Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After The First World War

by Virginia Nicholson

Virginia Nicholson's Singled Out is the touching and beautifully told story of the women who were left alone after World War I - a remarkable generation of women who were changed by war; and in their turn helped change society. In 1919 a generation of young women discovered that there were, quite simply, not enough men to go round, and the statistics confirmed it. After the 1921 Census, the press ran alarming stories of the 'Problem of the Surplus Women - Two Million who can never become Wives...'. This book is about those women, and about how they were forced, by a tragedy of historic proportions, to stop depending on men for their income, their identity and their future happiness. 'This is a ground-breaking book, richly nuanced with titbits of information, insight and understanding' Daily Mail 'Remarkably perceptive and well-researched ... Virginia Nicholson has produced another extraordinarily interesting work, sensitive, intelligent and well-written' Sunday Telegraph 'This in an inspiring book, lovingly researched, well-written and humane... the period is beautifully caught' Economist 'Brave, humane and honest' Observer Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. She has worked as a documentary researcher for BBC Television and her first book, Charleston - A Bloomsbury House and Garden (written in collaboration with her father, Quentin Bell), was an account of the Sussex home of her grandmother, the painter Vanessa Bell. Her second book, Among the Experiments in Living 1900-1939, was published by Penguin in 2002. She lives in Sussex.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Feminism, War, Womens, World War I, British Literature

393 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

VIRGINIA NICHOLSON was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1955. Her father was the art historian and writer Quentin Bell, acclaimed for his biography of his aunt Virginia Woolf. Her mother Anne Olivier Bell edited the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s Diaries.

Virginia grew up in the suburbs of Leeds, but the family moved to Sussex when she was in her teens. She was educated at Lewes Priory School (Comprehensive). After a gap year working in Paris she went on to study English Literature at King’s College Cambridge.

In 1978 Virginia spent a year living in Italy (Venice), where she taught English and learnt Italian. Returning to the UK in 1979 she re-visited her northern childhood while working for Yorkshire Television as a researcher for children’s programmes. In 1983 she joined the Documentary department of BBC Television.

In 1988 Virginia married screenwriter and author William Nicholson. Following the birth of their son in 1989, Virginia left the BBC and shortly afterwards the Nicholsons moved to East Sussex. Two daughters were born in 1991 and 1993.

Living in Sussex, Virginia became increasingly involved with the Trust that administered Charleston, home of her grandmother the painter Vanessa Bell, in due course becoming its Deputy Chairman. Her first book (co-authored with her father) CHARLESTON: A Bloomsbury House and Garden was published by Frances Lincoln in 1997. In 1999/2000 she made a ten-city tour of the USA to promote the book and Charleston itself.

In November 2002 Viking published AMONG THE BOHEMIANS - Experiments in Living 1900-1939 to critical acclaim. Its publication by Morrow, USA in February 2004 was followed by a sell-out lecture and publicity tour round five American cities.

SINGLED OUT - How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War, was published in August 2007. In this latest book Virginia Nicholson has set out to tell the stories of a remarkable generation of women forced by a historic tragedy to reinvent their lives. Singled Out received a spate of enthusiastic reviews which applauded it as a pioneering and humane work of social history. The work on this book was combined with her continuing commitment to the Charleston Trust.

Reviews

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book isn't exactly short of faults, but it's incredibly companionable.

Problems
- As several others have said, it's repetitive. I read the book in two chunks almost a year apart which reduced the effect - though by no means completely. Nicholson, a great-niece of Virginia Woolf, has tried to organise the book into themed chapters, but in order to try and present a rounded picture of life for many women, some ordinary diarists, others [semi] famous, who feature, details already mentioned under one theme keep appearing in other chapters.

-Despite information about some of these ladies being repeated, there was still frustratingly little about many of them: people about whom I wouldn't necessarily want to read a whole biography, but easily 20+ pages. Perhaps the strangest material to leave out was about Victoria Drummond, the first female marine engineer, who began her maritime career just after WWI. Whilst it was possible to understand how everyone else achieved their careers, I couldn't imagine sailors of that period accepting a woman as part of the crew, no matter her personality or talent. They did, with a little grumbling - but I had to find out the longer story from Wikipedia. There is less information online about Beatrice Gordon Holmes, the first female stockbroker, another great character from this book I'd like to hear more about, though at least there's a little more about her in the pages of Singled Out.

- Whilst Nicholson does highlight and criticise the ways in which media disparaged unmarried women in the interwar period (quite illogically as they had access to population statistics which would indicate it wasn't possible for a lot of them to marry) I felt that at times she leant too much towards pity in the narrative. Most of the women of the WWI generation had of course been brought up to expect marriage to be at the centre of their lives; some, of their own accord, didn't agree and for them the war was always massively liberating. Some grew to love a different way of life. Many others did experience a sense of loss and dislocation. It may be kind of tricky to reflect the times well and not feel sorry for them, but I would have opted for less of that kind of commentary whilst not omitting direct quotes to explain how these women felt.
- Nicholson appears to consider maternal instinct and the desire for children as a biological norm. (There are still women featured here who said they never felt any maternal instinct and they are not in the least criticised.) Okay, this isn't a sociology book, but she never speculates as to what extent it was the result of conditioning - of being brought up to expect to have children, or would have been there regardless, and whether the extent of this may vary between individuals.
- I think she actually adds pity to the stories of women who never had or loved another man after their beau / fiance died, or in a few cases, jilted them. Regardless that they did plenty of other things with their subsequent lives, this way of being seems to be looked down on now as a failure - for no good reason other than social convention. Ladies who eventually settled with someone else seem to get more praise - yet they are all people who lived their lives in a way that they felt best.

- I would have liked to see more material about competitive sportswomen.


Positives
- Simply, it was great hearing about a lot of interesting women - and often their own writing about their lives - who were either entirely unfamiliar, or whom I only vaguely knew of (e.g Winifred Holtby, a couple of the archaeologists. Though I'd already heard a lifetime's worth about Gladys Aylward *yawn* at school.)

