Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Did their spectacles and tweed jackets protect them from terrible vulnerabilities? One never asked the questions, because one never dared. They were private and uncomplaining, and perhaps too one hesitated to reveal answers that exposed one’s own fears of loneliness. Would one end up like them, with just cats for company?
Today the word ‘spinster’ has all but disappeared from current vocabulary, but the singles are still out in force. Some statistics predict million singles in Britain by . Mystery surrounds the murky figures revealed by the Census, in which around a million men of marriageable age appear to have gone missing (one theory is that they have all emigrated in search of jobs abroad). In the twenty-first century women are marrying older, and they are marrying less. But while the stigma may have gone, the xii
Singled Out
fears remain. Everyone now knows that marriage is not the only route to fulfilment, but the media and the internet tell of more lonely hearts and solitary singles than ever before. In this context, it is surely timely to examine a period of history when the ‘problem’ of the Surplus Women prompted both widespread anxiety and a wealth of solutions.
And so I set out to ask the inconvenient questions that my generation never saw fit to ask Miss Pease and her like. I wanted to find out how they coped with enforced spinsterhood and all it entailed, in a world which Ruth Adam, a now neglected writer who lived through the first half of the twentieth century, described as ‘the Mutilated Society’. Learning about the women who discovered, in , that there weren’t enough men to go round has been at times deeply moving. They did indeed harbour secret sadnesses, and many of them yearned for the comforts forever denied them: physical intimacy, the closeness of a loving relationship and children. Many women also suffered acutely from the blame that society laid at their feet.
As victims, they were often abused and marginalised. But I have also discovered many tales of individual courage in the face of a tragedy of historic proportions. Ruth Adam sang their praises in her book
A Woman’s
Place
(): ‘This was the era of the spinster. At last, after so many years of being grudged the right to exist at all, she came into her own.’ Like her, I am left full of admiration for the many brave women who learnt both to survive, and to triumph.
The chapters that follow trace the emotional trajectory of their subject matter from the initial plight of the Surplus Woman following the war and across the next two decades, through her experience of her own predicament and the necessity of facing life alone; they ask how she survived economically, emotionally and sexually, and they look at the advantages of spinsterhood. The final chapter reflects on, and honours, the achievements of a generation of single women. They were changed by war; in their turn they helped change society. I believe that today’s women are in their debt.
My approach in writing this book has been as far as possible to tell individual stories, and to emphasise personal details that I found fascinating, however seemingly irrelevant. When we reach into the past, we look for points of contact. Few of the names in this book are remembered today, and this too is deliberate. Demographics and statistics too easily blind one to the forgotten participants who made up the numbers; and I hope my reader will forgive me for hoping that she (or he?) will find it easier to identify with the predicament of young women ‘to fortune and to fame unknown’.
Many kind people wrote to me with stories of their teachers, aunts, patients and neighbours. Libraries, archives and old ladies’ homes slowly
but surely yielded up a wealth of telling memories. Inevitably the documents available have meant that this account may appear skewed in its emphasis on the middle classes. Where possible I have delved into accounts of their
lives by working-class women. The stories of May Jones, Amy Gomm,
Lizzie Rignall, Rose Harrison, Amy Langley and Florence and Annie White
all testify to experiences shared with more privileged women.
There is another reason for the emphasis on middle-class case-histories.
It is generally accepted that in the Great War a higher proportion of the
officer class was killed than of those lower down the social scale. A hundred years ago few people married outside their tribe. Middle-class women seeking husbands after the war did not on the whole consider marrying
among the blue-collar ranks, thus their chances of marriage were dispro—
portionately lowered. Programmed through generations to be mere orna—
ments and chattels, these genteel women’s attempts to stand fast in the face of historic calamity now seem especially poignant.
There is some dispute about how real the shortage of men was, and
evidence exists that women’s response to the lack of ‘suitable’ mates was
to seek them outside the usual narrow spheres, whether social or geo—
graphical. Statisticians point out that the number of post-war spinsters did not in fact greatly differ from the number of pre-war spinsters (while conceding that middle-and upper-class women in particular did face
reduced marriage prospects); but this is to ignore the undoubted effect of
grief, loss and national trauma. As the historian David Cannadine emphasises: ‘The abiding sense of loss throughout the land was as real as it was unassuageable.’ Death and bereavement were, he points out, ‘a mass reality’; a pall descended over Britain.
Whatever the case, it is beyond doubt that the war had a seismic effect
on marital behaviour, that all contemporary accounts take the man shortage
for granted, and that many women themselves perceived the courtship
arena as a competitive battleground, where defeat was perdition. The press
played its usual mischievous part in this, by whipping up a frenzy over the
Census figures, which revealed that there were ,, more females
than males in the population: that was , women to every , men.
Hysterical headlines about the ‘Problem of the Surplus Woman – Two
Million who can Never Become Wives . . .’ were hardly conducive to
morale among the husband-hunters of the day. In the event it appears that
more than a million women of that generation were never to marry or bear
children. This book, then, is an examination of the state of spinsterhood under the unprecedented conditions which prevailed after a cataclysmic war.
But war was not the only reason that one in four British women remained
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Singled Out
single. Under pressure from the feminists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the patriarchal monolith was showing early signs of
dissolution and that meant, above all for middle-class women, an increase
in economic and employment openings. In a number of professions, medicine and teaching for example, women were usually expected to resign on marriage, but at the same time financial independence deterred many
women from reverting to wifely subjection. Spinsterhood could be a choice.
