Singled Out (7 page)

country . . .’ to: ‘Cheerfulness is my motto . . . no need to be alarmed . . .

the women probably filled in the Census forms wrong . . .’ ‘Leave them

alone and give them equal opportunities with men’ seemed like sound

advice. Or, if you are set on marriage, emigration was the answer: you

‘. . . must go to Canada and the Colonies, where the toll of war has not

been as great as it has in this country, and where men want wives’.

Poor May Wedderburn Cannan had opened the telegram from the War

Office that told her of the death of her beloved Bevil. For months after the 

Singled Out

extinction of her hopes, she ‘wandered in darkness’, retreating into a realm of memory and poetry; she wrote of sad hearts, burials, broken dreams and the dimming of the light. But talented poet as she was, she knew that she

could not keep herself on verse. May was not university-educated, and she

was twenty-five. She kept afloat on temporary jobs, but the constant

headlines about the surplus of women were a ceaseless reminder of the odds

stacked against her and her kind. They were unnecessary and unwanted.

They weren’t educated, if they were under thirty they couldn’t vote, and

many of the professions were still closed to them. The end of the war

should have revived the energies of a drained nation, but, as May sat in the tube at the end of her weary day, ‘. . . rocking along in the dark and looking at the white, indifferent, tired faces opposite me the wheels sang ‘‘surplus two million, surplus two million’’, and I was one of them’. May Wedderburn Cannan felt that she was on the scrap heap.

This tragic imbalance of the sexes was rocking society’s fragile boat.

During the war, an estimated two million women had replaced men in

employment. All over the country women had escaped from mills and

servants’ halls and stepped in to fill the shortage of bus drivers, garage hands and factory workers. But now, the returning ‘heroes’ needed work and homes; they polished their shoes and went out looking for jobs, only to be

told, ‘It’s the younger men we want,’ or ‘We’ve got more men and girls

than we know what to do with.’ With men vastly outnumbered by the ‘war

girls’, angry accusations started to be bandied around. In  Lieutenant G.

Dickens (retired) of Weston-super-Mare wrote indignantly to
The Times
over the appointment of a woman to the post of assistant secretary to the

Royal Astronomical Society. He had been among the applicants for this

very job: ‘[I] was duly informed that I was unsuccessful – at which I did

not ‘‘kick’’, until I ascertained that an unmarried woman
had been given a
man’s job
! Surely such an appointment, in these times, is unjustified . . .’

It was generally held that the women should give the jobs back to the

boys. Most of them did so, uncomplainingly. It seemed a shabby trick to

steal the men’s positions while they were away fighting for their country.

For married women it was not so hard to go back to home and hearth, but

for single women it was different.

The anguish of the surplus two million was exacerbated by the sense that

they were unwanted by men not only as wives, but also as competitors in

the workplace and social stakeholders. When Asquith granted the vote to

property-owning women over thirty in  it was in recognition, partly,

of the part they had played on the Home Front – ironical, as it was mostly

much younger women who’d done the work. Now surely it was only a

Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



matter of time before all that the suffragettes had worked for would come

to pass. But the prospect of a fully equal franchise was deeply disturbing to much of the male minority; fears were expressed that a vast influx of ‘irresponsible’ female voters would cause ‘Bedlam’. With many men feeling

that women trying to get parity was an unnatural state of affairs, eleven

more years were to pass before women got equal voting rights with men.

The feminist assault undermined their sense of who they were and, above

all, they felt outnumbered. They could only deal with their fears by abus—

ing the offending women, who were bundled into a heterogeneous mob

labelled flappers, feminists, warped spinsters, man-haters, shrews, cigarette-smoking hoydens and militants. There was deep-seated anxiety among men that the battle of the sexes was being lost, and that the wrong side were winning. Hysteria, more normally expected from the opposite sex, manifested itself in smear campaigns by a number of male authors – like that of one John MacArthur, who blustered angrily against the granting of the franchise to younger women in a pamphlet entitled
Shall Flappers Rule?
().

The modern feminist agitation is mainly due to disgruntled, elderly women who, having for one reason or another failed to realise their hopes, seek to revenge themselves for their fancied grievances on men. Soured and disappointed, they blame the men for all their woes . . .

Vilified in such manner, many post-war women began to feel that life

had dealt them a raw deal; and when the press began to suggest that, as

superfluous women, they should be shipped off to the Colonies like so many

unwanted criminals, there was indignation. Miss Florence Underwood,

representing the view of the Women’s Freedom League, wrote angrily to

the
Daily Chronicle
:

Marriage is not the only profession which women want. If there is a problem of surplus women, it will be solved not by sending women to exile in the Dominions to which they don’t want to go, but by giving them in their own country equal opportunities with men to work. If more professions and industries were opened out to women, and if the tops of such professions were not reserved for men by men, we should hear little of the surplus woman problem.

If it is a problem, it is a problem created by men, which should be solved by men.

To call any woman ‘surplus’ simply because she is not married is sheer

impertinence.

*



Singled Out

So what did the world have to offer a surplus young woman in the aftermath

of the First World War? For Winifred Haward, now twenty-three, the

answer was staring her in the face. It was the job that any educated woman

like her would automatically qualify for: teaching. As many as  per cent

of female graduates from Oxford and Cambridge colleges in the s got

jobs in the classroom. But Winifred was determined not to become a

teacher:

All our mistresses at the High School were spinsters and that seemed the predestined fate of anyone who entered the profession. I liked men’s company, I wanted to marry, and had romantic ideas of love. I knew very well that it was almost impossible because hardly any men of my own age had survived. Also I was

short and rather plump, with dark hair and dark blue eyes, strongly marked brows and a fair but not very good complexion. People’s opinion varied from ‘plain’ to ‘attractive’. I think I was attractive only when I ceased to be shy and was at ease.

