Authors: Virginia Nicholson
economic rights and was to become the longest-serving woman MP. The
issues of women’s rights and employment were the lifelong passions of
Nancy Seear, who was raised to the peerage in , and whose sponsorship
of the Sex Discrimination Act of ensured her legacy to the nation.
‘Let me put it like this,’ she explained, looking back over her remarkable
career, ‘I’m a single woman. There is no doubt that it is very, very much
easier if you are single than if you are married.’
The trade union movement – in particular the poorly-paid garment
workers whom she spoke for – benefited from the ferocious energies of
Miss Anne Loughlin, tiny, stylish and bossy, who by the age of thirty-five
had fought her own way from the sweatshops of Leeds on to the TUC
general council, and was made DBE in . The upper echelons of the
Civil Service also gained the formidable abilities of spinsters like Dame
Evelyn Sharp and Dame Mary Smieton, the two first women to head
government departments in this country. Dame Evelyn, who was honoured
for her key role in the framing of important planning laws, confessed that
she regretted remaining single: ‘I should prefer to have been a man: then I
could have had a career and marriage too.’ Dame Mary rose in her career
to become director of personnel of the United Nations. She shared a home
with her sister, and lived to the great age of .
The fortress of politics was a clear target for the regiments of advancing
women, but Surplus Women had lots of surplus energy, and they expended
it on almost everything hitherto regarded as ‘male’. In Miss Cecil
Leitch had given the suffrage movement a welcome publicity boost by
defeating the leading amateur golfer Harold Hilton. After the war Miss
Leitch went on to win championship after championship: the British Open
twice, the French five times, the Canadian once. In the mountaineer
Dorothy Thompson became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc by the
Brouillard Ridge. The following year Miss Marjorie Foster confounded no
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fewer than men competing against her by carrying off the sovereign’s
prize for target rifle shooting – in years the only woman to achieve
such success. The oarswoman Amy Gentry was undefeated sculls champion
until ; and in the virtuoso wicket-keeper Betty Snowball became
a member of the first women’s cricket team to tour Australia. All were
unmarried.
As in so many cases of women who invaded male strongholds, it was the
war that gave them their opportunity. Military enlistment caused the gradual dislocation of public services. Women police officers like Mary Allen were first recruited (on an unpaid and voluntary basis) in , largely to control prostitution which had escalated in the proximity of army recruitment camps. The war also gave Mary Baxter Ellis her chance to join the armed
forces. She defied her parents, trained as a chauffeur, and immediately
joined FANY as a driver; her service won her medals for gallantry. By
she had become corps commander of the unit – an inspirational leader
renowned for her probity and valour.
On the home front Miss Verena Holmes profited by the wartime absence
of men to gain a formal apprenticeship in the field which had fascinated
her since childhood: engineering. She learnt to work everything from a
diesel engine to a torpedo, and employed her skills to create a range of
useful inventions – assorted medical apparatus, safety paper cutters and
rotary valves. In her versatile talent earned her admission to the
Institution of Locomotive Engineers: the first woman to gain such entry.
Verena Holmes’s contemporary, Victoria Drummond (whose early career
is described in Chapter ) also seized the chance offered by the war to
pursue her ambition of becoming a marine engineer. The struggle was a
severe one; despite demonstrable experience she continued to fail her chief
engineer’s exam through no fewer than thirty-seven attempts. ‘After some
years even Mr Martin [her tutor] had become convinced that it was because
I was a woman they would not pass me. Of course I was not deterred. It
even became quite a joke between us.’ Her determination paid off. In
Victoria’s ship SS
Bonita
was attacked by a bomber. ‘My duty was to keep the engines going as long as they would turn.’ She took charge, dismissed all the engine-room staff, and for nearly half an hour battled single-handedly in scalding steam and deafening noise to keep the ship’s speed up. Miraculously they were not hit. When the ship made land Victoria was greeted with a heroine’s welcome, and awarded the Lloyd’s war medal for bravery
at sea.
As Victoria Drummond found out, getting acceptance and professional
recognition was an uphill struggle. Among the lists of eminent female
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
medical workers who dedicated their lives to patient care in the first half
of the twentieth century, nearly all were nurses. A few determined women
managed to train as doctors. This was easier during the war because of the
shortage of male doctors, but in the s the big teaching hospitals, unable to stomach the thought of mixed gynaecology classes, closed their doors to women again. In her bid to become a doctor, Octavia Wilberforce was
thwarted at every turn by her parents, who told her that medicine was
‘unsexing’ for women. Though well-to-do, her father cut off all financial
support. Octavia failed her exams seven times before managing to pass in
all subjects. Supported by friends, Dr Wilberforce eventually became a
highly regarded diagnostician and, perhaps out of fellow-feeling for them,
founded her own convalescent home for stressed and exhausted women. A
few more names – Diana Beck, Dorothy Russell, Esther Rickards, Letitia
Fairfield – stand out from their generation as exceptional women doctors.
But women neurosurgeons, pathologists, even gynaecologists or paediatricians like them were hard to find in those days. And because marriage seemingly barred the way to hospital appointments or posts with administrative responsibilities, those that there were tended, as a result, to be unmarried.
