Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Singled Out (47 page)
they had to wait another ten years before being accorded equal voting
rights with men; but in all the campaigners knew that a barricade had
been demolished which could never be rebuilt. The status of women was
irrevocably altered.
When the suffrage movements were founded before the war, centuries
of patriarchy presented a monolithic structure, a resistant edifice made up
of hardened convictions: convictions of male superiority, of a natural sexual hierarchy in which women were subordinate in every way to men, in short, of the inequality of the sexes.
The First World War dealt a blow to that entrenched male position from
which it has never recovered. The damaged soldiers who crept back home
from their dugouts after demobilisation were victors only in name. There
was massive unemployment. One young woman described the all too
common sight in of ‘patient queues of hollow-eyed men outside
factories hoping to be taken on . . . who, by a nervous movement, a
twitching muscle, or a too rigid tension, would betray the fact that they
were all in some greater or lesser degree suffering from shell-shock’. Set
alongside these unfortunates, the young women of the post-war period
were the gainers. Among some more broad-minded commentators the
view was that men were in fact less able to endure mental strain than
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women. War had tested the men and found them wanting. ‘Women are
accustomed to nervous shocks and stand them better,’ stated the eminent
psychiatrist Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones. And that same whirlwind of war
which had traumatised and depleted the male population had also raged
through masculine institutions, flattening obstacles in the way of women’s
emancipation. Though decades had yet to pass before even a semblance of
true equality prevailed, still, in those early days ambitious and talented
women had reason to feel victorious.
When women got the vote in it was only the first in a series of
male defences which started to tumble after hostilities ceased. In the
Sex Disqualification Removal Act changed the law which barred women’s
entry to the professions. For the first time women could stand for Parliament, become vets, architects, civil servants, lawyers or sit on juries. In A s careers manual recommended aviation for girls: by then, life for the single woman seemed to be brimming over with adventurous opportunities Oxford University allowed women to take degrees;* in the Equal Franchise Act finally permitted women over twenty-one to hold
equal voting rights with men. The s was a decade of firsts. :
the first women were permitted to perform jury service. : Victoria
Drummond became the first woman to join the Institute of Marine
Engineers. : Aileen Cust became the first woman member of the Royal
College of Veterinary Surgeons. : Evelyn Cheesman became the first
woman curator at London Zoo. : Margaret Bondfield became the first
* Cambridge lagged behind in this for another twenty-eight years, withholding full university membership from women until .
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
woman minister in Parliament. : Hilda Matheson was appointed the
BBC’s first-ever Director of Talks. : Eleanor Lodge became the first
woman to gain a doctorate from Oxford University. : Margaret Bondfield became the first woman cabinet member and privy councillor. In government departments, legal chambers and financial houses, in the army
and the police forces, in hospitals and dental surgeries, laboratories and
universities, in Fleet Street and on farms, on racetracks and golf courses, in the air, on water and in the remote islands of the Pacific, unmarried women whose lives only thirty or forty years earlier would have been confined to
parlour and parish were starting to compete with men for authority, enterprise and glory. Though not all of them could be ‘firsts’, they shared the same pioneering spirit. For many of these single women, life now seemed to
be brimming over with opportunities for adventure. For every disappointed
spinster gnawed at by poverty and blighted hopes, there was another who
looked into a future full of bright possibilities – for personal satisfaction, for social value, for the betterment of her world.
One lady who wrote to me about her spinster aunt, whose fiance´ had
died as a result of the war, concluded her letter: ‘How I miss her! There
was only one Bessie Webster, but there must be many similar stories.’ Miss
Bessie Webster’s life might well stand for the multitude of those maiden
aunts who resolutely made lives for themselves in the liberating world of
the s. Jimmy Brown, Bessie Webster’s fiance´, had been a talented
linguist and academic; they met at Glasgow University where Bessie was
studying Modern Languages, and they fell in love. Jimmy was a jewel
among men, and Bessie and he were besotted with each other. His death
when it came must have knocked the bottom out of her world.
But Bessie wasn’t the type to mourn the rest of her life away. She was
twenty-four; she was devoted to her family, she was a fluent linguist, a
talented pianist, and was characterised by a streak of irrepressibility that both delighted and maddened those who knew her. After a spell learning secretarial skills and working in an office (where she had an affair with her married boss), she joined ICI and began a lifelong career in industry. Her niece described how Bessie ‘. . . gave the company a verve and excitement
that galvanised the Central Labour Department into actions they would
never have dreamed of without her. ‘‘Bessie’’ was everywhere, on intimate
personal terms with everyone, from the various Chairmen, to the cleaners
and porters. And she was known and welcomed at every factory she visited,
over the length and breadth of Britain.’
Vivacious and approachable, Bessie Webster remained a magnet for men
– some of whom tried and failed to persuade her to go to bed with them
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– but she never married. Her sister was convinced that Bessie could never
have dwindled into domesticity. She was in her element at the annual ICI
conferences, where, as a passionate music-lover, her job was to organise
the entertainment, and she was soon on close terms with many of the
celebrity artistes of her day. A celebrity herself, she held court on these
occasions in the midst of a throng of captains of industry where she was
often the only professional woman. ‘ICI gave her a freedom she would
otherwise not have known . . . None of this would have come her way if
she had ‘‘dwindled into a wife’’. [Marriage] would have bored her to
distraction,’ wrote her niece.
