This area seemed as good as any for this book review, one of those societal factors that framed the 'Golden Age' and yet doesn't seem to be discussed much.
There's also an audio review of the book on NPR somewhere.
The Found Generation
Review of: Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
http://www.nysun.com/article/68776
In 1919, a young, well-to-do British war widow is invited to a ball in London. In the name of perseverance, she puts on a gown and fixes her hair. But when she arrives at the party, her first impression is that she has misunderstood the invitation. The room is full of brave-faced, ball-gowned women like herself; was it a women-only, hen party? At last, she spies a man in tails, then another through the crowd, and then a few others. These were the men who had survived. There were, it seemed, 10 women for every man. Remembering the ball decades later, she told her nephew: "It was as if every man you had ever danced with was dead."
How, asks Virginia Nicholson in her compassionate and provocative "Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War" (Viking Penguin, 312 pages, £20), did the deaths of more than 700,000 British men in the First World War affect the women they left behind? So accustomed have we become to the elegiac notion of a generation destroyed — the Flower of Europe crushed on the blood-soaked battlegrounds of Flanders — that we have neglected what their survivors achieved in their stead. Yes, Ms. Nicholson assents, the mass death of men broke hearts and ruined lives. But it also, at least in some cases, transformed women who would otherwise have been stay-at-home wives and mothers into trailblazing journalists, scientists, business executives, and explorers.
"Singled Out," just published in England, tells a story of making do and getting on, braced by moments of glamour and intrepid assaults on formerly male-only bastions of power and authority. Whether they sought to find a husband or to provide for themselves, unmarried women in postwar Britain faced formidable obstacles. As newspaper headlines screeched the findings of the 1921 census — Britain had 1 3/4 million more women than men — middle-class girls who dreamed of a grand passion had to content themselves instead with a lifetime of lonely evenings. In the words of one, "It is not only the Beloved that death takes. It is all the bright hopes."
Ms. Nicholson delves into lives impoverished by the lack of a male wage earner, uncovering business girls who resorted to soup kitchens intended for prostitutes because they did not earn enough to eat. Eccentrically rouged cat ladies and sublimating nannies make an appearance in this book, as, too, do the rare leggy beauties who seized upon the man shortage to stake out lives as fun-loving singletons.
Drawing upon an admirable fund of research, Ms. Nicholson very skillfully balances unmitigated tragedy with tales of opportunity redeemed from disaster. The death of her sweetheart propelled Gertrude Caton-Thompson from an upper middle-class girlhood filled with golf, bridge, and parties to a university course in archaeology. Never to marry, Caton-Thompson became one of Britain's pre-eminent archaeologists. Ms. Nicholson excavates a legion of bachelor women pioneers for whom spinsterhood proved "a liberation and a launching pad," from the first woman curator at the London Zoo to the first woman judge, from the first woman to gain admission to the Institute of Locomotive Engineers to the first woman stockbroker. While Ms. Nicholson pays respectful attention to shattered dreams of romance and babies, she also reminds her readers "how depleting and exhausting love can be, and how its converse — solitude, independence and the freedom to work — can liberate and fulfill." Ms. Nicholson is too empathetic a historian to disdain those who simply fell apart, but it is clear that her own sympathies lie with women who picked up the pieces, such as the biologist Miss Honor Fell, who joyfully anticipated "an orgy of staining slides" during a Sunday alone in her Cambridge laboratory.
What remains underdeveloped in Ms. Nicholson's account is the extent to which these women were indeed caught in a demographic vise. Despite the book's dramatic subtitle, "How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War," Ms. Nicholson acknowledges what historians have long since proved: The number of spinsters did not in fact change significantly from the prewar to the postwar years. There had been more than 660,000 "surplus women" in the Edwardian period. A sharp decline in emigration to the colonies following the war righted what would otherwise have been a more serious imbalance.
Nonetheless, Ms. Nicholson often refers to the "surplus two million" as if they were a demographic fact rather than a cultural mirage. In so doing, she muddies the implications of a good point that she makes early in the book — that the war removed the shame from spinsterhood, which "could be regarded as a misfortune rather than a fault." There are tantalizing hints throughout "Singled Out" that a number of the unmarried, especially women with professional aspirations and lesbians, seized upon the infamous 2 million statistic to justify their own life choices. They were swimming upstream to an extent that even Ms. Nicholson doesn't credit: Far from declining, marriage rates boomed and connubiality reigned in the aftermath of World War I.
To the generations that followed, the postwar spinster more often appeared a pathetic casualty of the European conflict than the harbinger of a new world. Rescue missions — chief among them Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" — have been dishearteningly infrequent. In this rewarding book, the women singled out for spinsterhood finally get their not-so-quiet due. The unlikely progenitors of both the female executive and Bridget Jones, "surplus women," as Ms. Nicholson puts it, "had plenty of surplus energy, and they expended it on everything hitherto regarded as 'male'." Like the nonagenarian whom Ms. Nicholson interviewed at a nursing home on the English coast, many lived surprisingly unspinsterlike lives: "I don't think that going to bed is a great achievement. I didn't do that much; and if I did, I knew exactly what I was doing. Next question!"
