Singled Out

Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson (2008)

The 1921 Census in Great Britain revealed some 1.75 million “surplus women,” those left single because the men they might have married had been slaughtered on the battlefields of World War I. At a time when the only acceptable fate for a woman was marriage and child-raising, how did surplus women cope? In her fascinating, utterly compelling social history, Virginia Nicholson examines contemporary accounts, memoirs, biographies, advice manuals, novels, and personal memories to find out. Many women suffered poverty, loneliness, and social disapproval. But, Nicholson shows, many also found new opportunities for financial and personal independence—and happiness.

A woman’s destiny was to get married and have children. But after the war, there were simply not enough men to go around, and those remaining had their pick. If you were unlucky enough to be left on the shelf, that was it: no husband, no social status, no children, and often, penury. Working class jobs were grueling and underpaid. Middle- and upper-class women, who grew up assuming they’d be supported by their husbands (and learning little beyond water-colors and conversational Italian), found few opportunities for making money. Jobs were for men, at least when the soldiers returned from war.

British society offered some sympathy to surplus women, but also contempt. Despite the shortage of men, spinsters were assumed simply to have failed to attract a husband—and such a woman was a complete failure. Bereaved and lonely, unable to have love and sex without great risk, she was often mocked as a sour, frustrated, dried-up spinster.  She couldn’t win.

But she could cope. Nicholson discusses the many strategies such women adopted to combat loneliness in fulfilling ways, and quotes from contemporary diaries and memoirs to show that, often, these strategies worked well. For example, a woman who loved children could become a beloved nanny, often closer to her charges than their own parents. Single women could share digs and become lifelong friends (or sometimes more). They could pursue their own interests.

As the social landscape changed between the wars, determined women banged on the doors of politics, science, business, social work, and other professions. Nicholson draws from many autobiographies and memories to illuminate the lives of some pretty amazing women. Her variety of sources is wonderfully helpful in showing the spectrum of possibilities for single women. Especially open were the worlds of academia and Bohemia; women with intelligence, talent, and enough money to get by could live surprisingly independent, powerful lives, and did not at all regret missing out on housework and childcare. They drew their happiness from success.

“Surplus” women, Nicholson also suggests, often benefited society rather than becoming the drain on it that contemporary commenters feared. Many well-educated single women of the time became superb teachers for the next generation, probably better teachers than most students get today. It was a golden age for social work and the caring professions, which drew in unmarried women in great numbers, and they had enormous influence. Many women’s lives were greatly diminished by not having men to marry, but, Nicholson shows, many found unexpected freedom and power for the same reason.

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Although they don’t detract from the book’s useful and riveting account, a few problems exist. Nicholson doesn’t spell out some unfamiliar acronyms like VAD, PEN, and ICI. The first is for  Voluntary Aid Detachment, the field nursing service; the second, I think but couldn’t determine for sure, is PEN International, an NGO that’s originally short for Poets, Essayists, and Novelists; as for ICI, where Bessie Webster worked—even Google couldn’t help me there. I found the occasional infelicity, like the women who “had sex with men, and in some cases children.”

When Nicholson turns to literary sources for illustration, her remarks can be ill-considered. For example, she’s most unfair to Dorothy L. Sayers, citing her indelible  “image of the academic spinster . . . as a round-shouldered woman in a yellow djibbah,” but ignoring the wonderful Miss Climpson, whose energy and intelligence are highly valuable to Lord Peter, and he knows it. And Miss Marple as any kind of failure? She’s a woman to be reckoned with, just like Miss Climpson. If they get away with a lot because society writes them off as old maids, that’s part of the point. And Nicholson quite misunderstands the typist in The Waste Land, calling her “pretentious.”

However, Nicholson does discuss many contemporary novels now little known today and that reveal much about conditions for women of the time. I do wish she’d included Winifred Watson’s Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day (1938), which would have been a perfect illustration of the hard-up lady’s companion type who finds happiness in an unusual, creative way, partly through breaking class boundaries—this would have fit in well with her argument. But that’s a quibble. Her bibliography for those wishing further research is highly useful. This was a terrific, eminently readable, valuable book.

Charles Dickens: A Life by Claire Tomalin

Works on Charles Dickens are sprouting up like weeds lately, no doubt at least in part because of the upcoming bicentennial of his birth on Feb. 2, 2012. Claire Tomalin and Robert Douglas-Fairhurst have both just published new biographies, and these follow several recent ones: Peter Ackroyd's 1991 Dickens and Michael Slater's 2009 Charles Dickens. I read the Ackroyd, which was strange in places, but valuable and evocative of the man's complexities.

