Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
Virginia Nicholson Viking, 336pp, £20
In the 20th century, everybody knew a spinster. When I was a child, in the 1970s, one lived in our road. She was a retired district nurse, probably then in her late seventies. She wore huge plastic sunglasses, bright pink lipstick and jaunty tweed golfing cap. We regarded her with the pitiless indifference that children reserve for those who are different. She strode down the street with youthful vigour and cheerfulness, but we knew she couldn't possibly be happy because she was a spinster.
The word, so redolent of loneliness and cats, has cast a shadow over the lives of single women that even now, when marriage is no longer the single public measure of a sexual relationship, has not entirely lifted. But, as Virginia Nicholson's splendid and sympathetic study demonstrates, the generation of spinsters that followed the First World War was marked by extraordinary reserves of courage, character and self-reliance. They were the first to face in such numbers the probability of life without marriage and children; and for many it was a revelation.
The First World War simply took away the men: 700,000 fiancés, brothers, boyfriends and sons. In 1918, hundreds of thousands of women were left mourning the men they loved or could have loved and would or could have married. The men who had survived the war were often damaged and fragile; and for those who were still marriageable, there was the sheer volume of willing partners. A cartoon, reproduced in Singled Out, shows a party at which every man whirls two or three girls across the dance floor on his arm. And as if the hard facts weren't depressing enough, "our surplus girls" found themselves a problem humiliatingly picked over in newspapers and social studies. Out they went to work on typewriters and in offices; a few went to university or became social campaigners or academics. Some of them (especially if they had some money) embraced the new order from the beginning, determined to make the most of the prospect of self-autonomy; others struggled with a sense of failure.
Most working women - 90 per cent - were employed in factories or were in domestic service. Of this majority we inevitably hear little in the book, though Nicholson has vividly recreated the bleakness and poverty, the sixpenny rented mattresses shared in shifts with strangers, that were the lot of those labouring women whose pensions, won by the Insurance Act 1911, were pitifully small (and the act didn't cover domestic servants). Nicholson has burrowed through archives, autobiographies and diaries, as well as interviewing a few survivors - but it is hardly surprising that the emphasis is on the articulate, the educated and those who left records of lives fulfilled. The novelist Winifred Holtby was one of these, writing a call to arms in her essay "Are Spinsters Frustrated?"; her fictional creation Sarah Barton says, rather magnificently, "I was born a spinster and, by God, I'm going to spin."
There was camaraderie and friendship; there was political suffrage and increasing numbers of women in public life. But, for the most part, from the vantage point of the married and the media, a "Bachelor Girl" (chummily known as a "bach") inspired only patronising tips on the importance of living within her means, fitting her own (brown or green) carpet, managing a household budget for one and making lists of tinned staples for her bedsit suppers.
If a woman was sufficiently young and attractive still to entertain the hope of a husband, the advice, then as now, was not to appear too earnest, stressing sense of humour over intellectual accomplishments: "be light, amiable, quite disassociated from care and all the common things of life". But the common things of life loomed large. For many girls working in low-paid clerical jobs, just finding the money for lunch was a worry. On Maiden Lane in the City of London, there was a canteen where women workers could get a free bowl of soup in exchange for memorising a passage from the Bible.
As for sex, most experts advised taking up hobbies such as folk dancing to deflect the distracting pangs of physical desire. Even Marie Stopes counselled a correspondent to concentrate on knitting. Sometimes women were fortunate enough to find a companion to share the cost and ease the loneliness. Loving friendships - sometimes sexual, but generally not - were often exemplars of joyful domestic happiness that lasted till death.
Behind the descriptions of brown paint and employment agencies, Singled Out is a celebration of pluckiness, realism, intellectual independence and self-reliance. Nicholson has taken a feature of 20th-century British social life that is familiar to us - but here gives it the intelligent and humane examination it deserves.
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