Women lawyers – known as ‘Portias’ in the popular press – had a slightly
easier time of it than the doctors. So many young lawyers had joined up
and been killed in the war that there was a serious shortage of barristers and solicitors, particularly in family firms. With a son dead, blind or shell-shocked, the father of a family practice would be grateful to see his clever daughter step into her brother’s shoes. The first female solicitor, Carrie Morrison, qualified in . Even so, by only an average of fifteen
women a year were qualifying as solicitors. One of these, Miss Eulalie
Spicer, was to become one of the most prominent divorce lawyers of her
day; though the clues given by her emphatically masculine appearance –
complete with Eton crop, suit, tie and cigarette holder – suggest that her
own unmarried state was no great cause for regret. Among the first women
barristers was Miss Elsie Bowerman, an active suffragette who at the age of
twenty-three had survived the sinking of the
Titanic
. After this nothing seemed impossible to her. As a hospital orderly she joined the Allied retreat from Russia in and witnessed the February revolution in St Petersburg.
In she joined Christabel Pankhurst on the hustings, and was called to
the bar in . Later she founded the Women’s Voluntary Service and
represented women at the United Nations. The first British woman judge
was Miss Sybil Campbell, who became a barrister in and was appointed
to the judiciary in . Miss Campbell immediately gained a reputation
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for the severity of her sentencing, when she handed out six weeks to a man
who had stolen three bars of soap. But the protests stemmed in part from
specious outrage by petty, and sexist, criminals who saw pilfering as their
right. By the time she retired Miss Campbell had won a reputation for
fairness and humanity.
Typical of the public-spirited women who entered the law at this time
was Miss Mary Freeman, who grew up in Slathwaite, at the smart end of
Huddersfield. She and her sister Margaret, a teacher, lived all their lives
together in the same house. Mary read law at Manchester University, and
qualified as a solicitor in . She was articled to her father, and after his death took over the practice. She pursued her chosen career for the next thirty-five years. The Misses Freeman jointly personified spinsterly respectability. They never drank in pubs, and on Saturday nights were to be found working at home until their ten o’clock bedtime. Guided by their strong protestant ethic, they supported the local church, the Girl Guides, local
music and drama, and gave unstintingly to their community:
Remember that it was the spinsters that kept the country going. It was not only us. You’re to remember that the men were killed in the First World War – there weren’t any men to go round. All my friends are ‘Miss’. We had a family of four neighbours here – all unmarried. There’s Miss Roberts there, and ourselves, and next door here, and I think that the Sugdens had a spinster in the family hadn’t they? – and the Webbs – Dorrie was a spinster. It’s not a bad life. There’s a lot to be said for it. The important thing is to enjoy and be enthusiastic. And take everything that comes.
In science women often had to twist and dive to find outlets for their
talents, often in less mainstream disciplines. We find women marine zoolo—
gists like Sheina Marshall, women bacteriologists like Muriel Robertson,
women biochemists like Dorothy Lloyd or Marjory Stephenson (all unmarried) taking advantage of those then relatively undefined fields; for them too, gaining posts was problematic, and they often had to exist from one
grant to another. For the forty years that she ran the Strangeways Research
Laboratory in Cambridge, Miss Honor Fell was not paid a salary, but
survived on a research grant from the Royal Society – which, although it
did not admit women scientists, supported them financially. Under her
directorship the laboratory became world-famous (gaining her a DBE in
), while remaining homely and hospitable. At teatime Miss Fell would
gather her staff together to talk over their work; this had an added advantage.
Steam from the boiling kettle helped to humidify the laboratory environ-
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
ment, which in turn helped to moisten culture dishes containing embryonic
tissues awaiting dissection. Honor Fell’s joy in her work kindled the enthusiasm of her colleagues, and not having the commitments of home or family released her: ‘I had a lovely Saturday afternoon, with the whole lab to myself,’ she wrote to a fellow scientist; and, ‘On Sunday I shall have an
orgy of staining slides.’
On the whole academia offered a haven for the ambitious and educated
spinster of the period. Gertrude Caton-Thompson’s story is not untypical;
the satisfactions of archaeology seem to have offered profound consolations.
Dorothy Garrod was born a couple of years later than her, in ; her
early life was convulsed by tragedy when two of her brothers were killed
at the Front, and the third died in the flu epidemic. Her studies took
her to Oxford after the war, and she developed a passion for Neanderthal
caves. On site Miss Garrod was rigorous and imperious, but could also
delight her colleagues by her witty conversation and skill with the flute. In she became the first woman professor at Cambridge University, and in her lifetime was garlanded with honorary degrees, a CBE, and fellowship
of the British Academy. Miss Margaret Read was also a Cambridge history
graduate when she lost her husband-to-be in the First World War. In
she went to live with her brother in India, and turned her formidable talents to the study of anthropology. Colonial education was to become her speciality; tenacious and implacable, she gained a PhD, worked as a government adviser, was appointed Professor at the London Institute of Education, travelled for the UN, and was made CBE in .
‘One of the most comfortable jobs, and one of the most sheltered lives
open to an unmarried woman, is that of a don on the staff of one of the
women’s colleges in Oxford or Cambridge,’ remembered Professor Barbara
Wootton. (She herself was still a student at Girton when her husband, with
whom she had spent only thirty-six hours of married life, died of wounds
in France.) Many a harassed mother or overworked housewife might well
have envied the bookish, studious lives led in those tranquil quadrangles.
True, such women often had public and private turmoil to contend with.
Margery Fry, principal of Somerville College, Oxford, battled unsuccessfully to persuade the university authorities not to restrict the numbers of entrants to women’s colleges. Julia Mann, the economic historian and head
of St Hilda’s, Oxford, sacrificed her own comfort to fund provision for
scholarships and facilities at her college. Before she became an Oxford don, Margery Perham suffered a nervous breakdown when her beloved brother died in the First World War.
But their contributions too were magnificent. Enid Starkie, Doctor of
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French literature at Somerville College, Oxford, brought all her passionate