There's also an audio review of the book on NPR somewhere.
The Found Generation
Review of: Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War
http://www.nysun.com/article/68776
In 1919, a young, well-to-do British war widow is invited to a ball in London. In the name of perseverance, she puts on a gown and fixes her hair. But when she arrives at the party, her first impression is that she has misunderstood the invitation. The room is full of brave-faced, ball-gowned women like herself; was it a women-only, hen party? At last, she spies a man in tails, then another through the crowd, and then a few others. These were the men who had survived. There were, it seemed, 10 women for every man. Remembering the ball decades later, she told her nephew: "It was as if every man you had ever danced with was dead."
How, asks Virginia Nicholson in her compassionate and provocative "Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War" (Viking Penguin, 312 pages, £20), did the deaths of more than 700,000 British men in the First World War affect the women they left behind? So accustomed have we become to the elegiac notion of a generation destroyed — the Flower of Europe crushed on the blood-soaked battlegrounds of Flanders — that we have neglected what their survivors achieved in their stead. Yes, Ms. Nicholson assents, the mass death of men broke hearts and ruined lives. But it also, at least in some cases, transformed women who would otherwise have been stay-at-home wives and mothers into trailblazing journalists, scientists, business executives, and explorers.
"Singled Out," just published in England, tells a story of making do and getting on, braced by moments of glamour and intrepid assaults on formerly male-only bastions of power and authority. Whether they sought to find a husband or to provide for themselves, unmarried women in postwar Britain faced formidable obstacles. As newspaper headlines screeched the findings of the 1921 census — Britain had 1 3/4 million more women than men — middle-class girls who dreamed of a grand passion had to content themselves instead with a lifetime of lonely evenings. In the words of one, "It is not only the Beloved that death takes. It is all the bright hopes."
Ms. Nicholson delves into lives impoverished by the lack of a male wage earner, uncovering business girls who resorted to soup kitchens intended for prostitutes because they did not earn enough to eat. Eccentrically rouged cat ladies and sublimating nannies make an appearance in this book, as, too, do the rare leggy beauties who seized upon the man shortage to stake out lives as fun-loving singletons.
Drawing upon an admirable fund of research, Ms. Nicholson very skillfully balances unmitigated tragedy with tales of opportunity redeemed from disaster. The death of her sweetheart propelled Gertrude Caton-Thompson from an upper middle-class girlhood filled with golf, bridge, and parties to a university course in archaeology. Never to marry, Caton-Thompson became one of Britain's pre-eminent archaeologists. Ms. Nicholson excavates a legion of bachelor women pioneers for whom spinsterhood proved "a liberation and a launching pad," from the first woman curator at the London Zoo to the first woman judge, from the first woman to gain admission to the Institute of Locomotive Engineers to the first woman stockbroker. While Ms. Nicholson pays respectful attention to shattered dreams of romance and babies, she also reminds her readers "how depleting and exhausting love can be, and how its converse — solitude, independence and the freedom to work — can liberate and fulfill." Ms. Nicholson is too empathetic a historian to disdain those who simply fell apart, but it is clear that her own sympathies lie with women who picked up the pieces, such as the biologist Miss Honor Fell, who joyfully anticipated "an orgy of staining slides" during a Sunday alone in her Cambridge laboratory.
What remains underdeveloped in Ms. Nicholson's account is the extent to which these women were indeed caught in a demographic vise. Despite the book's dramatic subtitle, "How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War," Ms. Nicholson acknowledges what historians have long since proved: The number of spinsters did not in fact change significantly from the prewar to the postwar years. There had been more than 660,000 "surplus women" in the Edwardian period. A sharp decline in emigration to the colonies following the war righted what would otherwise have been a more serious imbalance.
Nonetheless, Ms. Nicholson often refers to the "surplus two million" as if they were a demographic fact rather than a cultural mirage. In so doing, she muddies the implications of a good point that she makes early in the book — that the war removed the shame from spinsterhood, which "could be regarded as a misfortune rather than a fault." There are tantalizing hints throughout "Singled Out" that a number of the unmarried, especially women with professional aspirations and lesbians, seized upon the infamous 2 million statistic to justify their own life choices. They were swimming upstream to an extent that even Ms. Nicholson doesn't credit: Far from declining, marriage rates boomed and connubiality reigned in the aftermath of World War I.
To the generations that followed, the postwar spinster more often appeared a pathetic casualty of the European conflict than the harbinger of a new world. Rescue missions — chief among them Muriel Spark's "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" — have been dishearteningly infrequent. In this rewarding book, the women singled out for spinsterhood finally get their not-so-quiet due. The unlikely progenitors of both the female executive and Bridget Jones, "surplus women," as Ms. Nicholson puts it, "had plenty of surplus energy, and they expended it on everything hitherto regarded as 'male'." Like the nonagenarian whom Ms. Nicholson interviewed at a nursing home on the English coast, many lived surprisingly unspinsterlike lives: "I don't think that going to bed is a great achievement. I didn't do that much; and if I did, I knew exactly what I was doing. Next question!"