Eighty years ago the world these women lived in was a very different
place from ours. From the mill-girl turned political activist to the debutante turned archaeologist, from the first woman stockbroker to the ‘business girls’ and the Miss Jean Brodies, I have attempted to interweave their stories into the social fabric of their time. The reader may have reservations about my occasional use of that word ‘girl’ to describe the young women of the interwar period; in my defence, it was universally used of unmarried
women. Its patronising condescension gives, I believe, an accurate flavour
of a time and a tone of voice now fading from living memory.
I myself was thirty-two when I stopped being a spinster, married and
started a family. In the course of working on this book I have several times been asked what drew me to write an account of spinsterhood. The answer is both personal and, I think, universal. My mother married late because
the first man she loved had been killed in the Second World War; because
of this I did not grow up taking marriage for granted, and I turned thirty
firmly persuaded that not yet having found Mr Right, I was unlikely to do
so. In that belief I took stock, faced the fear, and counted my blessings: I had the love of friends and family, an interesting life, and some money.
Barely two years later I was planning my wedding; I have been fortunate
in a long and happy marriage which, along with our children, has been a
wonderful, unsought and undeserved bonus. Often I look back and try to
think what my life would have been like had I not had such fortune, and I
conclude that the blessings I had at the age of thirty would have continued
to bring me happiness, as indeed they still do. In the end we are alone. In
recognising that, I also accept that marriage – even love – can never be
everything in life.
The women I write about learnt out of necessity not to be reliant on
husbands; in doing so many of them bravely reinvented themselves. Even
if we are not, like them, forced through grief and war to learn the same
lesson, it does no harm to recognise that our lives are our own to build or
destroy. The following pages offer, I hope, some of their solutions, and also some of their consolations.
In , when she was eighty-five years old, Margaret Jones, known as May,
wrote her autobiography. The manuscript is mostly written in biro, on
assorted pieces of coloured paper and the backs of circulars. It has never been published; it is not literary, sensational or revelatory. In fact there is little to single it out, for it is a story typical of thousands of women of her generation.
But as you read it, a century melts away. May’s story stops being a case-history and instead you catch a glimpse of the unique, transient life of a real person.
May Jones was born in , the oldest daughter of a Welsh carpenter.
She grew up in a small village in Cheshire not far from one of the great
mill towns. Her home was a damp smoky cottage, and it was a struggle for
her family to keep afloat financially. Nevertheless, writing at the end of her life, May was able to bring to mind happy pictures of her father’s evening pursuits: she would hold the candle steady for him as he worked meticulously on the wood-carvings which brought in a little extra money. The child would play with the lovely curly wood-shavings, holding them up as
ringlets on the side of her face. She remembered merry evenings in the
village dancing to the hurdy-gurdy man, or scrambling for fistfuls of sweets thrown to them by the Squire at the annual Sunday school treat. Summer was the high spot, when she and her younger brother were carried off to
stay at her grandfather’s house twelve miles away, the children piled into
empty potato baskets on the back of a cart drawn by a great Shire horse.
But Mother was often ill. She had three more children after May, and
after each confinement she was laid up. The doctor was a frequent visitor
to the Jones household. When Mother couldn’t get up, ten-year-old May
had to keep house and cook, look after the baby and do the washing.
May was a worry to her parents because she had an over-active imagination. She learnt to read early and loved fairy stories. The little people were real to her. There was a fairy prince who married a fairy princess and lived happily ever after; they lived in flowers. Sometimes one heard their tiny tinkling laughter, but one never saw them. The assiduous doctor wagged
his head and told her parents that too much reading would damage her
brain. She must be kept back, he said. On his advice she was denied books
Singled Out
and only allowed to read at school, though she sneaked her father’s carpentry manuals to bed with her at night and read whatever she could lay hands on. When she got older she managed to get hold of copies of
Jane Eyre
,
Lorna Doone
and
Kim
. But her favourite author was Marie Corelli, whose melodramatic romances imbued her with a sense that some day, somewhere, she would unite with her twin soul.
At twelve, May was taken away from school; she was old enough now
to make a financial contribution to the family. Her beloved schoolmistress
pleaded for her pupil to be allowed to take a scholarship, but May was sent
to work in the local textile mill. At thirteen she was the works runabout,
known by all in the factory as the ‘Flying Angel’. She ran errands from .
in the morning till eight at night, darting up and down the six-storey
building from one department to another with orders, messages and samples.
She was happy; the other workers were friendly, she appreciated the pretty
colours of the silk bobbins, and she was earning five shillings a week. But
running tired her out, and May became ill. The next three years were spent
working in a tobacconist’s, until at sixteen her mother set her up with a
five-year apprenticeship to a milliner in town.
At the top of a new page, May Jones wrote the heading for the next
episode in her young life: ‘My Love Story’. This is where we meet Philip
for the first time. Philip and May had been playmates from the age of six.
He was a city boy from Manchester, the son of middle-class business people,
but May got to know him because he would come to stay with his aunt in
the village in the summer holidays. Bright and studious, in due course
Philip was to win a scholarship to Cambridge. There wasn’t much money
around, and his parents – Quakers – were proud to make the sacrifices