- I find everything to like about the feminism of this period, and it was nice and almost odd to get misty-eyed about some of these women's achievements - such contrast with the anger I often feel towards current internet feminism and its infinitely petty squabbles.
As well as various individuals in pioneering careers, I admired those who campaigned for statutory rights, such as the Spinsters' Pensions Association (and felt disappointed in contemporary feminists' failure to exert more pressure over practical issues that would make a difference to a lot of ordinary women, such as childcare provision and lower fees on a par with many other European countries).

- Nicholson does her best to cover the experiences of women of all classes, and appears to make the most of the smaller amount of evidence about those in manual occupations.

- The book acknowledges the evils of the colonial era at various points, but understands the spirit of its subjects and the times by creating a sense of adventure, far more than guilt, around travel.

- It's never twee and isn't part of frilly neo-domesticity.

-Whilst there are a few people discussed who must have been very difficult to live with, the author never labels them. Perhaps the implication is that commentators of the period made enough criticism of women who didn't fit in, without adding to it.

- There is really quite a lot of material about lesbian (and a few bisexual) women, both those who were as out and proud as you could be in the twenties, and those who simply appeared to live together as two respectable ladies sharing expenses. There are a lot of very interesting women among the famous names and the big achievers and I found myself wishing I'd heard more about these when I was younger - absolutely excellent counterexamples to to Camille Paglia's characterisation of the lesbian scene as intellectually and aesthetically dull, which had a disproportionate influence on me in my teens and early twenties.

- The achievements of the generation of "Surplus Women", who broke down many barriers, makes it evident just how instrumental the First World War was for British feminism. (This is an entirely British, and 99% English, book.) Not only via women's work during the war - but all these women afterwards who, unable to marry, had to have jobs and create an independent way of life. They took the ball and ran with it.

- All the stories of the women who lived on a shoestring, the "business girls" and teachers and carers are incredibly companionable if you are sitting reading whilst eating special offer cheese on toast, sitting by the tumble dryer to keep warm and such. For all that I've written more here about the women who had extraordinary lives, the majority gets more space. And regardless of its faults, Singled Out presents a sense of 'how to be' that works if, for whatever reason, you don't have the kind of single life that's likely to conform to glamorous contemporary ideals. Its resolute focus on real experience rather than image is part of that.

[Wanda Pedersen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In recent years, I've discovered a delight in fiction set in the interwar years written by women of that era. I have been trying to determine why I like this time period so much and I think that this book has clarified things for me. The so-called surplus women who gained prominence as a societal worry started the changes necessary for my happy life now.

Many young men were killed in WWI, leaving a preponderance of single women with no hope of marriage. Up to this point, marriage, being a governess or a lady's companion were pretty much the only “career choices" available to “respectable” women. With the demographic imbalance of the sexes, things had to shift. Women had entered the workforce during the war and had developed a taste for self sufficiency. As time went by, they also saw the benefits of travel, education, and escape from the duties of wife and mother. I had previously been of the view that the 1960s and 70s were the decades when women's lives changed, but I realize now that this post-war period laid the foundation for modern feminism. Here was the beginnings of women's suffrage, education, careers, and reliable birth control. Women had escaped from the house and they weren't going to be returned to captivity quietly.

As a youngster, I looked around at my mother, aunts, and female neighbours and knew that I wanted something different. I never dreamed of weddings or babies. The pioneering surplus women helped to set up the world that allowed me to support myself, get two degrees, own my own home, traipse all over the world in pursuit of birds, and generally do my own thing. All without having to consult another adult or share my closet. Don't misunderstand, there's still pressure to conform, but I've always thought that marriage isn't a big achievement. But building your own life to your own standards? That's a big deal.

[Samar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad read, though often repetitive and sometimes idealistic. I could not escape the feeling that the author was often imposing her own (wishful)interpretation on the lives of the single women she chronicles. Concluding her brief narration of the life of feminist activist Cicely Hamilton, the writer states confidently, "..surely Cicely Hamilton never cast a backward glance at the kitchen,the nursery or even the drawing-room, or sighed for a married life that was never to be. Didn't that sense of a cause greater than herself, a glorious mission, suffuse her with idealistic pasions every bit as heated as the ardour that burns between two lovers?" Surely, Ms Nicholson, you jest. Surely, you cannot in all seriousness reduce human needs to this either/or dichotomy that you try to convince us must, surely, work, for these bachelorettes of the early 1920's? And surely, you wouldn't dare draw out the same conclusion if you were chronicling the lives of bachelors who, by some accident in history, were forced to endure a life without women as spouses or partners?
Despite the rich detail and seemingly arduous research that went into this book, the author shoots herself in the foot by trying to hard to convince us that out of hardship blossoms opportunity, and that perhaps the two million English women left without husbands or partners beginning the early 1920's ended up better off than those who married. She makes a convincing case that it was the imposed singlehood that allowed these women to pave the way for the changes that eventually led women in the latter part of the century to be emancipated. This may be true, but she cannot overlook the fact that these woman must have paid a terrible price for this, in years of solitude and loneliness and fear for their futures. This kind of suffering is not easily uncovered in historical research, and although the author does quote extensively from the memoirs written by some of these women in their old age, the kind of suffering they would have endured is not such they would have readily admitted, not to their friends, companions, and relatives, and perhaps not overtly in their memoirs. Yes, the accomplishments of many of these women can be dug out, listed, and admired, but their real story, will, for the most part, never be told

[pizca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellas Solas. Un mundo sin hombres tras la gran guerra. Virginia Nicholson.
°
°
En este libro Nicholson analiza la situación de casi dos millones de mujeres en Inglaterra que debido a la cantidad de hombres que murieron tras la PGM, pierden la posibilidad de casarse pasando a formar un grupo conocido como del excedente. 

