REVIEW: Singled Out
Singled Out - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War: Virginia Nicholson
This book focuses on a section of society that I’d only been dimly aware of, namely the women who remained single after the men they might well have married had been killed during the first world war. The ‘lost generation’ are still remembered, even now, but we’ve lost sight of the women who lived on without them, even though their existence in such numbers changed society and women’s place in it, as this book details.
Perhaps it was my expectations, but I was a little disappointed by this book, finding it initially frustrating, and grumbling that the writer’s arguments were ‘flabby’. While I came to accept the shape of the book. I continued to find the author’s viewpoint sometimes too glib. While women’s position in society has changed drastically from the pre-war context sketched out, all these years on and in particular after this year, the claims about women’s equality in the UK seem unjustifiably blasé. Some statements seemed contradictory, possibly because Nicholson was oversympathising with her subjects, because one moment she seemed to be being critiquing the view that women’s only fulfilment could come from being wives and mothers, the next she seemed to be accepting it wholesale. She seemed to be consistently ranged against ‘Puritanism’ (although by using capital letters, wasn’t she referring to a group of people dead and buried some two centuries since the setting of this book, rather than the caricature of their beliefs that I think she meant to attack?) The author’s stance clarified somewhat for me when I realised that she’d previously written about the early twentieth-century artists known as the Bohemians, after reading the chapter or sub-chapter in this book on the experiences of unmarried women in this set.
As I tried to express, some of my grumbling was frustration about the structure of the book. We are introduced to the general view of women as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Women who failed to achieve the status of wife and mother were deemed failures.
But then the war came, and the book begins with several individual women who were engaged or on the verge of becoming engaged, when this great calamity took away their future husband. Apart from their personal grief, the prevailing idea was that this had ‘blighted their lives.’ And yet, it was intimated, it would not be so for most of them. Some of these women would go on to lead long lives, very different from what they had expected, about which we were offered tantalising hints - the archaeologist Geraldine Caton-Thomas is one example - but the author dropped those stories to return to them later, a device I found a bit irritating, especially as one of the earlier figures referred to was Vera Brittain, a classic example of a fiancée whose marriage was not to be. As a nurse who went on to university and a literary career, befriending Winifred Hotby, another figure Nicholson writes a lot about, I can see why she appealed as a quotable subject, but Brittain did go on to marry eventually.
But demographically speaking, there were no men for millions of women to wed. This fact is shown in many ways, from the telling census of 1921 and the press response to it, to a headmistress’s direct speech to sixth formers at a girls’ school. What would they do with their lives?
Those men had been largely absent from the workforce and universities when they had gone to war, of course, but fewer of them returned (and of their number, many were maimed in body or in mind). So, women stepped into roles that would previously have been barred to them. With no husband to support them, and in some cases, family members depending on their income, women continued to work in greater numbers.
Nicholson talks about the extraordinary examples, the ‘firsts’ who broke down barriers, and also the masses of ‘business girls’, of teachers and of nurses. These women were not paid as well as men, and faced misogynistic hostility, with Nicholson quoting from various sources (although she has a tendency to treat all written material as zeitgeisty and influential, when I’m fairly sure that several of the ladies that she mentioned wouldn’t have read your D.H. Lawrence or your Radclyffe Hall, actually.)
The Government and society were slow and grudging to act - Nicholson makes the valid point that the women who were first granted the vote (aged over 30 and property owning) were certainly not the women who had stepped in as munition workers during the war effort. One of the people she returns to throughout the book is campaigner Florence White, who fought for pensions for single women, and it is staggering from 2020 that that battle had to be waged even.
Another thing that I noticed, reading in 2020, is how little mention there is of the influenza epidemic. Of course, it didn’t have the gendered impact of the first world war although that conflict had a part to play in the disease’s transmission, but it was another key trauma that shaped these womens’ lives, yet there are only a couple of references to it. Recent historians have been far more interested in the shadow of the great war, of course, which one thinks will no longer be the case.
The book looks at these women’s relationship with children, and the heartbreak for some of it always being another’s baby, whether these were women working in childcare or aunts. It looks at the impact of the lack of romance or sex, and at the unmarried women who experienced both - it’s not a book that has any time to spare for the wife when affairs were conducted - at lesbianism and the networks of friendship and companionship offered by women in a similar situation, and how new this was.
The writer is aware of the bias towards the literate more middle-class women who were better able to write about their experiences, (the high mortality rates of the officer class meant that there were may of them) and tries to balance it with the autobiographical details of working-class women, either garnered from unpublished memoirs (although that has a bias towards great readers) and interviews conducted by the author with then elderly women, looking back at their varied experiences.
It’s a thought-provoking read. Some of the questions it raises are as relevant now as then about the single life, its positives and negatives. It is also enlightening about women’s history in the twentieth centuty in the UK, reminding one sharply of the different expectations parents holding their newborn daughter would have a hundred and twenty and more years ago to modern ones. The influence of these ‘surplus women’ is certainly to be felt, from the trailblazers who went to Oxbridge to study, but not to get degrees, until the universities finally yielded, which led the way to further honours and varied careers to the influence of less garlanded women. The myriad ways these women spent the energy they had, untethered to the kitchen or the nursery, and their impact on women’s views of marriage and social matters over the years becomes clearer. It is a reminder of the historical reasons for the social forces that are still at work now.
Nicholson comes up with a fanciful ending for Graldine Caton-Thomas, adding imaginary detais to the facts that are known. I found it more potent to read the list of distinguished women (even if they made me feel bad for not being as extraordinary.) This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/181898.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.
