I'm Going for a Million Bucks_ was released in October. A very similar tale is told by the actress Shirley MacLaine in _Out on a Limb_ (1976). Like the "old maid" heroine of the novel, MacLaine, while in her mid-fifties, finds she is free to make the most of her sexuality, now that she is no longer married and has been "out of circulation for a long time" (p. 5). Now that her family has grown up and moved out of her home, and since she has always felt ambivalent toward men, MacLaine decides to "do" men: first, men younger than herself, with whom she is quite sexually active and in a couple of cases forges very lasting friendships; next, much older men who are in a different time zone and world from her own and whose "floral" presence alone in her life affords her pleasure. Not content with a casual or merely sexual interest in men, the protagonist of _Out on a Limb_ becomes an artist. As much in sexual liberation as as an art-making process, MacLaine and her friends "discover" that men can be "touched with paint as with a brush and a stick" and thus "loved." And she, by means of her paintings of mannequins, discovers a place for herself in art: "it seemed that finally a man had fallen into my life, and I'd been his model." With the help of her painting, "I was discovering a new relationship with the world" (MacLaine, p. 21). When one examines this account of the experience of the "old maid" who has never married, and with the help of our knowledge of female friendships among women in their thirties and forties, it becomes apparent that the "new relationship" MacLaine found with the world consisted of her sexual relationships with both men and women, as well as her creation of her own world as an artist, _not_ sexual liberation (and certainly not "full sex") from men. A somewhat similar situation is described by the protagonist in _Sexual Politics_. After the death of her husband, who had been her lover for many years, Joan Nestle, who has never married, begins a love affair with a woman. The affair is at once a love affair and sexual politics; from one perspective the "woman" is both the lover and her daughter. For Nestle, it is the daughter, not the lover, who has "finally found what she had always been looking for" in Nestle (p. 4), a loving, accepting woman. In another novel by a contemporary writer, Marjorie Rosen's _The_ _Anatomy Lesson_ (1977), a new love relationship, for the first time in her life, comes to the sixty-eight-year-old Jewish actress Celia Zinn. She has fallen in love with a woman, not a man, as she had been looking for. Zinn, despite the fact that she is "no longer young" and "hardly a girl" (p. 36), seems able to respond with freshness and energy to the new experience of a lesbian relationship. Although there are other books dealing with the experience of heterosexual women who have never married, most notably Joanne Woodward's _Never Say Die_ (1976), a much-discussed book by such a contemporary author, and Joan Didion's _Play It As It Lays_ (1970) – written twenty-one years earlier – I will focus on the novel by Marcia Schreiber, _The Redhead from the New World_ , since its theme is the "old maid" who has never married and who, moreover, not only falls in love but creates a self through her new love relationship. The novel was a selection for Oprah Winfrey's Book Club, was widely reviewed, and was called by a reviewer "a masterpiece of its genre" (Lax, pp. 8–9). _The Redhead_ is about a thirty-nine-year-old woman who came to this country from Europe as a young child with her parents. We are told she was "born without the gift of words" (p. 3), and there is no apparent reason for this but for the fact that she was brought up in Europe with little contact with Americans until she was fifteen years old. In _The Redhead_ it is her "dear friend" who teaches her "how to find words, how to be a person" (p. 2). She has an affair with a younger woman, and when the younger woman has her baby, Joan's relationship with her lover becomes one of mother and daughter. Despite the fact that the older woman is not Jewish and the younger woman is, there is the suggestion in the novel that the new relationship that will give Joan a sense of being in touch with the world might include Jewish tradition: I was trying to tell myself this woman was not in fact an alien, since she had married the baby's father, since she was in every way Jewish, since she herself had come to this country on a ship from Europe at the age of sixteen (p. 5). The fact that _The Redhead_ was a selection for the Book-of-the-Month Club's series "Best of the 1970s" further indicates that it has something to do with the experience of being a lesbian (in this case older than Joan), although Schreiber's own background does not give her any cause to identify herself with a lesbian existence. It is interesting to note, in addition, that while the female protagonists of contemporary novels of all kinds are, at least for their moment of identification, identified by means of their sexual or other relationship with a man, both Zinn and the older woman who is Joan's lover in the novel do not identify themselves with women and women only. They are both the subjects and the objects of what is described as "love," and this is the one positive, non-sexual, kind of relationship between two women they have had or have been able to enter into. And in both cases, because they are "old maids," they are not able to enter into full sexual or emotional intimacy with their lovers; the time that had once been theirs in which to do so is gone, perhaps lost forever. It is significant in this respect that women who have never married are described not only as "old maids," but as "old." Indeed, the phrase "old maid" is not applied only to older women but to young women as well. A review of _The Redhead_ in _The New York Times_ quotes the review's author saying that Joan Zinn is "an old maid at twenty-five." In "My Husband's Women," a contributor to _The New York Review of Books_ describes her own situation in the light of both the popular literature available on homosexuality and of the popular literature available on being an "old maid." It is clear that she views herself as "old" and thus "old maid," in part because of the fact that her sexuality has been suppressed and she does not make a sexual relationship for herself; she also sees herself as "old" because she has never married, just as the "old maid" is never married. Although she is certainly old enough to be a "spinster," since she has never married, it would seem she is at least twenty-six, perhaps twenty-seven; her marriage, "for all its happiness," took place during her freshman year in college. After years of struggling with her sexuality, she had had an affair with another woman and found that her sexual orientation had been confirmed. As a result, she and the other woman decided to become lovers. "We had never felt so happy, so contented, as in those few weeks of love and passion," she writes. "I knew that I had never been in love before... it had been an idyll" (p. 34). Yet at the same time she acknowledges that even now her attitude to her sexuality is ambivalent: "I felt both the excitement of the newness of it all and a kind of resentment that I didn't 'know' any men who would be so right, so necessary, so right for me. I wasn't sure what I wanted, or if I wanted anything at all" (pp. 34–35). There is no question but that this woman is aware of herself as sexually involved with a woman. What she does not seem to be aware of is that sexual relations between two women can be as intimate and deeply personal as sexual relations between men and women. It would be interesting to know what Joan Nestle or Joan Zinn felt was lacking in their sexual relations with their men. In addition, we might question why these two "old maids" are so unhappy with their sexual lives. It would seem that both women, in different ways, would be satisfied in a relationship with a man if they were able to find the kind of love and care, in their own words "acceptance" and "affection," from men that they crave. It would seem, then, that our novels and essays of the late sixties and early seventies offer a somewhat distorted account of what has happened to some women, often called "old maids," since the mid-nineteenth century: that in many cases these women have been "leftover women," but that this kind of identification is a convenient one which allows for a certain amount of simplification. While they see themselves as "old maids," they are not simply "old," nor are they, as the novels and