By Virginia Nicholson

Hardback : £20.00
ISBN : 9780670915644
Size : 235 x 159mm
Pages : 336
Published : 23 Aug 2007 Viking Adult

Synopsis [Scroll down for Reviews]
The First World War deprived Britain of three-quarters of a million soldiers, with as many more incapacitated. In 1919 a generation of women who unquestioningly believed marriage to be their birthright discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round. The press ran alarming stories about the ‘Problem of the Surplus Women – Two Million who can never become Wives...’ But behind the headlines were thousands of brave, emancipated individuals forced by a tragedy of historic proportions to rethink their entire futures.

Tracing their fates, Virginia Nicholson shows how the single woman of the inter-war decades had to stop depending on men for her income, her identity and her happiness. Some just endured, others challenged the conventions, fought the system and found fulfilment. Singled Out pays homage to this remarkable generation of women who were changed by war, and in their turn helped change society.

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September 2007

DAY OF THE SPINSTER

By Jane Ridley

Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War

By Virginia Nicholson (Viking 293pp £20)

 In 1917 the Headmistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls made a chilling announcement to her sixth form: 'I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever marry ... Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can.' She was right: 700,000 British soldiers died in the First World War, and over a million and a half were wounded. Ghastly and unthinkable though their fate was, it has been endlessly commemorated with Remembrance days, with war memorials and a literature which still continues to grow. The women who were left behind are forgotten. The Census of 1921 revealed a surplus of one and three-quarter million women over men. These Surplus Women form the subject of Virginia Nicholson's book. She succeeds triumphantly in telling the human story behind the demographic statistic.

Being condemned to a lifetime of spinsterhood was especially hard for women who had been programmed by their Victorian mothers to seek fulfilment through men, love, marriage and children. Society had never been kind to spinsters. Victorian maiden aunts with wispy buns and ruined hopes were caricatured and despised as frumps who had failed to attract a man. The Surplus Women in the wake of WWI could hardly be blamed for their spinster state, but nonetheless, as Nicholson shows, they were punished for it. The male minority, many of them damaged or mutilated by war, felt threatened by the surplus of healthy women, and sneered at bossy, warped, cat-loving virgins with thick legs. Misogynists waxed hysterical about man-hating, sexually abnormal viragos with 'busy little brains'.

Some women were defiant. 'I was born to be a spinster, and by God, I'm going to spin,' declared Winifred Holtby, who is one of the heroes of Nicholson's book. Addressing the issue head on, she wrote an essay, 'Are Spinsters Frustrated?', and pronounced that sex wasn't the only thing that women wanted. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark created an interwar spinster teacher who is the antithesis of the maiden aunt - glamorous, cultured and subversive, she enlivens Eng Lit classes with reminiscences of her dead lover, killed in action.

The reality was often grim, as women failed to take control of their lives. Nicholson quotes women confessing to a terrible sense of time passing, of the clock ticking, of regret for chances missed and fears of dying an unhappy, shrivelled virgin. There was something desperate about the postwar women who put on their war paint and went out dancing, often making do with female partners because there were not enough men to go round.

Women had worked hard during the war to keep the economy going, but when the 'khaki boys' came home, they found themselves on the scrap heap. Surplus Women were forced onto the labour market to survive, but they were expected to do jobs that didn't compete with men. The 'business girl' or shorthand typist, demure and neat, posed no threat to patriarchy, tinkling away on her Remington and taking dictation from the boss; but, as Nicholson shows, business girls lived grey half-lives, shivering in mean lodging houses and saving up for sardines on toast in dingy tearooms. Many Surplus Women became school mistresses, locked into spinsterhood by their profession, as they lost their jobs if they married - which in any case was unlikely, as schoolmarms were famously unattractive, and (in defiance surely of Darwinian theory) men are put off by clever women: even today, women's marriage prospects apparently drop 40 per cent for every 16-point increase of IQ.

The realities of living without sex in the early twentieth century, says Nicholson, are impossible to disinter - DON'T ASK. Nonetheless, she has a damn good go at it, quoting anguished letters written to sex counsellor Marie Stopes by single women riddled with guilt about masturbation. The story is not all gloom and doom though. If the war destroyed the certainty of marriage, it destroyed Victorian morality too. Newly liberated women had affairs, used contraception, enjoyed sex without marriage. 'To be white as the driven snow at thirty is just damn silly,' declared Angela du Maurier. Women came out as lesbians too; championed by Radclyffe Hall, they cropped their hair and smoked jewelled pipes.

If the golden generation of boys killed in the Great War had survived, Nicholson suggests, the odds are that their women would have gone on much as before, becoming wives and mothers. The classically educated empire-builders who were slaughtered in the trenches showed little sign of sponsoring women's liberation. Demographic disaster forced social change. The Surplus Women included spectacular success stories, such as the colonial historian Marjory Perham or the archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson, both of whom found freedom in travel. Gertrude Maclean, spinster aunt, 'a rock and a sport', founded Universal Aunts, the agency which became the lifestyle consultants of the 1920s. My favourite is Caroline Haslett, spinster engineer, who liberated women from household drudgery by pioneering the application of electricity to washing and dusting and cleaning. Nicholson's conclusion is upbeat. In spite of the loneliness and the heartache, the Surplus Women were the first generation to prove that women can survive without men.

Virginia Nicholson has found a wonderful subject. The virtue of her book is that she doesn't attempt to generalise or theorise or preach, but allows the women to speak for themselves. Taking the life stories of a sample of women, she skilfully weaves them into her narrative, and the result is not an arid social history but a book packed with human interest, elegant and funny and a compelling read. Today, more women are choosing to remain single than ever before. The difference is that they are in control of their lives, in a way that their great-grandmothers of ninety years ago most certainly were not.

