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.