Singled Out
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Singled Out
By the same author
Among the Bohemians
Singled Out
How Two Million British Women Survived
Without Men after the First World War
virginia nicholson
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nicholson, Virginia.
Singled out : how two million British women survived without men after the First World War / Virginia Nicholson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-537822-1
1. World War, 1914–1918—Women—Great Britain.
2. War widows—Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century.
3. Single women—Great Britain—Social conditions—20th century.
4. World War, 1914–1918—Social aspects—Great Britain.
I. Title.
D639.W7N73 2008
306.81'53094109041—dc22
2008019971
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?
‘A world that doesn’t want me’
‘But who will give me my children?’
vi
Singled Out
Miss All-Alone in the classroom
A cause, a purpose and a passion
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
. –: the pitiless destruction of a generation of young men (Imperial War Museum) . Wartime munitions workers: in those same four years the female workforce increased by nearly a million (Imperial War Museum)
. New women on bicycles (from Ruth Adam,
A Woman’s Place
) . Winifred Holtby and other Somerville students in (from Marion Shaw,
The Clear Stream
)
. Margery Fry was Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, from to
(Courtesy The Principal and Fellows of Somerville College, Oxford) . and . Celebrating physical vigour, the Women’s League of Health and Beauty may not have done much to comfort men scarred and crippled by a remorseless conflict (
Top
, from Mary Turner,
The Women’s Century
;
bottom
, Imperial War Museum) . Richmal Crompton: ‘the last surviving example of the Victorian professional aunt’ (from Mary Cadogan,
Richmal Crompton – The Woman Behind William
) . Society belle Isie Russell-Stevenson (Courtesy Julian Fellowes) . Rani Cartwright, a celebrated catwalk model who described herself as ‘free range’ (Courtesy Rani Cartwright) . Joan Evans lost the man she loved in , and by the age of twenty-two had given up hope of marriage (from her autobiography,
Prelude and Fugue
) . Cicely Hamilton lived ‘like the traditional spinster, with a cat for company’
(from her autobiography,
Life Errant
) . With the help of Jessie Monroe and her dogs, Elizabeth Goudge learned to ‘deeply prize the blessings of a single life’ (from her autobiography,
The Joy of
the Snow
) . ‘Rose-coloured carpets were mine’; stockbroker Beatrice Gordon Holmes photographed in the s (from her autobiography,
In Love with Life
) viii
Singled Out
. The staff of the Electrical Association for Women honour their founder Caroline Haslett, awarded the DBE in June (Courtesy Institution of Engineering and Technology Archives)
. Career woman Bessie Webster chose to be photographed leaning against her Chairman’s Rolls Royce (Courtesy Isabel Raphael) . After thirty-seven attempts, Victoria Drummond passes her Chief Engineer’s exam (from Cherry Drummond,
The Remarkable Life of Victoria Drummond,
Marine Engineer
)
. ‘Gert and Daisy’: Elsie and Doris Waters (Getty Images) . ‘I thought a god was there’: Richard Aldington in (National Portrait Gallery) . Irene Rathbone, featured in a round-up of book reviews in the weekly
Everyman
, (British Library, Newspaper Library) .
