Singled Out (19 page)

to confess to having a six-year-old child.

Most significantly, nearly all the advertisers stress their desire to marry

someone socially and financially compatible. As an indicator of the stranglehold class had on British society in the early twentieth century, the advertisements are telling. ‘Would prefer introductions to men in really good social position only’; ‘Public school man preferred’; ‘He must be refined, domesticated and well-connected’ – are typical stipulations; similarly, a ‘superior domestic servant’ aged forty-one very much hoped to marry a ‘superior working man’, preferably a non-smoking Baptist under forty-six years of age.

However desperate these women were to marry, they were not, it seems,

desperate enough to marry outside their class. And, understandably perhaps,

in almost all cases the advertisers emphasise economic security alongside the wish for companionship, from ‘£ to £ a week . . .’, to ‘must possess not less than £ a year’. For spinsters in their thirties and forties, it would appear that two cats and a house didn’t add up to happiness; and that the romantic dream had been replaced by the simple wish to stop struggling on alone.

*

It wasn’t Winifred Haward’s style to place an ad in the
Matrimonial Times
, nor to write to the Editress at Heart-to-Heart Chats for comfort, but women whose hopes were dwindling might well have found sympathy and

advice in some of the self-help books for ‘bachelor girls’ that started to fill bookshops in the s and s. There was a very real gap in the market for psychologists like Mary Scharlieb, Esther Harding, Laura Hutton (all

mentioned in the last chapter) and a number of other journalists and

commentators writing for single women.

The term ‘bachelor girl’ has an unmistakably jaunty and modern tone. It

seems to have been coined in America in the s, when the ‘American

Bachelor Girls’ Club’ set out to challenge the received notion of the spinster.

‘Old maids no longer exist!’ declared the Club’s constitution. ‘Unmarried

women, until they reach the age of thirty, shall be known as bachelor

‘‘girls’’, and after that they shall be known as ‘‘bachelor women’’.’ Like

many American neologisms, the term successfully filtered over time into

British vocabulary. By the s it was current here, and British readers of American authors like Clara Amy Burgess, who wrote
The Sex Philosophy


Singled Out

of a Bachelor Girl
(), would have recognised themselves in her target readership.

Burgess’s book, and
Live Alone and Like It – A Guide for the Extra Woman
() by Marjorie Hillis (another American), were unambiguous and direct in their approach in a way that would have been unthinkable twenty years

earlier. Both authors adopted a bracing, no-nonsense tone aimed at rallying

the spinsters out of their gloom and passivity.

The Sex Philosophy
invoked God’s aid and the psychology of substitution in helping the Bachelor Girl to ‘change and revise her whole mental attitude toward sex’. But Burgess’s theory that physical longings could be sublimated through healthful exercise and fresh air, folk dancing, callisthenics, long walks, swimming and camping out seem not to have applied in Winifred’s

case – the hiking trips across the New Zealand fjords seem, if anything, to

have sharpened her sexual appetites.

Marjorie Hillis’s book was much more earthy. The knowing tone of
Live
Alone and Like It
is captured in chapter headings such as ‘A Lady and her Liquor’, ‘Pleasures of a Single Bed’, and ‘Setting for a Solo Act’. The text combined bossiness with intimacy: It is probably true that most people have more fun in bed than anywhere else. We are not being vulgar. Even going to bed alone can be alluring. There are many times, in fact, when it’s by far the most alluring way to go.

. . . If even the most respectable spinsters would regard their bedrooms as places where anything might happen, the resulting effects would be extremely beneficial.

There was plenty more in this vein, along the lines of keeping your end

up, putting on a brave face and jolly well enjoying yourself. Though much

of Hillis’s advice was sound, she aimed to provoke rather than to console.

Nor was her book aimed wholly at women who were likely to remain

single for ever, so although she extolled living alone, her readers were

assumed, probably rightly, to prefer marriage. There were many hints on

how to make yourself attractive. Some of these were not so sound. Take

up astrology, numerology, palmistry, graphology and tarot, she advised.

Use them to intrigue and waylay men . . .

Another book which made no attempt to be anything other than a

husband-catching manual was
The Technique of the Love Affair
by A Gentlewoman (). Its real author, the fashion historian Doris Langley Moore, had already caught hers (though she later divorced) and aimed her instructions at chic socialites like herself, who were likely to have met their suitably suave Englishmen in a hotel or at a party. As usual, it was most important
On the Shelf



not to appear clever, but to play the game of artful coquetry. ‘Be sophisticated and wonderfully feminine. Be elegant and a little spoiled, but not bored. Be light, amiable, quite dissociated from care and all the common

The Technique of the Love Affair
by ‘A Gentlewoman’ gave tips on how to make your dreams come true things of life . . .’ An intellectual looking for love, like Winifred Haward, might have found such directions hard to follow. But maybe the ‘graceful attitudes and airy ripostes’ recommended in this early version of
The Rules
worked for some.

Probably Winifred Haward would have gained more from authors like

Esther Harding, who reminded her readers how much value could be had

from friendships with women. Don’t look, she counselled, for emotional

satisfaction from men; it is not in their power to give, nor do they want it.

Only women are capable of the kind of psychic connections that give true

richness to life. Laura Hutton too was firmly realistic; recognizing that the basic problem of the single woman was loneliness, she urged her readers to be courageous and make efforts of will:

It is possible . . . to take steps to join a ramblers’ club . . . spend an evening at the ballet . . . accept an invitation to a Church Social. These things lie within everyone’s power to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to.