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 London ~~ Sunday September 2, 2007

The invisible women

Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out chronicles the women left alone and vilified after the First World War, says Hilary Spurling

Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
by Virginia Nicholson
Viking £20, pp312

'MY, you have put on flesh,' my Irish granny used to say, assessing my chances on the marriage market like a farmer with an unpromising pig to sell. 'Stand up when your father comes into the room!' was another of her favourite sayings, hissed through her teeth and accompanied by a sharp poke in the ribs. My husband's grandmother was less brutal but almost as discouraging. 'It's the best thing you've ever done or ever will do,' she said when my first child was born, 'even though it's a girl.'

These were standard attitudes in their day. Both women were realists. Both had married off daughters against cutthroat competition between the two world wars, both saw failure to find a husband as ultimate, irremediable defeat. Wartime arithmetic if anything reinforced their sexual self-contempt. 'Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry,' the senior mistress of Bournemouth Girls' High School told her sixth form in 1917: 'Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed.'

Her frankness was rare, but her facts were indisputable. The mass graves of 1914-18 produced a generation of unwanted and largely uneducated women written off as useless before they even grew up. Their predicament was shameful in their own eyes and other people's. The term 'spinster' came to mean, in Virginia Nicholson's accurate definition, 'shabby, sallow, petty, sour and queer'.

Some stayed at home to be mocked, patronised and exploited by their families. Those who found employment were branded by the press as bloodsuckers and bread-snatchers. 'The superfluous women are a disaster to the human race,' said the Daily Mail in 1921.

Three-quarters of them lost their jobs to returning soldiers as soon as the war ended. Ninety per cent of wives stopped work. Teaching hospitals ceased to accept women. Married women had no serious prospect of promotion in the few careers - domestic service, nursing, teaching - not staffed exclusively by men. Offices refused to employ them. Teachers who married had to resign. I was taught in the aftermath of the Second World War by women still living in the Fifties under a monastic rule of enforced celibacy. Some counted it a price worth paying for professional independence and ambition. The very few successful career women I ever met, all of them phenomenally tough and inevitably single, issued regular warnings, both explicit and implicit, that marriage was a deathtrap and children at best a menace.

Nicholson documents their testimony with wretched accounts of unpaid domestic drudgery at the lower end of the social scale ('My life ... consisted of being penned in a kitchen nine feet square'). Working-class women, struggling to feed a family on starvation wages of less than £2 a week, grew prematurely old from the back-breaking labour of basic housework, such as humping coal, kindling fires, heating water, scrubbing floors and washing clothes. Middle-class women might have servants, but relatively few had husbands because proportionately far more officers had been killed than ordinary soldiers.

In theory, women were liberated by the war - 'It found them serfs and left them free,' wrote Millicent Fawcett - but in practice, waitresses, shopgirls, clerks and typists worked for 10 or 12 hours a day, ill-paid and malnourished ('30 bob a week and never enough to eat'), with no security, no pensions and no money to spend on medication, let alone hairdos or holidays. As for sex, even Nicholson's indefatigable research very nearly breaks down at this point: 'Don't ask.'

Statistics proved hard to come by. A survey of single women in the US in the Thirties found that 440 out of 500 were virgins. The only comparable documentary source in the UK is the correspondence with single women conducted by Marie Stopes and preserved at the Wellcome Institute in London, 'an extraordinary archive of fear, ignorance, doubt and unhappiness'. Appalled by the urgency of the problem, painfully conscious of its intractability, Stopes could only recommend brisk walks, wholesome occupation or - reluctantly and with sinister warnings - masturbation.

One of the saddest stories in this book comes from an unpublished memoir by Miss Amy Langley, a dressmaker sustained all her life by the memory of a single brief encounter at the age of 20 with an Australian penfriend on leave from the Front in 1916. She wore a lavender check dress, baked him a pie and took him for a bus-ride before he left to rejoin his regiment in Flanders and shortly afterwards stopped writing. She waited more than 60 years before she fell in love again at the age of 82 with a fellow inmate of her carehome: 'Never in my life had anyone called me "Dear", not in my home, never! This was the first emotional moment in my life.'

Its happy ending is the only unusual thing about Miss Langley's story. Stoical endurance seems to have been the almost invariable response to emotional attrition, financial hardship and moral stigma. The two heroines of this book are pragmatic rather than ideological. One was Florence White, whose lifelong campaign for spinsters' right to pensions ended in victory, and was immortalised in verse: 'God made each maid a husband/ But men on earth must fight/ So just in case there aren't enough,/ He made Miss Florence White.'

The other was an engineer called Caroline Haslett, who dreamed in the early Twenties of an impossible futuristic Britain where every household would be 'cleaned, dusted, washed, heated, lit and fed' by electricity. In a poll of imaginary appliances organised by young Haslett for her campaigning paper, Woman Engineer, the winner was a dishwasher and the runner-up a thermostat oven. For 32 years, she ran the Electrical Association for Women, dying long before it was finally disbanded in 1986, having fully achieved all of its aims.

By that time, the subjects of this book were dying off, too. The feminist movement, on an unstoppable, irreversible, triumphalist roll, had no time for spinster aunts and great-aunts who had asked and got so little. The price they paid in what Doris Lessing called unlived lives and unborn children was a grim reminder of the longterm realities underlying my granny's hard-line approach.

Militant feminist agendas overlooked and underplayed the corrosive bitterness and guilt of an earlier generation of women who sacrificed their lives for nothing, only to find, unlike their male contemporaries, that society held them to blame. For all practical purposes, they were sentenced to be turned to stone and buried alive like the clay warriors of China more than 2,000 years ago. It is high time to dig them up, salute their memory and listen to their sad and uncomplaining voices unmuffled at last in Nicholson's brave, humane and honest book.