Women without men after 1918

[George Armstrong Custer]

Review in today's Sunday Times suggests this is an interesting look at a subject often mentioned in passing, but little explored in depth.

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

By Virginia Nicholson

Reviewed by John Carey

The slaughter of a generation of young men in the first world war left a generation of young women without their normal chance of marriage and motherhood. Their fate was already apparent before the war ended. In 1917, the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls stood up before the assembled sixth form and broke the news: “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry.” Her estimate, a former pupil later recorded, proved exactly right. What this generation of women made of their diminished lives, and how the rest of the population regarded them, are the questions that Virginia Nicholson’s pioneering book confronts.

The answer to the second question is – with astonishing spite, resentment and lack of sympathy. When the 1921 census revealed that women outnumbered men by almost 2m, it unleashed a frenzy of vituperation. “The superfluous women,” proclaimed the Daily Mail, “are a disaster to the human race.” They were labelled “limpets” and “bread-snatchers” for taking jobs from demobbed soldiers. They were reviled for forming “unwholesome female friendships” and mocked for lavishing their stifled affection on cats and lapdogs. Sexual psychologists pronounced them unnatural, and Oswald Mosley found them “distressing”. A popular solution was that they should be exported to the colonies. Canada, it was pointed out, had an excess of male trappers and lumberjacks, and even Australia offered many “simple pleasures”.

When, desperate to fill the gap in their lives, they wrote for advice to women’s magazines, they met with heartless optimism (“Cheer up, dears”) or insulting tips on man-catching (“If you use a henna shampoo, don’t overdo it”). Self-help books, with titles such as Sex Philosophy for the Bachelor Girl and Live Alone and Like It, prattled on about taking up folk dancing, astrology or amateur dramatics. But for women whose men had died, the need was to find some way of appeasing their desire for love and their guilt at surviving. An advertisement in the Matrimonial Times read “Lady, fiancé killed, will gladly marry officer totally blinded or otherwise incapacitated by the war.”

Nicholson’s book centres, however, on women who refused to be overwhelmed by grief and struck out in new directions. One of her heroines is Gertrude Caton-Thompson, the distinguished archeologist. The love of her life, a hussar officer, had been killed, and, like many of the bereaved, she felt at first that it was a treachery to him even to breathe and eat. But after the war she enrolled for classes at University College London, learnt Arabic and studied African prehistory. She braved leopards, fleas, fevers, swamps and crocodiles to excavate Neolithic sites in Malta, South Africa, Arabia and Egypt – where she camped out in a tomb with a family of cobras. Other “superfluous women” whose stories Nicholson tells achieved eminence as explorers, entomologists, marine engineers, doctors, mountaineers and fashion models. Some devoted themselves to slum improvement or famine relief, or broke into what had been male preserves – as the first woman solicitor, the first woman director of a firm of stockbrokers, the first woman privy councillor and cabinet member, the first women vets, civil servants and architects. Meanwhile, women novelists shattered the old spinster stereotypes. Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie transformed the schoolmarm into a sexy elitist; Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes blossomed into a happy practising witch.

Most of these enterprising single women, Nicholson acknowledges, were from affluent middle-class families. But there were exceptions. Florence White, a Bradford mill-hand, became a leading political activist and the founder of the National Spinsters Pension Association. Gladys Aylward, a London parlour maid, saved up her wages and travelled on the Trans-Siberian railway to China, where, for 20 years, she worked as a missionary, tending lepers and caring for sick children. Less outstanding, but as heroic in their way, were the women who remained satisfied with little. By 1921, there were half a million female clerks (typists, lowly civil servants, secretaries) who lived in bedsits and spent their days clattering away at Remingtons. They earned 30 shillings a week, and lunched off a penny bun or a Marmite sandwich. Social historians have tended to pity them, but Nicholson, interviewing survivors, found them upbeat. They were all girls together and stayed friends for life. They enjoyed dancing at the Locarno or the Palais, walking in Kensington Gardens, and consuming wonderful bacon-and-eggs teas at Lyons Corner House. It was a brave new world – much better than slaving for a husband.

Other single women, with no particular talents beyond the ability to make children happy, found fulfilment as nannies, wheeling perambulators in London’s parks. Often the bonds they formed were closer than those the children formed with their parents, and lasted a lifetime. In 1921, a maiden aunt called Gertie Maclean, much in demand for taking nephews and nieces back and forth to school, decided to make aunthood professional and set up Universal Aunts in the back room of a bootmaker’s in Sloane Street. Soon her “Ladies of Irreproachable Background” were escorting children around London, organising trips abroad and doing other people’s shopping for everything “from a hairpin to a Moth aeroplane”.

Gertie, like the trailblazers in male professions, freed single women from dependence and contempt. Another liberator was Radclyffe Hall, the author of the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. Many single women had found happiness with members of their own sex, but the subject was deemed unmentionable until Hall came along.

Even Marie Stopes, renowned as a birth-control campaigner, proved hostile. The letters of women who wrote to her about their sexual feelings provide an extraordinary archive of ignorance, fear and unhappiness. Asked about lesbianism, Stopes replied firmly that it was a “disease”. Hall, by contrast, made it fashionable. When The Well was prosecuted as an obscene libel she appeared in court in a Spanish riding hat and long leather coat, and though her novel was condemned to be burnt, it became a clandestine bestseller. The centre of a galaxy of artistic and theatrical types, including Tallulah Bank-head and the cellist Gwen Farrar, Hall made it her mission that lesbians should never again be “driven back to their holes and corners”.