Private View
() by Gladys Hynes. Unmistakable in the centre of the picture are Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge (from Michael Baker,
Our
Three Selves
) . A Universal Aunt (from Kate Herbert-Hunting,
Universal Aunts
) . Nannies in Hyde Park (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
. Mary Milne, Matron of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Her fiance´ was killed in the war (St Mary’s NHS Trust Archive) . In the s nursing was one of the few professions seen as respectable for decent young ladies (Hulton Archive/Getty Images) . After her mother’s death, Phyllis Bentley rediscovered a guiltless freedom (from her autobiography,
O Dreams, O Destinations
) . Rowena Cade, founder of the Minack Theatre, Cornwall (Courtesy Minack Theatre Trust)
. Winifred Haward and Louis Hodgkiss (from Winifred Haward’s autobiography,
Two Lives
) . ‘I would live my life over again’: lady’s maid Rose Harrison (from her autobiography,
My Life in Service
) . Post-war, women replenished the ranks of white-collar workers killed in the trenches (Courtesy Cadbury Schweppes Plc)
List of Illustrations
ix
. Shop assistants – in ninety per cent of women working in the retail sector were single (Mary Evans Picture Library) . Margery Perham with Masai warriors in Kenya, (Courtesy Tony Raine) . The archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson (from her autobiography,
Mixed
Memoirs
) . Women working in the laboratory at Girton College, Cambridge (Courtesy Girton College)
. Maude Royden in the pulpit (from Sheila Fletcher,
Maude Royden, a Life
) . Preacher, journalist and charity worker Rosamund Essex with her adopted son David (from her autobiography,
Woman in a Man’s World
) . Picnics and prayer meetings: members of the Christian Alliance of Women and Girls on holiday in Scarborough, (Courtesy Keychange Charity) . Campaigning for spinsters: on the right, Florence White (Courtesy West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford)
p. ‘Husband hunters’, caricature in
Strand Magazine
, Vol. , July–December
p. ‘The gorgon Aunt Jane with her maiden lady companion’, illustration in Hilaire Belloc,
Cautionary Tales
p. ‘The literate spinster’, caricature by Nicolas Bentley in Hilaire Belloc,
Cautionary Tales
p. ‘The superfluous woman: a holiday tragedy’, from
Punch
, August
p. Illustration to Daisy Ashford’s romance,
The Young Visiters
p. ‘To Meet the Shortage of Dancing Men’, from
Punch
, October
p. ‘Meeting and Mating’, illustration from
Punch
, December
p. Illustration from Doris Langley Moore,
The Technique of the Love Affair
p. Illustrated feature from
Weldon Ladies’ Journal
, September
p. Illustration in ‘Things That Make Me Grouse’,
Woman’s Life
, September
x
Singled Out
p. The Scholastic Woman as depicted by
Woman’s Weekly
, October
p. Illustration to an article on nursing in
What Shall I Be? A Book of Careers
, ed. Jocelyn Oliver,
p. Nanny and her charges, illustration in Noe¨l Streatfeild,
Ballet Shoes
,
p. Title page of Marie Stopes,
Married Love
, (Wellcome Institute Library) p. ‘Will You or Won’t You?’, illustration by Cipe´ Pineles in Marjorie Hillis,
Live Alone and Like It
,
p. ‘Falling in Love’, illustration from
Strand Magazine
, Vol. , July–December
p. ‘I Say, Isn’t Your Pipe a Bit Large?’, illustration from
Punch
, June
p. ‘Little City Girl All Alone’ as seen by
Woman’s Weekly
,
p. ‘William was left alone to escort Aunt Jane through the mazes of the land of pleasure’, illustration by Thomas Henry in Richmal Crompton,
William the
Fourth
,
p. Illustration to ‘Aviation – a career for girls’, in
What Shall I Be? A Book of
Careers
, ed. Jocelyn Oliver,
p. ‘Have
You
Discovered Electricity?’, an advertisement in
The Electrical Journal
of June
p. Classified advertisements targeting the female labour market in
Women’s
Employment
, January
The First World War deprived Britain of nearly three-quarters of a million soldiers, slaughtered on the Western Front and elsewhere. They were known as ‘the Flower of Europe’, ‘the Flowers of the Forest’, and ‘the Lost Generation’. Many of them left behind widows and orphans, but enormous numbers of these young men were unmarried when they died. Their deaths bereaved another generation: the thousands of women born, like them, between and , who unquestioningly believed marriage to be their birthright, only to have it snatched from them by four of the bloodiest years in human history.
Those women started to die off in the s and s, and now there are few left, but anyone today over the age of thirty or forty will remember them. In the s when the phenomenon first arose they were known collectively as the Surplus Women, and according to the Census there were one and three-quarter million of them. I remember as a child in suburban Leeds our neighbour was one of these spinsters. Miss Pease was diminutive and self-effacing; she lived a blamelessly meek and solitary existence in a humble stone terrace house with a cat, a cottage piano and an outside lavatory. Though you couldn’t pigeonhole them, these women were somehow both valiant and incongruous. Unasked questions hovered around them. Why didn’t they ever marry? Did they mind? Did they harbour secret sadness? What did they do about the lack of love in their lives, and the lack of sex? Did they care that they had never had children?