I've just read Tomalin's 2011 Charles Dickens: A Life, and the first most obvious question is, why a new biography at all? This book cries out for an author's introduction explaining what's new about her outlook, her evidence, her sources, or whatever. But none is given. (Luckily for readers, the New York Times reviewer David Gates nicely summarizes the Dickens biography situation in his review "Being Charles Dickens."

What I found most valuable was Tomalin's attention towards Catherine Dickens and Ellan Ternan. The biographies I've read before don't give much sense of poor Catherine, calling her "shadowy" or "passive" and having done with it. Tomalin shows how hard it was to stand up to Dickens, and shows Catherine's good nature--her kind, pleasant nature, her love of puns, her fortitude in all the difficult Victorian travel they did.

Tomalin has written before about Ellen Ternan in Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. She provides a good deal of strong evidence to show how deeply they were involved, even (perhaps; Tomalin makes it seem likely) having a baby who died in infancy. This relationship is something other biographies tend to skim over, and Ackroyd even maintains that Dickens and Ternan probably never consummated their relationship. Anyone weighing the evidence will want to read Tomalin's account.

Tomalin's scholarship, while admirable, can become tiresome. Dickens traveled frequently, and Tomalin seemingly records every train trip, every ferry crossing. Details of the publishing process, copyright law, and so on were less than riveting.

Tomalin obviously loves Dickens's writing, and she also provides useful, thoughtful summaries of his works. While she never looks away from his considerable faults, she understands what makes him irresistible to readers. "He left a trail like a meteor, and everyone finds their own version of Charles Dickens." And perhaps that helps explain why all the biographies, 142 years after his death.

Sandman Slim by Richard Kadrey (2009)

 The first punk-noir novel I can think of, Sandman Slim imagines a world where some people have magical abilities, and James Stark’s have been honed by 11 years fighting off demons in Hell. Now escaped, Stark has some serious scores to settle with the ex-friends who put him there. The story plays out in a traditional noir setting, Los Angeles, but here it’s a magician gang fight being battled out among L.A.’s gritty alleyways and expensive private clubs.

Lots of this novel is great fun and I want to read the next one. But I had a lot of trouble with the hero (we never learn why his other name is Sandman Slim). He’s as much of a haughty snob  as are the rich fucks he despises; it’s just a different set of sensibilities, punk-approved. Chuck Taylors instead of Ferragamos. Motocross jackets instead of London tailoring. Girls with green hair and tattoos instead of being body-sculpted and waxed.

But Stark occasionally shows some insight, and I had to remind myself that he’s stuck emotionally at age 19, when he entered Hell and then spent 11 years being abused by demons: not a great developer of character. And he has a moral compass in his lost girlfriend Alice, reminding himself that Alice wouldn’t like it if he did this or that. Also, it’s again traditionally noir for the hero to be compromised in some way. He does seem somewhat changed at the end, more aware of his own faults and ready to be less angry at the world.

Infelicities in the book include lots and lots of typos, such as three or four instances of “bought” for “brought.” Three references to the Beverly Hillbillies to indicate lameness—really? Nothing more up to date than a show that’s been off the air since 1971? Also, I felt the gladiatorial arena in Hell perhaps owed something to Kage Baker’s similar theme in her 2008 novel The House of the Stag, where the hero similarly fights almost impossible battles with hellish opponents to please his owner.

In all: Fun, not perfect, and I’ll read the next one.

Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything by Lynda Barry

Drawn + Quarterly Press has been publishing Lynda Barry, my favorite cartoonist, for some years. Now they're putting out collections of her early work, some of it long out of print, in Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything, comics from 1978-81.

I used to have all Barry's books beginning with Girls and Boys, but sold most of book collection when I was out of money in the early 90s. Getting these back again, plus a lot of her weekly strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, is a real treat.

Also a treat is Barry's illustrated introduction where she talks about how her drawing style developed. I especially liked her distinction between "sweet" (like Peter Max) and "bitter" (like Robert Crumb) and how she needed to reach a bittersweet style for better expressing what was true to her.

You can see her line changing drastically through the book, yet always retaining something that's Lynda Barry. Her characters also change quite a bit: early on, a lot more grownups and adult romantic difficulties than her current work, which is almost entirely from a childhood point of view. Re-reading these strips made me wish she'd explore more grownup themes in her work.

Not all of her early work is especially strong, and I was baffled by such repeated themes as the six-inch-tall person on the breakfast table. Some of it is just "Huh?" If you're a devoted Barry reader, like me, the book will be most valuable for how it shows the development of a great artist.

A quibble: The publishers chose a rectangular format that fits with the recent Barry books on writing and drawing, but since her comics are square, this means a lot of wasted space and squeezed-in panels with tiny writing.