The women Nicholson celebrates changed our culture. They turned the Victorian spinster into the modern career woman. But, she believes, they were also different from modern women. Like anyone who has lived through a war, they had lower expectations of happiness and a stoicism and dignity that were all their own. Her book applauds the celebrities but does not forget the obscure. Beside Caton-Thompson she sets May Jones, who wrote her autobiography, in Biro, on scraps of coloured paper, when she was 85. She was a Welsh carpenter’s daughter and fell in love with Philip, a young Quaker intellectual, who went to France with an ambulance unit and was killed. “I knew then,” May wrote, “that I should die an old maid.” Then she added, in pencil, “I was only 20 years old.” The rest of the page is blank. It is moments such as this that make Singled Out so powerful and so inspiring.

SINGLED OUT: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicholson Viking £20 pp326

[Sue Light]

Thanks for posting this very in depth review - but if that senior mistress stands up one more time on this Forum, I think there could be a mutiny

There have already been a couple of threads on the book, which have been merged here:

 

We're all champing at the bit waiting to read it!

Sue

[George Armstrong Custer]

Sue Light said:

Thanks for posting this very in depth review - but if that senior mistress stands up one more time on this Forum, I think there could be a mutiny

There have already been a couple of threads on the book, which have been merged here:

 

We're all champing at the bit waiting to read it!

Sue

Oops! Not been on the forum in quite a while and had missed that - thanks for pointing it out, Sue. Good to see from the many comments on the other thread that this is a topic which many find interesting, as well as being one that's not been 'done to death' - unlike preliminary comment on the book! Maybe the mods could add the review posted by me to the merged thread.

ciao,

GAC

[bob lembke]

My father told me some stories on this topic from his life on post-war Germany. At one time he worked as a grain broker, and he was sent to work at a provincial town in the local branch. (Actually, he was charged with the task of observing the operation of the office for the central administration, as it was believed that the branch manager was stealing from the company, but they were not sure exactly how.)

He arrived in town on a morning train, and went from the station to the hotel, settled in, and then went to the office. After a while a group of women formed outside the office and started tossing pebbles at the windows. A teamster had to be sent out to close the shutters so that windows might be protected. My father found this most curious, and asked what the women wanted, and a female typist, hardly breaking her pace of pecking, gave a candid response that I will not repeat in mixed Pal company. Evidentally, a woman or two had been at the station, seeing if someone new had arrived at the town, and followed him to the hotel, and then to the office, when the force assembled.

I understand that sociologists have stated that there are measurable sociological effects observable when the "sex ratio" rises over 105. (The "sex ratio" is a demographic term, the number of women per 100 men in a specified age cohort.) I have also seen it stated that in a marriagable age range, there were as many as three women in Germany for each live, non-seriously disabled male in the post-war period. In a rural area like the farming town where the incident occurred, many women probably did not have the mobility of the remaining young men, many of whom probably migrated to large cities pursuing opportunities. (I think that the losses of males were about the same in France, a bit less in the UK.) My father's oral history includes a number of stories of surprising social behavior during and after the war. Before my father entered the Army he left his studies in construction engineering and went to a Rittergut (a noble estate) to work replacing the called-up reservists getting the harvest in, etc. I have a remarkable postcard he received at the front from the estate from a group of women who were having a weekend "hen party", evidentally they were drunk, to some degree; about eight women wrote notes to him. One announced that one of the women had had a "love child", there were several more or less racy references, including one startling (and accurate!) reference to my father's anatomy.

After the war my father returned to the estate and worked there a while as an administrator. I think his later life reflected some attitudes that he picked up in this socially extreme period.

Bob Lembke

[George Armstrong Custer]

What a fascinating glimpse into the social consequences of the wartime decimation of a nation's young men your father's reminiscences give, Bob - thanks for sharing them! That explicit postcard he received from the female estate workers is evidence for those who doubt that, contrary to Philip Larkin's assertion, sex for fun began long before 1963! And that rural town of sexually predatory women watching the station for the arrival of a man sounds like the basis for an interesting movie - the episode of them throwing pebbles at your father's window reminded me of the lines in a Warren Zevon song 'Poor, poor pitiful me, these young girls won't let me be....' But whilst the consequences as experienced by your father might lend themselves to a humourous treatment, the reality of why these women were in that situation, of course, was anything but frivolous or amusing. Another, less familiar, reminder that the consequences of war reach far beyond the carnage of the battlefield.

ciao,

GAC

[elaine s.]

This wasn't the whole picture though. I have been carrying out some research recently on Louise Hoare, cousin of the more famous Samuel. She joined the Red Cross and, after initial medical training, was appointed commandant of London 58 BRCS, before founding, in 1916, the Gerstley-Hoare Hospital for Officers at 53 Cadogan Square, London, with a wealthy friend Mrs. Adele Gerstley. Like many of her class, she returned, seemingly contentedly, to her former life in Norfolk where she worked for a number of charities before, as an octogenarian, writing a series of "Cromer Memories" for the Norfolk Chronicle. In WW2 she was a member of the WVS and in her diaries shows that she felt her voluntary work gave her status in peacetime as well as war. I found no evidence that she was dissatisfied with her life which bears out Vera Brittain's assertertion the many VADs, herself included, regarded war as an interruption to their lives , and whatever had happened to them, wanted to get on with their lives. A significant number of women, tasting the opportunity to have a career, put that uppermost in their lives, whatever the press might have said about their inadequacies as single women.

[SiegeGunner]

We've heard a lot about 'women without men' in the aftermath of the Great War, but I doubt whether the entire adult male population was married either, and there must have been many theoretically eligible men who did not form relationships after the War, whether because of injury, disfigurement, illness, or mental trauma. It is evident from family details on CWGC entries that many widows re-married within a few years of their husband's death (probably to men of a similar age), but it would also be interesting to know whether there was an increase in marriages where the wife was some years older than her husband. There must also have been some cases of women who were widowed in the Great War and then widowed again in WW2.