Authors: Virginia Nicholson
– ‘happy, natural things’. The psychologist she goes to see forces her to
face the awful truth; she is a ‘sex-starved spinster’. Wade’s bleak and sadistic book ends with its heroine in tears, staring at her lined face and dumpy figure in the mirror, recognising that life has failed her: ‘. . . it was too late. No matter the agility of her spirit, she saw that she was too old. She had missed something that could never now be claimed on this side of death.’
It seemed as if the more women sought freedom and self-determination
the more they must be suppressed. Nowhere is the anger and insecurity of
men faced with independent women more evident than in D. H. Lawrence’s
punitive novella
The Fox
(). Here, Jill and Nellie live lovingly and tranquilly together on their farm, until the appearance of a returning soldier who wreaks havoc in their lives. Characteristically, a red mist seems to descend over Lawrence at the thought of two women managing self— sufficiently without male mastery. They must not be allowed their contentment, and this violent and bitter little story tells how the soldier forces Nellie to marry him and kills her friend Jill.
Fiction even managed to present sexually liberated single women as the
losers. All too often the s heroine is independent but brash, bitter and indifferent, ‘hard as nails’ or, like the women in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste
Land
, pretentious and cold: When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone,
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand,
And puts a record on the gramophone.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
More than ever, society as a whole, not just men, held single women
responsible for their own predicament. Their detractors included women
like journalist and novelist Charlotte Haldane, who took it upon herself to
attack spinsters for fanaticism, crankiness and deviancy. She herself was
married, and might be excused some prejudices. But it took an unusually
sadistic turn of mind for a spinster to censure other spinsters for not being married, which was exactly what the virulent anti-feminist Miss Charlotte Cowdroy did in her book
Wasted Womanhood
(). Wasted, as she explained, because so many women were perverted away from their natural
destiny of marriage and motherhood by Gallichan’s tyrannical spinster
teachers and their false intellectual creed. Wasted – on university, on the
vote, on independence and on the hockey field. Miss Cowdroy’s book is a
bitter lament for the army of women who ‘deliberately’ put aside marriage
in favour of being ‘clever’ and earning their living. She grieves at the
spectacle of ‘beautiful young girls . . . [who] gradually wither as the years pass them by and they lose their bloom . . .’
A few years ago such girls would have had mind and heart satisfied with the
multitudinous duties of home and little ones. Instead of withering, their cheeks would have bloomed anew under the kisses of their children . . .
And, according to Miss Cowdroy (whose own cheeks, one trusts, were
round and rosy), they had only themselves to blame. Frustrated, unhappy
and queer: Britain had two million barren, dowdy, pathetic women, growing
old alone.
*
Not surprisingly, with such a stereotypical reflection staring at them from
the mirror, single women found it hard to avoid presenting an equally
stereotypical image. Cicely Hamilton, a powerful advocate of women’s
rights and equality, and a later friend of Winifred Holtby’s, started out
persuaded by her family that being attractive to the opposite sex was essential if she was not to be a failure. But as time passed and other activities left no space in her life for marriage, she relapsed gratefully into being an Aunt Jane – living alone with just her cat Peterkin for company, like a witch.
No, it was not how she had envisaged her life turning out, but it suited her and she had no regrets.
The war destroyed novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett’s private and family life.
Five of her sisters and half-sisters survived the war; none of them married.
Beset by personal loss and moral confusion, the almost exaggeratedly
Singled Out
‘spinsterish’ appearance and habits which Ivy rigidly adopted for the rest of her life seem to have been in some way a reaction to sorrow and doubt.
She was painstakingly correct in her dress and in the way she arranged her
hair, yet she remained stuck in a time warp, holding on to past certainties.
Her skirt lengths never changed; the eccentric coiffure was from a bygone
era. She looked like one of her own fictional governesses.
Enid Starkie was of another type. Wild, intense and Irish, she was an
outsider whose fragmented, emotional character made it hard for her to
make relationships. She adored men and it was a permanent sadness to
this brilliant French scholar that lasting love eluded her. However, she
lacked the self-effacing qualities expected of the average meek spinster,
adopting instead an uninhibited and eccentric appearance that startled her
colleagues in the senior common rooms of Oxford. Actressy, with her
vividly dyed hair and chalk-white face powder, Enid loved to make an
entrance. She bought cheap, colourful clothes off-the-peg, and there was
something of the mad bag lady about her, decked out in blue trousers,
scarlet coat, quantities of imitation costume jewellery and broken-down
umbrellas.
No doubt about it, single women were conspicuous in the s and s.
Conspicuous by their numbers, by their manner and appearance, and by
what they represented, statistics were on their side. Today, singles are
increasingly prominent and powerful: since single-occupant households have risen per cent. But in the s they were a lost generation, an ever-present reminder of what the country had suffered in the war, and
many of the Surplus Women had become impatient with knitting in the
chimney corner – in other words, they were a problem, a talking point.
Society could no longer afford to ignore or marginalise them.
Fortunately there were plenty of writers more sympathetic to the situation of unmarried women than Gallichan, Ludovici, Cowdroy and their like. Among these were feminist doctors, psychologists and preachers – like
Maude Royden, who published
Sex and Commonsense
in , Dame Mary Scharlieb, author of
The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems
(), Esther Harding, who wrote
The Way of All Women: A Psychological Interpretation
(), and Laura Hutton, who wrote
The Single Woman and Her Emotional
Problems
(). The authors of these works spoke to women who, like the Muriels and Sarahs in Winifred Holtby’s novels, were full of despair and darkness. They acknowledged the ‘bitter grief ’ of loss, and the ‘dull, deadly
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
days when one realises at last that youth has passed without granting
fulfilment of any of one’s dreams’, and tried to offer consolation along with solutions.