"La mujer de hoy en día exalta con frecuencia su independencia, su relación satisfactoria con la soledad y la libertad. Por el contrario, las mujeres de la generación de entreguerras se sentían ridículas. A la soledad se sumaba la pobreza y la alienación" (pag190).


A pesar de que la gran mayoría de estas mujeres se sintieron infelices, esta situación supuso para otra gran parte de este grupo, la posibilidad de ocupar puestos de trabajo que antes eran solo para hombres, viajar, formar asociaciones, descubrir la sexualidad fuera del matrimonio, luchar por los derechos de la mujer, y en muchos casos ser conscientes de que el matrimonio no les habría hecho más felices.


" si la guerra hurto a dos millones de mujeres la posibilidad de contraer matrimonio también les facilito el desempeñar un papel muy diferente... "(pag 143).

°
Me ha resultado una lectura fantástica, es verdad que puede parecer repetitivo en sus casi cuatrocientas páginas, pero es que Nicholson hace una labor de documentación admirable.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating book! Using letters, autobiographies, novels, and her own interviews, Virginia Nicholson explores the lives of the Surplus Women of the Great War. Of course, I've known about the huge numbers of war dead and the permanently wounded, but somehow I'd never spent much time thinking about the women they left behind. If I thought of them at all, I suppose I assumed they mourned their lost husbands/fiancés/boyfriends for a period of time and then moved forward in their lives. I'd never really considered that many would never marry simply because there weren't enough men available. Very interesting to read about their lives as (usually) underpaid workers, aunts who were expected to be free to babysit whenever called upon, lonely women who joined forces with other lonely women (perhaps lesbians, perhaps not, but usually assumed to be and made fun of for it). They were also resented for "stealing" men's jobs, even though they were forced into employment because they had to support themselves. There were a lot of sad stories in this book. However, there were also many stories of personal success--women who found great satisfaction in their lives as singletons, who became pioneers in careers and who helped change society in ways that have helped improve our own lives. A history that deserves to be told. I'm very glad to have read it.

[Gurpreet Dhariwal · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Everyone now knows that marriage is not the only route to fulfillment, but the media and the internet tell of more lonely hearts and solitary singles than ever before.” ― Virginia Nicholson

I finished off reading this beautiful book a few days ago and I am so proud of women who fought against injustice, derogatory remarks, and women’s equality rights during the First World War era. I certainly feel I was one of them. This I can say after staying true to myself rather than following the herd’s mentality.

Having a family is not a bad deal, but it is not everything in life.

Some women mentioned how love is not everything to go on forever. Some were of the opinion that men don’t like to stay in a truthful relationship with one woman, and you sacrifice a lot while taking care of their household chores. Some accepted their fate as single women because they knew the majority of men died while fighting for the country and others were asked to leave the country to be available somewhere else.

While reading this book page by page on the Kindle I was questioning myself who feeds us this fake idea of worshipping the man in this world? If a woman with a man and child is accepted wholeheartedly then why cannot single women be treated in the same way? And I am not just talking about the First World War scenario here because people roll their eyes in the 21st century knowing you are single and wish to spend your entire life that way.

When will I wake up to the world that will stop judging women? When will I meet men who will praise women more for their singlehood than women themselves? When will I see God making equal rights for every gender on this planet Earth? If not in this birth, then maybe never. Because these issues haven’t been given much importance in so many years then what makes me think it will change now just in a glimpse of an eye?

These women in that era worked so hard to make their ends meet. They survived the war and the death of the men in their families. They survived betrayal of the society and geared up again to face the world with new light and hope. They were treated like a piece of trash for their tragic fate, yet they stood firm on the ground by living life one day at a time.

What do I get to learn out of all this?

I have learned about resilience, courage, and bravery from them. I felt their loneliness, not in terms of sexual desires but a yearning of giving birth or raising a child on their own. I felt their empty hands and sore eyes. I felt their pain as my own. Some of them made peace with the fact that God didn’t want them to experience marital bliss. While some thanked God for not allowing any man to touch them ever.

One of the women gave up on the idea of marriage because she was raising her bedridden sister, and she knew no man would have entertained her sister in his house considering it more like a burden than a blessing. She believed in God and accepted his decision of living that life in the service of someone else than her own. How many of us truly think about life this way?

Life has become a competition for many people, and they believe having a family is like going to the grocery shop. You have that item in your kitchen, I have it in mine too. What a small way of looking at things when God didn’t make this life equal for anyone in this world. He segregated miseries for a reason. His aim was clear that every human must become a human first.

My Two Cents

I would want every woman and man to read this book and decide for yourself. Having a family is not always about washing their clothes and buying the groceries with no willingness of waking up with them the next day. No abode is happy ever. No human remains happy ever. God hasn’t blessed us with a kind of peace of mind. We get one thing, and we start craving for another. And this need not be in materialistic terms.

Just look around, and you would see what exactly people call “peace” these days and they make me laugh. I went to the grocery shop the other day, and there came this lunatic man who must be around 50 years old, and the first dialogue he uttered with a smiling face was “Hey, that man in our neighborhood he died, He got off.” The shopkeeper immediately reacted and said, “You are talking as if you won’t ever die.”

I pay a lot of attention to how people react when someone dies, or some kind of misery surrounds them. It says a lot about the people and the world we live in.

If you are fond of reading history books, then it surely is a must-read for you all.

Thank you for reading my words.

[Aitziber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wartime has a way of causing social change, particularly before nuclear warfare, when soldiers did a lot of the fighting. As such, the death of thousands of British soldiers of prime marrying age in World War I resulted in around two million women who would never find a husband. There simply weren't enough men to marry.

That was a generation of women who had been brought up to see marriage as the only option for a decent woman, whose only examples of single women were sexless, unfulfilled, buttoned Fräulein Rottenmeiers. It was now up to them to figure out how to fit in a country that would rather see them leave England and marry abroad, before they'd cease to ostracize them, start paying them living wages, or allowing them to study alongside men.

