A Magnificent Regiment of Women.

 

Three quarters of a million British men lost their lives in the First World War, leaving behind not just widows and orphans but a generation of women for whom marriage was not to be an option, in this enjoyable and frequently inspiring book Virginia Nicholson tells the remarkable story of how they overcame hardship and prejudice to build successful independent lives and changing British society irrevocably in the process.

Until the second half of the nineteenth century women were seen, depending on their social class, as being either decorative creatures fit only for making polite conversation in drawing rooms or kitchen drudges, for both groups marriage was seen as their highest aspiration and their only hope of attaining financial security and social respectability. In such a society the lot of an unmarried woman past the age of thirty was not a happy one, the options open to her consisted of earning a meagre living as a school mistress if she had had the luxury of an education or having to fall back on the often grudgingly given charity of relatives, for women lower down the social scale failing to marry meant the certainty of a life of overworked penury in domestic service.

The rise of the Suffragette movement began the long process of liberating women from the drawing room and the kitchen sink, the role they played in the ammunition factories that fed the brutal meat grinder of the war to end all wars won women over the age of thirty the vote in 1918, but social attitudes remained determinedly resistant to change. Once the armistice had been signed the women who had had their first taste of independence during the war were ushered unceremoniously back to home, hearth and domestic bliss, creating a problem for the two million women for whom the change of attaining such things had been wiped out on the battlefields of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 />Flanders.

They were, as Nicholson ably demonstrates, caught between a moral panic over the threat posed to society by the ‘surplus women’, as they were dubbed by the more hysterical sections of the press and the harsh financial and emotional constraints imposed by attempting to get by on a single, usually small, income. Some of the most moving passages in Singled Out are those dealing with the sacrifices made by women who surrendered their own hopes of happiness to meet the demands of caring for their elderly and not always appreciative parents in an age when the state offered little in the way of support.

Using the testimony of the women themselves Nicholson describes how they made vintage lemonade out of the lemon handed to then by life, introducing her readers along the way to a selection of spirited characters who broke down the barriers imposed by a still patriarchal society with nothing more than their innate ability and sheer determination. Women such as Beatrice Gordon Holmes, known as Gordon to her friends, who rose from the typing pool to be the first female stockbroker on the London Stock Exchange and the Cambridge archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson along with a multitude of capable, though unsung women who diverted the passionate commitment that might have been devoted to the family they had been denied by circumstances beyond their control into being pillars of their local community, giving sterling service to schools, hospitals and charitable institutions that would have floundered without their support.

The message that emerges from the collective story of this remarkable generation of women is the sense of freedom and infinite possibility they discovered in lives that were not overshadowed by the restrictions imposed on their forebears, even those women for whom being single made life a hard slog against seemingly impossible odds emerge as showing a resilience sadly missing in modern Britons of either gender.

Any good history book should attempt to draw parallels between the period it covers and our own time, Nicholson strikes a dud note when she attempts to do so by equating the generation of women left single by  the war with the so called ‘Bridget Jones generation’, it feels forced and more like the sort of thing publishers insist the authors of ‘serious’ books insert in a patronising attempt to make them more accessible, there is also the small matter that the women Nicholson writes about would have probably thought the heroine of Helen Fielding’s popular, but not particularly insightful, novel decidedly ‘wet.’ She is on much surer ground when she asks if their enforced spinsterhood might have been a blessing in disguise for a generation of women and a war scarred nation that was desperately in need of being shaken out of the dusty entrapments of tradition.

This is a clever, well ordered and thoroughly engrossing book that pays much deserved tribute to a generation of single women who did much, much more than simply cycle to evensong through the mist.

Singled Out

How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War

Virginia Nicholson

Penguin

£8.99 312pp

ISBN 978-0-141-02062-4