Spinster focused on a single lost love, destined to go unmarried unless the lover returns. Tina Fey's portrayal of her character Liz Lemon, on the hit NBC series "30 Rock", exemplifies another classic spinster stereotype. Lemon, a 40-something single woman whose relationships never seem to work out, has unrealistically high expectations for a male partner: her dream husband is the archetypal "Astronaut Mike Dexter", and for much of the series her character is holding out on settling on a man until she can score an astronaut. Unpopped popcorn kernels have been dubbed "old maids" in popular slang, since like unmarried women
The Spinster and Her Enemies feminism hostile to sexual freedom. Jeffreys discusses the change in sexual attitudes that occurred in Britain between 1880 and 1930 from a feminist perspective, criticizing the idea that "the sexual puritanism of Victorian England gave way to the first sexual revolution of the twentieth century." She examines feminist involvement in the social purity movement in the 1880s and 1890s. She also discusses the physician Havelock Ellis, the poet Edward Carpenter, the psychiatrist Iwan Bloch, and the neuroanatomist Auguste Forel. "The Spinster and Her Enemies" was first published in 1985 by Pandora Press. "The Spinster and Her Enemies" received a positive