glimmer with irony, wisdom, and quiet rebellion. Spoken in an age when a woman’s worth was measured by her marriage, they capture both the pain of social judgment and the liberation that comes when one ceases to live by others’ expectations. Ferber, one of America’s most insightful authors and playwrights, understood the inner war faced by women of her time — torn between the desire for independence and the pressure to conform. Her words are not merely a jest; they are a song of surrender — not to defeat, but to freedom.

Edna Ferber, born in 1885, came of age in a world where women were expected to marry young or risk being labeled spinsters, a word whispered like a curse. Yet Ferber, who never married, rose to greatness through her pen. Her novels — So Big, Show Boat, and Giant — celebrated strong, self-made women who defied convention. She knew firsthand the loneliness that society imposed upon the unmarried woman, but she also knew the power that lay in solitude. When she likened being an old maid to death by drowning, she did so with characteristic wit — to suggest that while independence may first feel terrifying, once accepted, it becomes a delightful peace, a surrender to one’s own truth.

The struggle she speaks of is the struggle against judgment — the exhausting battle to meet expectations that were never one’s own. For many women of her era, to be unmarried was to live beneath a shadow, always asked, “Why not?” The world viewed such women as incomplete, pitiable, or strange. But Ferber turns this pity into power. She suggests that the agony lies only in the resistance — in the attempt to swim against the current of public opinion. Once one ceases to struggle, once one accepts her solitude as her sanctuary rather than her prison, the water becomes calm, and life, at last, becomes beautifully bearable.

Her words echo the ancient wisdom that peace is not found in control, but in acceptance. Like the Stoic philosophers of old, Ferber understood that freedom comes not from conquering the world’s opinion, but from ceasing to care about it. The drowning she describes is not the loss of life, but the death of vanity, of the false self that craves approval. When that false self dissolves, what remains is serenity — the quiet joy of one who lives according to her own will. The metaphor of drowning transforms into something holy: a baptism into independence.

History offers us many examples of souls who, like Ferber, found strength in the solitude that others mistook for misfortune. Jane Austen, who also never married, endured whispers of pity during her lifetime, yet through her solitude she gave the world the eternal treasures of Pride and Prejudice and Emma. Like Ferber, she found that when one ceases to fight society’s tide and instead turns inward, one’s inner world blossoms. Both women remind us that aloneness need not mean emptiness; it can be the soil in which greatness grows.

In Ferber’s time, her remark may have sounded sharp, even bitter — but beneath it lies a quiet triumph. The “delightful sensation” she speaks of is the lightness that comes when one no longer measures her value by companionship or convention. It is the laughter of the woman who has faced loneliness and discovered that it does not destroy her, but frees her. Like the sea that once frightened her, solitude becomes vast, alive, and full of hidden wonder.

So, my children, take this teaching to heart: struggle not against your own path. Whether you walk alone or beside another, do so without fear or apology. The world will always demand that you fit its mold — to marry when it says, to live as it decrees — but peace belongs to those who choose authenticity over acceptance. If the tide pulls you toward solitude, do not resist it. Let go, as Ferber did, and discover the delight of being wholly your own. For only when you cease to struggle against what is natural to your soul will you find what she found — that freedom, once feared, is the sweetest sensation of all.