Nicholson's book covers the gamut of female experience. From the working class women who had to care for their parents on a meager salary, to the trailblazing women who made strides in careers previously reserved to men, and made it easier for women that came after them. Social activists such as Florence White, and the nannies of the titled class who sublimated their desire for children into their charges. If you want to read about a whole lot of women working and living on their own, this is your book. Writers, models, teachers, engineers, it's got them all.

As a look into how hard women in the 30s had it, Singled Out is great. It paints a very complete picture of the way these women were oppressed. For instance, teachers were paid a lot less than men per year, because it was assumed that men had to take care of a family, while paying single women too much may drive them to spend what remained after bills in useless stuff, such as dresses. The possibility that women may also have a family of their own to feed was non-existent. Female teachers were fired when they married, which drove many of them dating men of little means to have to live in sin. They risked exposure and scandal, which would have led them to be fired anyway.

I found it to be a very inspiring book. While possibilities for women have certainly improved, we still live in a culture that's enamored with marriage and babies. Reading Singled Out will, I'm sure, give any woman thinking of staying single (or divorcing!) role models, confidence that it can be done, and even a wide variety of careers and lifestyles to consider. (Unless you want to be a wet nurse. I don't know that those are in such high demand anymore.)

If there's anything to reproach Singled Out for, and other reviews have mentioned it, is how repetitive it is for a good chunk of the book (easily one third, perhaps even half). The reader will be constantly reminded that hundreds of thousands of men died or disappeared, that there was a national debate about the Surplus Women, and that women were inconsolable when the man they envisioned marrying died in service. On the other hand, I was hoping that the book would not ignore lesbian women, and it did not disappoint. There's a long section about women such as Radclyffe Hall and how they dealt with a society that both pushed women to share living arrangements (see: lower salaries for women), while very much looking down on homosexuality.

For those interested in Women's Studies, this is a good book with some tortured prose.

[Toast · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is very interesting the same as really liked it? because VN raised some great points, the research is impecable but a page turner it ain't. In fact sometimes it is quite heavy weather to wade through such dense text, the conclusion especially. Yet, the tales of various womanfolk who did break out and make a huge leap forward, and those who didn't but mindfully plodded on, are handled with equal aplomp. These 'Surplus Women' helped shape not just the UK but the globe and we owe a huge debt to that entire generation. It makes a fascinating area of social study, one I am excited about so much was in flux, but VN is caught between two stools is it a text book or a commentory? Such a shame, there is so much there.
Toast

[Melanie Baker · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting look at the consequences of history-shaping events. In this case, due to the carnage of WWI, after there were ~2 million "Surplus Women" in Britain -- a major gender disparity due to the number of men killed in the war. As a result, few of these women would ever marry and have families (which was what women were *for* in those days).

Additionally, the numbers of dead were much higher in certain echelons of society, i.e. the young men of the upper classes were more likely to become officers, and thus more likely to die, being at the front of so many charges with their men. As a result, marriage prospects were even more bleak for upper class young women who, even more than working class women, were expected to marry, bear children and... well, not really do much else of anything.

Societially spinsters were often derided, seen with pity or contempt, mocked, and viewed with suspicion. Often they were even blamed for their spinster states, which makes about as much sense as you'd expect from "society". The wealthy had some freedom from this that money brings, though in the upper classes they had their own prisons of opinion given that expectations were generally even more rigid.

However, the lack of availability of traditional lifestyles meant that, for some women at least, they could pursue careers and lives unthinkable even 20 years before. Earning PhDs, running companies, travelling the world... Of course, at the same time, many, many women lived in poverty, earning little and working endless hours in often deplorable conditions at the low-end jobs (often clerical or retail) that they were qualified for, and living in what was frequently squalor in rented lodgings.

All these things led to vast societal change, however. Women crusaded for pensions for spinsters -- before, you could work your whole life and be entitled to nothing on retirement, when a woman who was married for even one day was entitled to a comfortable pension if her husband was killed in the war. The suffrage movement really became a force at this time as well.

And, of course, simply being tired of war and death and the still-clinging tendrils of Victorian society, people -- but women especially -- cast off many restrictions, and hiked their skirts, cropped their hair, got educated and built careers, and went drinking, dancing, and had love affairs. (And basically once the horse was out of the barn, there was no putting it back...)

All in all, there's a fair bit of repetition in the book, about the prejudices the women faced, about the loneliness and longing many never really got over, etc. And it can be a really depressing read. Especially when you realize that, in certain ways, not that much has changed in nearly 100 years.

However, given that time period is History now, that any of those women left are centenarians, and that it's been over six decades since the end of WWII, it's fascinating to try and wrap your brain around that world and what normal life looked like compared to now.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro molto interessante e molto godibile che racconta l'esperienza di tutte le donne che si ritrovarono in surplus dopo la Prima Guerra Mondiale - al giorno d'oggi sembra quasi imbarazzante, ma in un'epoca in cui la società voleva le donne sposate e non le voleva lavoratrici, ritrovarsi statisticamente impossibilitate al matrimonio per i troppi decessi avvenuti in guerra risultò in una vera e propria 'piaga' sociale.
Da un lato questo situazione agevolò l'indipendenza delle donne, dall'altra si vorrebbe che la realizzazione di poter vivere una vita piena anche senza un marito e dei figli avvenga per propria libera scelta, e non a causa di un tragico evento storico...

[Kathryn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just realised that I forgot to do a review for this one when I finished it a couple of weeks ago. It was an interesting, if at times sad, read. It made me very grateful that I live now, with life being better in general for both married and single women.

It was sad to read about the women who wanted a husband and family and felt that they had lost their sense of purpose without this path. But it was also inspiring to read about the women who viewed the lack of men as an opportunity to succeed in their chosen areas of work, against all the odds, and mostly without the approval of society.

[Kathryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Usually these social histories have at least one part which sags or just doesn't hold your attention but this kept me entertained all the way through. It is full of great research but it is the individual stories holding the book together which grip you and keep you reading. Just a fascinating period of time - the great sadness of those who lost love in the war, the drudgery of life in a single room, deciding if you could afford to put the heater or or not, the trap of being a spinster without wanting to be or risking derision for trying to make inroads into male dominated work environments. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

[Shatterlings · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this, these women were remarkable characters with their passion for life, their cats and their eccentricities. I would have liked to have met them. I will now say that " marriage would have eclipsed my unusual talents". Or " that anyone can get married but it takes a good valiant woman to remain unmarried".

[❀⊱RoryReads⊰❀ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

[Karin · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a rather interesting topic, how much I liked the writing varied. That said, I'm glad to have read it. I have opted to round up because I think this is an important part of women's history, and it's impossible to deny that what went on in England had an impact on what was going on in Canada and the States. Due to the scope of this book, it is limited to British women, primarily from England.

One of the things this book does is show how the 1 in 4 single British women after WW I (not that the rate of being a spinster was that much higher, apparently) eventually wrought changes in rights for and attitudes about spinsters. There were a number of other factors, of course, such as the time in history, the rise of electrical appliances (it was quite enjoyable to learn about a women who made it her mission to encourage women, married and single, to make use of electrical appliances.) They fought for change in attitudes about sex, birth control, pension, what women could and couldn't do and a variety of other things. Not all of the women, of course, since many could barely survive on the long hours they worked. It's not just birth control that has freed up many things for women, it's also electricity, modern plumbing and various and sundry other things.

One of the things that had an impact is that officers back then came from the higher British classes, and they died at a higher rate that enlisted men. It was often--but not always--women who had at more education or some private means (even if not enough to cover all of what they needed) who were able to break many barriers.

[Ainsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating read - I knew of this part of history, but had never really researched it or thought through any of the ramifications. I found it both moving and thought-provoking (imagine being told by your headmistress, at a time when it was so taken for granted that girls would marry that it was near impossible to think of any other way of life, that nine out of ten of them leaving school would remain single for life...not unlike a university graduate nowadays being informed that the job market was such that he/she would be guaranteed to spend the rest of life on the dole). My only objection is with some of the examples from popular culture of the time - Dorothy L. Sayers, for instance, is pegged as unsympathetic/mocking toward single women on the basis of one sentence in "Gaudy Night" about a badly dressed Oxford graduate, while recurring characters like Miss Climpson, Letitia Martin, Harriet Vane's friends Sylvia and Eilunedd, etc etc, are ignored. Yes, it's a small point, but when an author does this it makes me wonder a) what other 'facts' that I'm not so familiar with have been adjusted, and b) was the rest of the research that careless?

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Virginia Nicholson's true story of the generation of women left without husbands after the Great War. Read by Miriam Margolyes.

1/5. Virginia Nicholson's true story of the generation of women left without husbands.

2/5. Not all men are happy with the amount of spinsters after the Great War.

3/5. True story of the women left alone after the Great War. The 1920s was a brave new world.

4/5. True story of the women left alone after the Great War. Exclusion led women to pair up.

5/5. It takes a valiant woman to remain unmarried.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jvy2t

[Sonia De la rosa · Rating 3 out of 5]

*3, 5
Un libro muy interesante en que la autora analiza lo que supuso la muerte de casi toda una generación de hombres, en la Gran Guerra, para las mujeres británicas. Casi dos millones de mujeres, que habían sido educadas que su meta en la vida era casarse y tener hijos, vieron que sus expectativas de casarse eran casi nulas. La opinión pública les hicieron creer que habían fracasado, que eran las mujeres sobrantes.
Muchas de esas mujeres se tuvieron que enfrentarse al hecho de que no iban a compartir su vida con un compañero, sin el amor de unos hijos, la soledad... Estaban frustradas, pero también fue la oportunidad para esas mujeres de encontrar su independencia.

Los años posteriores a la I Guerra Mundial fue cuando las mujeres tuvieron los primeros éxitos de la lucha feminista.

La guerra y el sufragio cambiaron la naturaleza de las ambiciones femeninas y aportaron una complejidad y una diversidad nuevas. Aún se pensaba que el matrimonio era una vía de realización personal, pero la imagen de la boda, que antes estaba gravada en la conciencia de las mujeres como la solución a todo, empezaba a desvanecerse e iba siendo sustituida por otro tipo de sueños. El sueño del poder político, de la independencia económica, el sueño de un cargo de responsabilidad, de tener una vida pública, de lograr metas profesionales y personales, de explorar y de expresarse..., todos ellos se hacían realidad, y cada vez más mujeres demostraban que eran factibles.

Esas mujeres protagonizaron un cambio social. Esas mujeres fueron las que abrieron las puertas para las que vinieron después. No se conformaron con ser las tías solteronas excéntricas que echaban una mano a la familia en el cuidado de los sobrinos, de los abuelos. Fueron las que abrieron las puertas de Oxford, las primeras doctoras, las primeras ingenieras, corredoras de bolsa, periodistas, etc, etc...

La autora profundiza en temas personales, en como esas mujeres tuvieron que enfrentarse a su deseo sexual, a la soledad, a su falta de cariño...

No le doy más puntuación porque a veces el libro me ha parecido repetitivo. La autora incidía en temas y conceptos que ya habían sido tratados. Aún ha sido una lectura con la que he aprendido mucho.

