Singled Out (Virginia Nicholson)
While many may think me odd for sitting down with a thick tome of social history for a little light reading, I couldn’t stop myself from wanting to read this interesting, well-researched book about Britain’s so-called surplus women, left without men to marry and love after World War I. In fact, I had to interlibrary loan the book, the Pikes Peak Library District being too backward and short-sighted to pick it up. (I don’t mean that, PPLD. Please don’t take away my heroin library card!)
“In 1921, the National Census had published. The figures were devastating … In England and Wales there were 19,803,022 females and only 18,082,220 males — a difference of a million and three-quarters. This was far worse than predicted. Already, since the end of the war, newspapers had been running scare headlines about ‘Our Surplus Girls’. By February 1920 the Manchester Evening News was running a report on Dr Murray Leslie’s alarming analysis of post-war demographics, in ‘Husband Hunting — Tragedy of England’s Million Surplus Women’. The Daily Mail caught the story, with ‘A Million Women Too Many — 1920 Husband Hunt’. But with the publication of the 1921 Census the figure doubled overnight, and the Mail’s proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, felt able to publicly refer to ‘Britain’s problem of two million superfluous women’. The phrase — with all its insinuating baggage — refused to go away.”
Much awaited, the book didn’t disappoint in the least with Nicholson’s mostly anecdotal tales of these “bach girls” (pronounced batch, as in bachelorette), surplus women, spinsters and old maids. Yes, there were a lot of negative titles for these unfortunate ladies, who not only had to experience their brothers, fiances and neighbors being killed in foreign lands, but also had to find a way to go through life without a mate — and often have society blame THEM for not following the traditional route of marriage and babies. There simply weren’t enough men to go around, so what was a girl to do? According to Nicholson, lots!
Surplus women studied at the best universities (where they could complete courses, but not receive degrees). They could get office jobs as clerks and secretaries (where they were paid a pittance compared to men doing the same jobs). They could fall into the guilt trap of taking care of aging, ailing relatives. They could set up house with a sister or a friend and become uncomfortably fond of their pets. They could go lesbian. They could go to the colonies in search of single men. They could live financially and emotionally meager existences. Some did, of course.
However, Singled Out chooses not to focus on what these women missed out on or the negative aspects of their spinsterhood. Instead, we learn about women who became stockbrokers, archaeologists, publishers, authors, diplomats. We meet women who took lovers, traveled the world, adopted children, devoted themselves to politics or public service. In fact, these single women transformed society in one short generation. Unable to ignore such a big population, the patriarchy was forced to relax. Women not only had careers and options and freedom, they were eventually accepted for having them. They got the vote. They got respect. They achieved things that it might have taken women a century to accomplish and changed Britain’s conception of women, setting the stage for the women’s rights movement/feminism of the next generation. According to Nicholson, many came to see being a wife and mother as the real cage, a boring existence they were glad to escape. (And some wives shared their opinion!)
And all because their future husbands were killed before they could ever meet.
Bittersweet and often touching, the stories of these women were fascinating reading, sad yet empowering. Singled Out (like Sin in the Second City or Dorothy Parker’s biography — Gee, am I a bit of a feminist, you think?) is the kind of non-fiction I can read all day, without the pressure of a classroom or a syllabus to MAKE me do it.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection
Book Reviews, Non-Fiction |