Though opinions varied among these pundits, the gist of all of them was
that single women need not sit in chill rooms waiting for a knock at the
door, that society was much to blame for the common perception of the
spinster, and that there were practical remedies for their problems. Their
books redressed the balance towards insight and support. Though they
adopted the vocabulary of sublimation and repression, they were also full
of sympathy and ready advice.
Maude Royden – a remarkable orator and preacher – had taken up the
suffragettes’ cause before the war; in the s she was quick to speak
again on behalf of women who had been left single as a result. Royden’s
Christianity gave her pity for their plight a compassionate intensity; she
sided adamantly with the individual, refusing to belittle the suffering of
women who endured enforced celibacy. ‘The idea that they . . . do not
suffer if their sex instincts are repressed or starved is a convenient but most cruel illusion,’ she wrote, and she pointed to the evidence of repression: thwarted emotions expended on poodles and parrots, lachrymose religiosity.
The way forward was painful but, she insisted, it could be glorious; the
sexual and maternal impulses might be diverted Christ-like to the greater
good of humanity:
We too can transmute the power of sex and ‘create’ in other ways. He did it
supremely for the world. You and I can do it for our village, our city, for England, for the world, for anything you like.
More down-to-earth, Mary Scharlieb, a pioneer gynaecologist from an
earlier generation (she was born in ), offered words of sympathy and
caution.
The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems
addressed itself very directly to the multitude of post-war women who outnumbered their male counterparts. We were living in abnormal times, according to Scharlieb, citing the population statistics of one London borough, Marylebone, as evidence. In
this one London neighbourhood there were no fewer than , more
women than men in , and more than half of the borough’s female
population were unmarried. In her book Scharlieb set out to deal with the
practical problems arising from singledom on this scale, ranging from what
she saw as its less desirable side-effects like ‘unwholesome’ female friendships, to the solitary bad habits which so easily tempted the weary, despon— dent woman worker – like a whisky and soda at the end of a tiring day,
Singled Out
rather than a restorative cup of tea. But she too eulogised the spinster,
seeing her as having a universal role to play in society; she was ‘. . . essential to the welfare of the nation’.
All this helped. When Geraldine Aves, who was born in , was at
Newnham just after the war, a distinguished woman doctor came to lecture
to the students there on the subject of relationships between men and
women. ‘The thing that deeply impressed me was her description of how
young women had to face the fact that many of them would not get
married. She talked about sublimation and how you can, in fact, have a
very worthwhile and interesting and happy life if you somehow adjust to
that.’ Geraldine, like many highly educated women whose cheeks were
never to bloom anew under the kisses of her children, turned her attention
to her studies and became in due course a most eminent civil servant and
social reformer.
In the mid s two other writers, Esther Harding and Laura Hutton,
sympathetically considered the predicament of the single woman. By that
time, any young woman who might have hoped against hope for a husband
in the post-war period had either got one or was having to come to terms
with the fact that she probably never would. If she was born in, say, ,
like Gertrude Caton-Thompson, she would have been forty-seven in .
May Jones was forty-two that year; nearly half her life had gone by since
she lost Philip. Both Winifred Haward and Winifred Holtby would have
been thirty-seven in . These women would have felt the clock ticking;
they would be having to come to terms with the future as singles. And
whether or not the psychologists and medics consoled them with their
words of faith and encouragement, there must have been days when they
were depressed, days when they felt that, however essential they were to
Jesus Christ or the welfare of the nation, they themselves were plain, dull, queer and unnecessary.
*
All too often it seemed that the world just wasn’t designed around their
needs. Single women in the first half of the twentieth century had an image
problem, which they and their defenders were struggling to redress; but
survival was about more than persuading a hostile world to tolerate cat—
lovers and cranky maiden aunts with pince-nez. Post-war society wasn’t
ready for the influx of Surplus Women, and the spinster population felt
acutely the uncertainty of their social position.
Victorian conventions lingered on beyond the point where they were
obsolete. One evening in the mid s, when she was about twenty-seven
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
years old, Winifred Holtby took a family friend to the theatre. This lady
was middle-aged, and worked as the matron of a celebrated boys’ public
school. As Winifred described her:
I doubt if there is among my whole acquaintance a more admirable and respectable person or one whose looks inspire more confidence in her tact, wisdom, moderation and morality. Her face, her bearing, even her hats emphasize the strong sense of responsibility towards the young which has developed during her life’s work.
She has also, mercifully, a sense of humour, a knowledge of human nature, and many other pleasant qualities.
The play was a long one. When they reached the station Winifred and
her friend found that they had missed their train, which left them with an
hour to wait until the next one, at midnight. It was cold and rainy, the
ladies’ waiting-room fire had gone out, and the cafe´ had closed. Fortunately, Winifred recalled that the Station Hotel, right opposite the platform, had a comfortable lounge where they would be able to spend an hour in the warmth with a cup of tea. She had often been there and the staff knew her
by sight. It would be a relief to have a hot drink sitting in their deep sofas on such a miserable night. They went in.