Agony of the aunts

Singled Out
by Virginia Nicholson

One day in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls told the assembled sixth form, ‘I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry.’

She was right. Nearly three quarters of a million young British men died in the Great War. Girls born around the turn of the century had been reared to assume that marriage and motherhood were their natural destiny. Even before the war there were more women than men, and post-war the problem of the ‘surplus women’ became a public issue. Women had worked in factories and the trades during the war, but the returning soldiers wanted their jobs back. The cruel thing was that the ‘surplus women’ were mocked and reviled, especially in the press. Those who held on to their wartime jobs were ‘limpets’, ‘blood-suckers’. The terminology was ruthless. As the women lost their youthfulness they became ‘on the shelf’, ‘old maids’, ‘sex-starved spinsters’ or, if they had brains and showed it, ‘blue-stockings’. Most men did not like clever or emancipated women.

As Virginia Nicholson points out, if society seemed agreed that an unmarried woman had lost all chance of happiness and normality, it took a strong one to disagree. Some women became ruthless themselves in their hunt for a husband, and some snapped up the war-damaged. Some women clung for a lifetime to the memory of a lost fiancé, others were sustained for years by daydreams built on, for example, a single foxtrot. Nicholson writes that the single life was hardest for upper-class women, because they had ‘more to lose’. This is the only insensitivity, or failure in magination, in what is an extremely valuable and always riveting book.