[Mientras Leo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha parecido una lectura muy interesante. Me hubiera gustado que avanzara más en el tiempo

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Qué libro más necesario en estos tiempos para darse cuenta que no han cambiado nada las cosas en casi 110 años para las mujeres solteras, ya sea por opción u obligación (privilegiar lo laboral, los viajes, el cuidado de familiares, por necesidad económica) o porque no hay más opciones (en este caso, por la muerte de muchos hombres durante la Gran Guerra). Revisando casos de mujeres de la época (como Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby y Gertrude Caton-Thompson, entre otras) Nicholson nos muestra sus penas, sus alegrías, su trabajo y sus desvelos ante la situación de ser "solterona" y las diferentes formas en que lo afrontaron. 

[Sjervey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This extraordinary book looks at the generation of British women who were left without any prospect of marriage after over 2 million British soldiers were killed or maimed in World War I, women who were callously dismissed by politicians and media as “Surplus Women.” These women were born into a world where it was assumed the only proper role for a woman was as a wife, where unmarried women were derided as “Old Maids,” and where the only job opportunities for these failed wannabe wives were as teachers or nurses. WWI gave them a glimpse of the world of work when their efforts were needed to replace the men who had gone off to fight, but that glimpse was fleeting as some men returned and women were expected to relinquish their jobs to these returned heroes.
Most men in planning positions dreaded the thought of all these “surplus women,” unchecked by the maturing roles of wife and mother, yielding to raging hormones and disrupting the domestic tranquility of peacetime England. The women had other ideas.
For many, perhaps most, of these women, the war not only deprived them of the chance for marriage, it also deprived them of the loved ones they had confidently expected to marry. They had lost husbands, fiances, intended spouses as well as brothers, cousins and friends. The death toll was staggering. The average life expectancy of a lieutenant was two weeks. The sorrow must have been all-pervasive.
The caste system still dominated life. Upper classes filled the ranks of higher officers, lower classes provided privates, corporals and sergeants. The middle classes filled the most dangerous ranks, lieutenants and captains. While lower class losses in the war meant that only enough men survived to provide husbands for four of every ten lower class women, the toll in the middle classes was even more staggering: only one of every ten women had a statistical chance of finding a husband.
Despite the sorrow of lost family and friends, first to the war, then to the flu epidemic of 1919, despite the lost hopes and dreams and, in fact, the lost world of their youth, life went on and women forged new paths in every walk of life. A fledgling suffragette movement now had the momentum of an entire generation of women who had to support themselves.
Singled Out, describes in largely anecdotal format, the triumphs of many of these women, offering them as examples of what was transpiring throughout England. It is an inspiring survey of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of unprecedented sorrow and tragedy, but is, moreover, a tale of women achieving a new freedom to find themselves because they were the survivors of this sorrow and tragedy. These women found meaningful lives without marriage, without children, precisely because the crumbled world order of their youth was cleared away permitting them new paths.
Singled Out is a celebration, of women, of freedom, of hope. There is an underlying current that these successful lives would not have been possible if the women had also been wives and mothers, a current which was certainly correct in that time and in a world where women in careers were in uncharted territory. There is also no room in this volume for a review of how the liberation of women documented
here was also liberating for men. The challenge remains of finding paths which allow all to find their own paths, family, career or both. Singled Out is an invaluable look at some of the pioneers to whom we owe so much.
P.S. I expect it is the case that similar stories must have emerged in France and Germany, which were similarly devastated by the stupidity of WWI. I would like to find such accounts. It is also the case that many women were overwhelmed by the losses of WWI. I regard Sally Bowles of Cabaret (I Am a Camera) as one such case.

[Jenna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is both a well-written and interesting cultural history/gender studies history of women in the post-war years and also highlight some of the potential problems the besiege historians trying to accurately portray life during/after the war and how "accuracy" sometimes wars with perceptions and memories of the war.

I think, as far as I can tell, the perception that Britain had lost a generation of its best men (often cited as the civil servant class) is true. This was the view held both those living through the war/immediately after it and the way it is perceived in predominate cultural memory. Ms. Nicholson is able to pull excellent examples from period journals and articles that support this view.

However, some historians, notably Jay Winter, argue that this view, as cherished as it might have been, is not statistically supportable. In passing he noted that the idea that two million without husbands is "nonsense." As he argues in his seminal work, The Great War and the British People: Second Edition, more men actually left Britain (i.e. through emigration), than died in the Great War.

Finally, despite using a wide range of sources, this still is largely a history of middle-upper-class women, who were literate and, at least to a degree, educated. While this is not necessarily a draw-back, its bias (however unintentional) needs to be kept in the back of one's mind while reading.

The citation of sources, with a few exception, was good, and I appreciated the footnotes. It would be an interesting book to read in tandem with Jay Winters' book or other reassessments.

[Sally George · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt compelled to read this book when I came across this paragraph in the Family Tree Magazine - "In 1917, the senior mistress of the Bournemouth High School for Girls made a sobering announcement to the sixth form assembly: 'I have come to tell you a terrible fact,' she bagan, ominously. 'Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed.' On a positive note, the mistress explained that 'the war has made more openings for women than ever before,' but she cautioned that, 'you will have to struggle'. Unwilling to 'marry down,' many of the young girls would indeed end up as elderly spinsters." After reading the book, I thought of my own family and my Great Aunts. In Scotland, on my father's side Aunty Annie never married and it was said that there were not enough men to go round. She took over the family fish and chip shop business and looked after her disabled brother. All the Aunts on my mother's side in the Lincolnshire fens got married, in fact my Grandmother found a man because of the War. Her brother died in the army out in India from dysentery. The man in the next bed brought his belongings home to the family and my Grandmother married him. This book explains amongst other things how hard it was for women to take a man's job in order to survive. They were looked upon as selfish, even thinking about it, as a man would have a wife and family to provide for.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I should prefer to have been a man: then I could have had a career and marriage too", said Dame Evelyn Sharp, one of the first women to head a government department. Almost two million women more than men left over in Britain after World War One. Most had no hope of marriage, but back then there was so little choice and even women were saying a woman without a husband and children was a failure. Despite that, as Dame Evelyn showed, this was the real era when women's liberation took off. Those that had had jobs and responsibilities during the war did not want to be sent back to the kitchen or nursery, and so, despite all the obstacles, many assumed tasks that were once restricted to men and opened the at for others.