For lack of other options, Winifred took a post as history lecturer at the

University of London, and started work on a tedious doctorate about

fifteenth-century merchants. It wasn’t what she wanted; she wanted a love

affair, a grand passion: ‘ ‘‘Great love survives the night and climbs the stars’’

. . . That was what I wanted and felt I could give, if there were someone

to take it.’

*

Like Winifred Haward, Vera Brittain felt nothing but heartache and anger

when the war ended; she was still only twenty-two and she had lost

everything she had ever cared about. Roland had died at the beginning of

the war, but its subsequent course had also taken from her her two best

friends and her beloved brother Edward. On Armistice Day the streets were

full of jubilant crowds, waving flags and shaking rattles. But Vera blocked

her ears; she felt there was no place for her in this ‘brightly-lit, alien

world . . .’ and the future seemed empty.

The war had interrupted Vera’s Oxford education after only one year;

now, more from inertia than from any sense of purpose, she decided to

return and finish what she had started. Numb and passive, at that point her

only aim was to fill the blankness of her future with as little exertion as

possible. She did not then foresee that the war, and Oxford, were ultimately to shape her political commitments. For now, she pinned what little hope she had left on the university. It would, she trusted, offer balm to her sore and bitter soul; she would make friendships; her fellow-students, though
Where Have All the Young Men Gone?



not of her generation, would be kind to her, they would listen to her with

respect for having survived the greatest event of history. Pity would mingle with admiration, there would be tranquillity to write and study – and maybe time would do the rest.

*

Gertrude Caton-Thompson continued to work for the Ministry of Shipping, first as a filing clerk, then as a secretary. In , when she was thirty, her previous suitor, Montagu Luck, tried again to persuade her to marry him – unsuccessfully. ‘Carlyon’s death had left me with the feeling that

nothing much mattered,’ she later recalled. After the Armistice she stayed

on as personal assistant to the Ministry head, with whom she attended the

Paris Peace Conference. Gertrude and her friends took a day off at the

Longchamp races, where she won , francs backing an outsider. With

the war over, there was every indication that she would resume the aimless

social round that her upbringing had accustomed her to. She had no money

worries, and life had much to offer in the way of visits to friends, hunting, golf, and foreign holidays. But now the door stood open. In  Gertrude returned to her earlier interest – archaeology. She enrolled for classes at

University College London, took a course in prehistoric archaeology, learnt

surveying, studied Arabic and museum collections, and immersed herself

in reading. ‘I allowed myself few social engagements unconnected with

archaeology.’ As soon as she could, she signed up to join an excavation at

Abydos in Upper Egypt.

Mysteriously and inexorably, the bones and shards of remotest African

prehistory had become of prime importance in Gertrude’s life. She had

learnt the hard way that death is the end, and that those who are gone are

irreplaceable, but her career was to be spent in reverently resurrecting and understanding the past. Here, she found meaning. For her, the dead were as real as the living, and through archaeology she rediscovered them. It was to absorb her for a lifetime.

Gertrude was not alone in seeking to make sense of a future without

marriage, even if her solution was an uncommon one. War had stolen the

hopes of a generation, but they were still young. And little by little, the

Surplus Women began to find that life had not come to an end after all.

The blank page was not the last page of the book.

.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’

The twilight state

War killed a generation of husbands; it also stole the future from those who would have become their wives. Wives kept house, cooked dinners with love, bore babies and nurtured them. Wives had companionship, homes

and respectability; they had smelt the orange blossom, walked down the

aisle, attracted and possessed a man. It seemed wives had the secret of

happiness. Where did that leave the women who were not wives, who

would never be wives? What could they do, and who could they be? Were

they to spend their remaining days consumed with sick envy? Were their

lives to be defined by their failure in the eyes of the world?

May Jones, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Vera Brittain and Winifred

Haward were Victorians. When they were born, between  and ,

the old Queen still sat on the throne, festooned in black, symbol of a society which revered her as submissive wife, fecund mother, loyal widow. That was a society in which the single woman knew her place. The rare exceptions – travellers like Marianne North or Mary Kingsley, social reformers like Octavia Hill or Florence Nightingale – only served by their striking

independence to prove the rule.

And that rule was unambiguous. The status quo demanded that male

members of the family support their female relatives, so genteel women

learnt French and fancy needlework rather than a trade or skill that could

earn money. The world of employment did not offer opportunities for

single women to become self-sufficient, so they were reduced to dependency. The demands of gentility were cruel. If you wanted to stay respectable you could be a governess or a ladies’ companion but you couldn’t enter any form of commerce. Normally, an unmarried middle-class daughter would live at home and care for her fractious and ailing parents until their death. Then, if she was lucky, she would be left just enough to live

on; late in life, she might find freedom of a sort. But if not, she moved on down the line and went to live with whichever male relative felt morally obliged to have her. Her status was lowly. If the male relative was married, the spinster yielded precedence to his wife.

Gradually, the majority of such women sank into what Jessica Mitford

‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’



described in her memoirs as ‘the twilight state of aunthood . . .’ Jessica’s Maiden Aunts were gentle and wispy, their lives suffused with an aura of tragic legend. ‘Why didn’t she ever marry?’ Jessica would ask. The stories