Bessie unrepentantly ran her own life, and such was her humour and
directness that her colleagues, though occasionally driven wild, let her get away with doing things her way. In the thick of a crisis it would be discovered that she’d gone to have her hair done; policemen waved her on
through red lights, and shop assistants gave her priority. In later years she drove an open-top Sunbeam which she would park recklessly as near as possible to Knightsbridge, before swanning into Harvey Nichols for lingerie
or Harrods for library books (though well-read, her particular taste was for lurid and violent murder fiction, which the librarian took care to reserve in advance of her visits).
Bessie’s speciality was personnel, and nominally she was employed to
report to the Central Labour Department on working conditions in the
various ICI factories, but the reality was much more diverse. She ‘collected’
jobs, serving on all the Company’s committees that related to employee
welfare. Her work took her abroad, gave her status in a big organisation,
and offered endless variety. She was, she confessed, not good at detail and
routine, but she brought an unprecedented energy and eĺan to Board
meetings, to the Amenities Committee and the ICI Clothing Panel which
surprised and delighted her colleagues at Head Office. ‘I have always
enjoyed what I had to do . . .’ she remembered, ‘. . . but some of my more
candid friends might say it is because I don’t worry enough.’
Deep down, Bessie kept faith with Jimmy, and never considered marriage
with anyone else after he died; every year on the anniversary of his death
she wrote to his parents. They had given her, in his memory, a Blu¨thner
piano which was her most treasured possession. His ring was on her finger till the day she died. ‘If she had regrets about how her life had turned out, she never said so.’ Bessie Webster turned her face to the sun. ‘She was a great life-giver, who made friends everywhere she went . . . She was a wonderful
aunt. I loved her dearly.’
Miss Bessie Webster never achieved fame; like many of the women
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
whose stories I have told in this book, hers was a life encompassing private grief and limited recognition. Who can ever know the depths of anguish she endured when she lost the man she loved? What road did she have to
travel in order, eventually, to arrive at that unpretentious assessment of her own life, that really she didn’t worry enough? Let the love and admiration she inspired testify to a journey completed.
Now that women’s history is on the syllabus, and has expanded to fill
countless shelves in countless libraries, the achievements of the women’s
movement over the two interwar decades have received their due. The
historians have documented how in the last century the doors for women
were slowly but surely creaking open. We can read about the campaign of
the Six Point Group, about
Time and Tide
and its crusading journalists, about reform of the divorce laws, about the various fights for equal education, equal pay and equal opportunities (not all of those fights yet won . . .). But we have to look in the Biography sections to find out what
it felt like to live through those momentous times.
Take Rosamund Essex, who wrote her memoir
Woman in a Man’s World
() when she was in her late seventies. Rosamund was born in ,
‘when girls were still accounted for not very much more than for marriage
in later life’. Though much loved, she was, from her earliest years, the butt of family jokes that she was unlikely to amount to anything. Disabled by a deplorable stutter – she could not even say her own name – Rosamund
meekly accepted her parents’ estimation of her general incapacity: ‘We
know you haven’t any brains, darling. But you have a good strong character
and that will carry you through life.’ That was before the senior mistress at Bournemouth High School for Girls decided to set matters straight for the entire sixth form by pointing out to them – as ‘a statistical fact’ – that only one in ten was ever likely to find a husband. With her destiny thus blighted, it is remarkable that Rosamund was able to recover her self-esteem and make a fulfilling life for herself. But she achieved this, and more.
Her family’s low expectations spurred Rosamund to prove herself, ‘even
if I was inferior’. Classics had always held her enraptured from childhood,
and her father’s decision to take orders as a High Church priest when she
was only five meant that family mealtimes were dominated by theological
discussion. This stimulating intellectual climate gave her confidence. By
the age of eighteen Rosamund was head girl at Bournemouth and felt able
to compete for an Oxford scholarship in Classics. Like so many other young
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women who knew they would have to make their own way in the world,
Rosamund was among the ‘sudden rush of post-war women who wanted
a university education’. In she went up to St Hilda’s College. The
following year Oxford made the liberal gesture of admitting women as
members of the university:
So I was matriculated, became an undergraduate, bought a commoner’s gown, was fitted with a floppy Latimer cap, and felt the exhilaration of belonging to an old and honourable community. It is probably difficult for emancipated women now to understand our small triumph then. I said to myself at the time – I remember it well – ‘This is something that can never be taken away from me. It has happened.
It is a little bit of glory.’
But Oxford was still a man’s world. Many of the dons hated having
women in their lectures; one made the women sit behind him so that he
could not see them. Another addressed the undergraduates as ‘Gentlemen
– and others who attend my lectures’. Rosamund took up rowing, but the
women’s eights were not allowed to practise when men’s eights were on
the river, so they had to squeeze in their sessions early in the morning;
and, because wearing shorts for this activity would have been unthinkably
unfeminine, the girls had to row dressed in their cumbersome skirts, so
billowy that they had to be anchored at the knee with loops of elastic.
Rowing in these conditions wasn’t easy. ‘But it was another bit of glory
that we did it at all.’ Despite the apparent opportunities for female undergraduates to meet men at this time, none of them came Rosamund’s way.
She was, like her contemporary Winifred Haward, on a tight budget, which
barred her from a glamorous social life. Convention demanded rigorous
chaperonage, and one could only meet men in the common-rooms, not in