Spinster World War prevented many within a generation of women from experiencing romance and marriage, or having children. The image of the old spinster with a fading photo of her dead World War I soldier boyfriend on her fireplace mantel was common in films of the 1950s and 1960s. Likewise, in the American classic novel "Gone with the Wind" (1936) about the Civil War, numerous references are made to grieving fiancées, women who were "wanted, if not wed", and to the shortage of single, able-bodied (and thus "marriageable") men at war's end. In modern peacetime societies with wide opportunities for romance,
Doña Rosita the Spinster Doña Rosita the Spinster Doña Rosita the Spinster () is a period play by the 20th-century Spanish dramatist Federico García Lorca. It is subtitled "or The Language of the Flowers" and described as "a poem of 1900 Granada, divided into various gardens, with scenes of song and dance". It was written in 1935 and first performed in the same year. "The theme of the play", suggests Federico García Lorca, "is the passage of time" (which Lorca had developed in a different form in his experimental surrealist play "When Five Years Pass" in 1931). Doña Rosita is a young woman who