Bachelorette (pronounced bach-uh-luh-ret or bach-luh-ret)
(1) An unmarried young woman.
(2) In Canada, a term for a small apartment suitable for a single man (ie can accommodate bed, fridge, TV & microwave).
1935: Some sources date the word from 1895 but it appears more likely bachelor-girl was first seen in 1888 and bachelorette is an American invention first noted in 1935. The construct was bachelor + ette. Bachelor (the alternative spellings have included bachelor, batcheler & batchelor) was from the Middle English bacheler, from the Anglo-Norman and Old French bacheler (modern French bachelier), from the Medieval Latin baccalārius & baccalāris. The ultimate source is murky and strangely, although Old French had bachelette (young girl) in the 1400s, it's something English seems never to have borrowed. Bachelor proved adaptable and in addition to the familiar modern sense of “a man socially & legally able to marry but as yet unmarried” it’s been used of (1) the lowest grade of degree proper awarded by universities and other tertiary institutes of education, (2) a knight who had no standard of his own, but fought under the standard of another in the field (obsolete), (3) among London tradesmen, a junior member not yet admitted to wear the livery or emblem of the guild (obsolete), (4) a kind of bass, an edible freshwater fish (Pomoxis annularis) of the southern US and (5), as Knight Bachelor, the oldest and now lowest grade of knighthood in the UK’s honors system (and not part of the hierarchy of the orders of chivalry). The –ette suffix was from the Middle English -ette, a borrowing from the Old French -ette, from the Latin -itta, the feminine form of -ittus. It was used to form nouns meaning a smaller form of something. Bachelorette is a noun; the noun plural is bachelorettes. Unfortunately, the noun bacheloretteness seems not to exist.
Once were spinsters
Neither bachelor-girl (1888) nor bachelorette (1935) can really be considered proto-feminist because neither replaced spinster; the latter merely re-defined as something applied to older un-married women; in the shifting hierarchy of misogyny, ageism prevailed. It may thus be thought casual, female-specific ageism, especially because older, un-married men remain described as bachelors even if centenarians. It’s not clear when spinster came to be thought of as disparaging and offensive but the usage certainly declined with rapidity after World War II and both it and bachelor have effectively been replaced with the gender-neutral single although in English common-law, the older forms lasted until 2005. There's another quirk. Middle French had the unrelated bachelette (young girl) which persists in the Modern French bachelière but that applies exclusively to students. In the narrow technical sense, still sometimes insisted upon in British circles, a more proper neologism would be bacheloress, since -ess is the usual English suffix denoting a female subject, while -ette is a French-origin diminutive suffix, traditionally used to describe something smaller in size. However, bachelorette was invented in the US where the -ette suffix can indicate a feminine version of a noun without implying a change in size. In these gender-conscious times, the -ess suffix is anyway falling into disuse due to attempts to neutralize professional terms. Except for historic references, it’s probably now obsolete and rejecting decadent Western ways, in China, females still unmarried by the age of 25 are classified as "leftover women".
Leftover women
Sheng nu (剩女; shèngnǚ), most often translated as "leftover women" is a phrase (usually considered derogatory), which describes Chinese women who remain unmarried by their late twenties. First promulgated by the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) as a promotion of government programmes, it’s been used in other countries but remains most associated with People's Republic of China (PRC). As a demographic phenomenon, it was once unexpected because the conjunction of the PRC's one-child policy and the disproportionate abortion of female foetuses had led to a distortion in the historic gender balance. Births in China since the one-child policy was introduced in 1979 have averaged 120 males for every 100 females compared to a global ratio of 103:107.
The term appears to have entered common-use in 2005-2006 and seems first to have appeared in the Chinese edition of Cosmopolitan. Unlike most of Cosmopolitan's editorial content, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took it seriously and instructed the ACWF (a kind of cross between the CWA (Country Women’s Association) and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army) to publish articles stigmatizing women still unwed by their late twenties, reminding them they have lost face. Borrowing from Maoist tradition (if not theory), the ACWF provided a useful analysis of the problem, concluding that while “pretty girls” didn’t need much education to find a rich partner, “average or ugly” ones who seek higher degrees thinking it will “increase their competitiveness” in the marriage market are delusional; all that happens is they become old “…like yellowed pearls." The rhetorical flourishes aside, they had a point. As the numbers of highly educated women rose, the numbers of potential husbands they found acceptable did not. What the distorted gender balance created by the one-child policy and the selective-sex abortion preferences had produced was an increasingly educated and middle-class female minority not impressed by a less schooled and more rural male majority.
“Leftover women” seemed the choice in print but on the internet, the punchier 3S or 3SW (Single, Seventies (referring to the then prominent 1970s birth cohort) and Stuck) was also used instead of sheng nu. There is an equivalent term for men, guang gun (bare branches (ie men who do not marry and thus do not add branches to the family tree)); shengnan (leftover men) does exist but is rare.
CCP demographers had expressed concerns about the social and economic implications of the one-child policy as early as the 1990s. In the new century, the policy was first selectively relaxed, then revised to permit additional children for those selected by the CCP as desirable breeders and, on 31 May 2021, at a meeting of the of the CCP Politburo, the three-child policy (三孩政策) was announced. The session, chaired by Xi Jinping (b 1953; CCP general secretary 2012- & PRC president 2013-), followed the release of the findings of the seventh national population census which showed the number of births in mainland China in 2020, at twelve million, would be the lowest since 1960, an indication of the demographic trend causing the ageing of the population. The Xinhua state news agency then announced the three child policy would be accompanied by supportive measures to “maintain China's advantage in human resources” but surveys suggested the section of the population the CCP would like to see produce three children per household were generally unwilling to have even two, the reason overwhelmingly the high cost of living in Chinese cities. The announcement on 26 July 2021 permitting Chinese couples to have any number of children was thus greeted by most with restrained enthusiasm.
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