[Sophie Patrikios · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. The home front fascinates me and I loved 'Nella Last's Diary' so thought I'd love this. Sure enough initially even the shortest excerpts from real diaries and accounts were able to move me to tears, but then the author's own voice turned me off completely. I found the interchangeable quoting from works of fiction, 'real people's' diaries and biographies of famous women e.g. Vera Britten very disorienting and fairly soon I lost my sense of connection with material I usually find very compelling. In summary, I wish this had just been an un-narrated anthology.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely fascinating examination of the "surplus women" of post WW1 England. At the time, many (most) were raised for two purposes - marriage and raise kids. After the massive losses in the war, there simply weren't enough men of "marriageable age," leaving two million women to face a future they had not prepared for.

I really enjoyed the exploration into individual lives of several women, scattered throughout the book are vignettes that introduce these ladies and tell their stories.

Some are heartbreaking, others inspiring, and all are interesting. A very worthwhile read!

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Becomes repetitive within the first 100 pages, but does give a unique perspective on a generation of women who went unmarried and had to deal with the mind numbing idiocy of common culture... you can just imagine, the portrayals in the media of the desperate women, the needy ones, and the stereotype of the ones who tried to find happiness outside of societies narrowly defined terms of what happiness as a women SHOULD be. F**k society.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Virginia Nicholson's true story of the generation of women left without husbands after the Great War. Read by Miriam Margolyes.

[Geraldine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is very strong in its strength and embarrassingly amateur in its area of weaknesses. The writer appears to have done a degree in English Literature, and this is very obvious in her approach.

Strengths: It is very readable and benefits from the depth of research - reading of private diaries and memoirs as well as published sources, including some long out of print, and interviews with very elderly women providing rich and vivid first person testament.

Often, reading about the achievements of these women made me very excited and almost envious of their opportunities to spend their life pursuing a vocation despite me knowing that as someone two or three generations younger, I had far more opportunities, partly (largely?) because of their efforts and sacrifices. Some amazing vignettes of the lives of remarkable women, some of whom I should have heard of, but hadn't, some that were little more than names, a few I did know something about already, and others who would never spend any time in the public eye but for this book.

She wrote engagingly about these women and gave some sense of the difficulties some of them faced - such as very meagre incomes, and the inbuilt misogyny of society.

However, the weaknesses stemmed from her lack of proper academic or professional training in methodology. She comes from a background where it's just assumed that one becomes a writer and, as I note above, she writes exceptionally well. But she has written a book inspired by a statistic, and it is clear, with dull thudding repetitiveness, that she has no idea about statistics or data. Her level of numerical ignorance runs so deep that she doesn't even know that she's ignorant about it, or that there is something to be ignorant about. I would hope that if a Social Scientist wrote a book about demography they would be aware of the importance of sound data and data analysis, but this writer crashes on making so many statistical faux pas that I could write a long review just by listing them.

She writes from a position of middle class privilege, having done a degree in a Mickey Mouse subject at a University that selects/selected students on the basis of social class. In the acknowledgements she thanks several friends: I recognised one of the names as being one of the most crushing class based snob in today's news media.

The book is inspired by the 1921 census, which confirmed that which was already known - the large number of 'surplus women' caused by the slaughter of men in World War 1. She reports the surplus as 2 million, although that figure is never challenged. She repeats several times the nonsensical warning of the Bournemouth headmistress that only 1 in 10 of her female pupils would marry - and she proves that by citing the anecdotes of two people. She is ignorant of the basic statistical/social science concept of 'confirmation bias'. I have seen reference to that 2 million figure having been debunked, although a quick Google didn't provide for me any specific proof of the debunking. However, she made a passing reference that provided the basis of my first 'so what' question. She mentions that there was half a million surplus women before WW1, because more men than women went to work in the colonies (and other reasons, too, which she didn't mention!)

Edit: I have subsequently found an authoritative source that debunks the 2 million figure - it's closer to 1 million, so still remarkable. But the laziness in the author who wasn't capable of questioning lazy clichés really does cast doubt on the reliability of her research -
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/cen... provides a narrative, tables and graphs on the 1921 census.

She fails to explain the composition of those 'surplus women'. I don't know from her writing how many of them were elderly widows who may have had children (and, hopefully, not lost them all in the war or flu pandemic) and grandchildren. Nor does she state how many of them were young war widows (or widows through other causes) who had children and perhaps a widow's pension - she makes one reference to the envy of the Surplus Women of war widows living comfortably on a pension.

I don't think this author, or any author, should indulge in what-iffery - ie if there hadn't been a War, how many men would have died young anyway, through industrial 'accidents', in road collisions (would car use have become more widespread more quickly?) and the numerous other non-military reasons that young men generally die in greater proportion to young women - or how many extra women survived as a result of not being the victims of domestic violence or dying in childbirth.

However, she fails to provide any substantial context. She makes fleeting reference to middle class women who worked long before World War 1, but doesn't offer any statistical analysis for context. And she offers almost no contrast with the lives of married women. She makes sweeping generalisations about married women being forced to stay at home, making a very basic mistake that 'middle class women' = all women. Almost no mention of the reality of many married working class women who weren't barred from the professions because of their gender but, as in the 19th century, continued to work at laborious menial jobs throughout pregnancy and motherhood - in factories and mills, as domestic servants or chars, taking in laundry or 'lodger children', or doing piecework in 'cottage industries' or working on the farm with their husband (and parents in law, and children).