This book focuses on a section of society that I’d only been dimly aware of, namely the women who remained single after the men they might well have married had been killed during the first world war. The ‘lost generation’ are still remembered, even now, but we’ve lost sight of the women who lived on without them, even though their existence in such numbers changed society and women’s place in it, as this book details.
Perhaps it was my expectations, but I was a little disappointed by this book, finding it initially frustrating, and grumbling that the writer’s arguments were ‘flabby’. While I came to accept the shape of the book. I continued to find the author’s viewpoint sometimes too glib. While women’s position in society has changed drastically from the pre-war context sketched out, all these years on and in particular after this year, the claims about women’s equality in the UK seem unjustifiably blasé. Some statements seemed contradictory, possibly because Nicholson was oversympathising with her subjects, because one moment she seemed to be being critiquing the view that women’s only fulfilment could come from being wives and mothers, the next she seemed to be accepting it wholesale. She seemed to be consistently ranged against ‘Puritanism’ (although by using capital letters, wasn’t she referring to a group of people dead and buried some two centuries since the setting of this book, rather than the caricature of their beliefs that I think she meant to attack?) The author’s stance clarified somewhat for me when I realised that she’d previously written about the early twentieth-century artists known as the Bohemians, after reading the chapter or sub-chapter in this book on the experiences of unmarried women in this set.
As I tried to express, some of my grumbling was frustration about the structure of the book. We are introduced to the general view of women as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. Women who failed to achieve the status of wife and mother were deemed failures.
But then the war came, and the book begins with several individual women who were engaged or on the verge of becoming engaged, when this great calamity took away their future husband. Apart from their personal grief, the prevailing idea was that this had ‘blighted their lives.’ And yet, it was intimated, it would not be so for most of them. Some of these women would go on to lead long lives, very different from what they had expected, about which we were offered tantalising hints - the archaeologist Geraldine Caton-Thomas is one example - but the author dropped those stories to return to them later, a device I found a bit irritating, especially as one of the earlier figures referred to was Vera Brittain, a classic example of a fiancée whose marriage was not to be. As a nurse who went on to university and a literary career, befriending Winifred Hotby, another figure Nicholson writes a lot about, I can see why she appealed as a quotable subject, but Brittain did go on to marry eventually.
But demographically speaking, there were no men for millions of women to wed. This fact is shown in many ways, from the telling census of 1921 and the press response to it, to a headmistress’s direct speech to sixth formers at a girls’ school. What would they do with their lives?
Those men had been largely absent from the workforce and universities when they had gone to war, of course, but fewer of them returned (and of their number, many were maimed in body or in mind). So, women stepped into roles that would previously have been barred to them. With no husband to support them, and in some cases, family members depending on their income, women continued to work in greater numbers.
Nicholson talks about the extraordinary examples, the ‘firsts’ who broke down barriers, and also the masses of ‘business girls’, of teachers and of nurses. These women were not paid as well as men, and faced misogynistic hostility, with Nicholson quoting from various sources (although she has a tendency to treat all written material as zeitgeisty and influential, when I’m fairly sure that several of the ladies that she mentioned wouldn’t have read your D.H. Lawrence or your Radclyffe Hall, actually.)
The Government and society were slow and grudging to act - Nicholson makes the valid point that the women who were first granted the vote (aged over 30 and property owning) were certainly not the women who had stepped in as munition workers during the war effort. One of the people she returns to throughout the book is campaigner Florence White, who fought for pensions for single women, and it is staggering from 2020 that that battle had to be waged even.
Another thing that I noticed, reading in 2020, is how little mention there is of the influenza epidemic. Of course, it didn’t have the gendered impact of the first world war although that conflict had a part to play in the disease’s transmission, but it was another key trauma that shaped these womens’ lives, yet there are only a couple of references to it. Recent historians have been far more interested in the shadow of the great war, of course, which one thinks will no longer be the case.
The book looks at these women’s relationship with children, and the heartbreak for some of it always being another’s baby, whether these were women working in childcare or aunts. It looks at the impact of the lack of romance or sex, and at the unmarried women who experienced both - it’s not a book that has any time to spare for the wife when affairs were conducted - at lesbianism and the networks of friendship and companionship offered by women in a similar situation, and how new this was.
The writer is aware of the bias towards the literate more middle-class women who were better able to write about their experiences, (the high mortality rates of the officer class meant that there were may of them) and tries to balance it with the autobiographical details of working-class women, either garnered from unpublished memoirs (although that has a bias towards great readers) and interviews conducted by the author with then elderly women, looking back at their varied experiences.
It’s a thought-provoking read. Some of the questions it raises are as relevant now as then about the single life, its positives and negatives. It is also enlightening about women’s history in the twentieth centuty in the UK, reminding one sharply of the different expectations parents holding their newborn daughter would have a hundred and twenty and more years ago to modern ones. The influence of these ‘surplus women’ is certainly to be felt, from the trailblazers who went to Oxbridge to study, but not to get degrees, until the universities finally yielded, which led the way to further honours and varied careers to the influence of less garlanded women. The myriad ways these women spent the energy they had, untethered to the kitchen or the nursery, and their impact on women’s views of marriage and social matters over the years becomes clearer. It is a reminder of the historical reasons for the social forces that are still at work now.
Nicholson comes up with a fanciful ending for Graldine Caton-Thomas, adding imaginary detais to the facts that are known. I found it more potent to read the list of distinguished women (even if they made me feel bad for not being as extraordinary.) This entry was originally posted at https://feather-ghyll.dreamwidth.org/181898.html. Please comment wherever you prefer to.