Perhaps the figures disguised the high number of men who simply weren't marryable - those with shell shock (and not just those in psychiatric hospitals) and also those with severe disabilities that made them unemployable or disfigurements that made them physically and sexually repulsive. She trivialises their plight in one passing mention. I infer from her general attitude throughout the book that the ones that mattered would have survived on a private income or supported by wealthy family members; the rest, although they were thrown into poverty and suffered greatly in the 1930s Depression, were non-people because they were lower middle or working class, and hadn't even gone to Oxford or Cambridge.

And this is the fatal flaw of this book - the focus on mainly middle class women, often from affluent backgrounds, many of whom went to University, and almost total ignoring working class women. Obviously, academics, senior civil servants and teachers will have left documentary evidence of their existence; many of the working class women were barely literate, or if literate, were far less likely to indulge in diary keeping and memoir writing. So, yes, the book was necessarily driven by the availability of source material, but hindered by the writer's blind ignorance of the existence and importance of data.

She fails to grasp the basic difference between 'proportion' and 'number' - a greater proportion of ex-public school junior officers were killed, so in Nicholson's mind this means that more women from that class were surplus. It's difficult for me, the casual reader, to provide hard stats on the numbers of people in various classes, especially when classes are ill defined eg is a lowly clerk with little chance of promotion sitting at a desk in an office attached to a factory more similar to the machine operators in the factory or to the solicitors, bankers and country parsons that constitute most of the population in Nicholson's mind?

She finishes the book by mourning the loss of ex-Balliol students (Balliol is a college at Oxford University; she assumes that people know that, because, you know, who doesn't!), and speculating whether they would have been a force for change for the good or would have maintained the status quo ante. She doesn't mourn the young men from other Universities, and the Grammar School boys, let alone the majority with limited formal education, who would have pushed forward scientific, technological and medical progress, or as administrators or Trade Unionists, or any number of other occupations may have taken forward the social changes many of which were were already happening or about to happen before WW1.

There are other flaws in her methodology. For example, she quotes at some length from Vera Brittain, perhaps more so than any other writer. I re-read Testament of Youth early this year and it's understandable why Nicholson used this as a source. However, as I knew, and as transpires in this book, Brittain wasn't entirely surplus. Yes, she had lost her fiancé in the war (and I'm not the only reader who feels she was more in love with the idea of being in love than she was with a man she barely knew and hardly spent any time with). She spent the years between age 22 and about 30 as a singleton (she married at 31), but she did marry and she did have children.

But I also read Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations, and Gertrude Bell gets almost no mention, despite her being a wealthy woman who lived an amazing life as a single woman long before WW1 or indeed before many of these women were born.

Other niggles included the author's unquestioning acceptance of Anglicanism as being both universal and right. She praises those women who shared her unquestioning belief, but apart from one temporary loss of faith by one pious individual, there was no mention of how many of these women questioned the established faith that was brainwashed into most of them as children: yet the War directly led to many people questioning or abandoning the religion of the Ruling class, or turning to Spiritualism in unprecedented numbers.

To conclude, this book has grandiloquent claims as a social history, but, as I have demonstrated, it is unreliable in this respect. However, it is engaging series of stories about individual people and if that's what you like, I would recommend it highly. Indeed I liked it enough I shall add Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in War and Peace 1939-1949 to my long term reading list. But don't believe any of the 'facts' because this woman has an airey fairey arty farty elitist disdain for them!

[Lisa of Hopewell · Rating 4 out of 5]

My Interest
I bought this book six years ago– the World War I era and it’s aftermath are one of my favorite historical eras. I’d picked it up and little bits here and there, but then Covid hit and my inability to sustain print reading hit. I used this book as the nonfiction “half” of a pair with Tracy Chevalier’s A Single Thread (my review is linked) for Nonfiction November last year, or so ago, so I knew I wanted to read it. Finally, my brain could cope with reading it.

The Story
Let me first say I will not do this book justice. I’ve been trying to review it for more than a month. It is so worth reading.

After the slaughter of The Great War–i.e. World War I, British women lost much of a generation of potential husbands. These women were in every socioeconomic class. The label “spinster” was not always said nicely. Women were seen, as sadly they often still are today, as “less than” or “incomplete” without a husband and children. Being a “maiden aunt” often meant being dependent on a brother to provide a home–or of having to somehow earn a living in a era when women were legally paid much less than men.

This book looks at those women. Through oral histories, published articles and memoirs, and other first-hand accounts of their lives, Nicholson draws us a portrait of a generation of British women all left by circumstance to fend for themselves.



The results were sometimes suprising in the best of ways.

Take that “maiden aunt” alluded to above–she founded “Universal Aunts”–a service that provided trustworthy “babysitters” to get kids to boarding school or to be the inter-war version of today’s Door Dash or the type service that gets elderly people who no longer drive to doctor’s appointments. Great, useful, idea. [Remember Lady Edith in Downton Abbery calling herself a “useful spinster” at breakfast one morning? That–useful spinsters in service to others].
What about a fun musical comedy duo–who developed a career they’d likely never have had if they’d married. That’s just what real life Eastenders, and sisters, Elsie and Doris Watters did (see the bottom of this post for a video of them in action).
Florence White, iced cakes by day, but campaigned tirelessly and successfully for pensions for spintsters.
Rose Harrison–Lady Astor’s maid who wrote the book on life in domestic service As a lady’s maid she went everywhere m’lady went. A much more interesting life than stuck home with kids and a husband–at least to her.


My Thoughts
As I said earlier, I cannot do this book the justice it deserves. It’s documents and brings alive the changes in women’s lives that occurred all because there was no man to marry. Isn’t our world pathetic sometimes? Without a few of these women, unmarried ladies would have been stuck for at least another generation or two, if not longer, living often unwelcome, in the home of their brother or with their elderly parents spending their lives as the family drudge. The women who wanted to marry, but could not find a partner but had the brains and resourcefulness to make the best of it helped remake our world for the better. Just read the book.

My Verdict
4.0
I actually read this one–the hardback edition even.