In
The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems
Mary Scharlieb pondered the psychological implications of marriage-deprivation and concluded that a



Singled Out

husband could never meet the longings of a large number of single women,

precisely because, deep down, it was not a husband that they wanted:

. . . it is not this: very often the unfulfilled desire is for motherhood. There is an incessant aching longing for the fulfilment of that primary feminine instinct . . .

‘But who will give me my children?’

This was surely true. Here is part of a letter written by the otherwise

unidentified Miss R. Williams of Dorking, Surrey. It was sent in  to

Marie Stopes, whose books and views on birth control had by then made

her a household name:

Dear Madam,

I sincerely trust that you will pardon the liberty I am taking in writing to you . . .

My love of little babies has prompted this action, as I must tell you I am

passionately fond of Babies. I would so love to have one of my own, but I

have given up hope of getting married, as I intend to stay with my Mother

as long as God spares her to me, as it was my only Brother’s last wish, who

was killed in the great war.

My mother is a widow . . . She has a small income and we let ‘Apartments’

by which means we get our livelihood. My Mother and I simply adore babies,

and would love to take one of the dear little unwanted ones into our Home

and hearts for love only. But as you will quite understand we are not in a

position to do so. Please forgive me if I am inclined to be bold in what I am about to ask you, but I have been wondering if you would care to sacrifice say about £ so that I could adopt a Darling little baby Boy about  months old (perhaps you might know of some dear little unwanted one) if you could only realise what joy it would give me, what pleasure, how we would both

love, & cherish it, words would fail to express my gratitude to you . . .

The £ was not forthcoming. Marie Stopes’s secretary was brief in her

reply to this
cri de cœur
, indicating merely that Miss Williams should approach the main adoption societies, and giving addresses.

A survey of elderly spinsters carried out in the s confirmed that

two-thirds of them felt that they had missed out on having children.

Examples of the responses included: ‘Married life’s not much without a

child. They’re handy for you when you’re older’ (Boot and shoe machinist,

Northampton); ‘Yes. I like children. And when I see women with their

On the Shelf



grown-up children around them, I regret it’ (Dressmaker, Harrow). These

women felt that society reproached them too: ‘They look at you as if

you’ve never lived. You haven’t had children and haven’t had a man about

the house, but you’re no different’ (Cotton worker, Oldham). Deep feelings

of deprivation were equalled by a dual sense of failure: failure to do their social duty by bringing the next generation into the world, and failure to fulfil themselves as women.

Never having thought too hard about marriage, Irene Angell’s sense of

inadequacy was reinforced when she became an aunt. ‘My sister had her

first baby and I changed then.’ (When they grew up Ruby’s children didn’t

help by rubbing it in: ‘Aunty, you know you’ve never married because you

never worked hard enough to get a husband.’) But something in her drove

her to seek contact with children. When her sister asked for help looking

after her growing family Irene was the ever-available aunt. Realising when

she was thirty that she was unlikely to attain the dreamed-of husband and

family, she trained in social work and got a job looking after prostitutes and their homeless children in the East End of London: it was tough, thankless work, trying to dissuade the girls from having more babies, stitching knickers for the little ones and then trying to dissuade their mothers from pawning them, but it didn’t put her off. ‘I’d have loved to have had a child. I think every woman should be allowed to have a child – married or not married. It’s not a right thing to say, but I think one should have been allowed that. I have a dream son who’s very good to me. I’d rather have a son than a daughter . . . I think every woman wants a son, you know, more than a daughter.’

Almost as much as by marriage, the nineteenth-century woman was

defined by her capacity to breed the next generation of sons – and daughters.

Her contribution to the human race was the bearing of children, while

government, science, the arts, industry and empire-building were the preserve of the male. Rosy little faces rewarded the wee wifie for her devotion.

Worried by the poor physical condition of our young men, particularly

army recruits, the patriarchy determined that more and better breeding was

the answer. They took a poor view of women who couldn’t or didn’t

contribute to the upgrading of the population. After the destruction of

young men in the war, society continued to look to its women to replenish

the losses. What good was a woman who couldn’t procreate? For the Surplus

Woman, barren and unproductive, feelings of waste and worthlessness went

very deep.

Women’s magazines, too, did their best to persuade their readers that

being hit by Cupid’s bow and arrow was only the beginning. The sixpennies

venerated the Victorian ideal of motherhood as much as they venerated



Singled Out

marriage, and too bad if it wasn’t likely to come your way. Beside the

romantic fiction and features on the latest diet, their columns gave space to articles on layettes, perambulators and knitting baby bonnets.
Woman’s Life
argued the case for motherhood through the voice of the lovely ‘Ann’, a fictionalised archetype of dutiful womanliness. Ann concludes that it is

inconceivable for any woman to choose work in preference to being

married, the clincher being woman’s infallible instinct for motherhood.

Her own shiny-eyed certainty of this stems from the fact that she herself is knitting ‘a tiny woollen shoe’. And because of this she gets the last word: ‘. . . the highest service a woman can render mankind is only
through
love – and
through
marriage’.

Babies had never featured prominently in Vera Brittain’s dreams of love,

until she heard that her fianceŔoland Leighton was due home from the

Front in December . In the long dark watches of night-duty at the st

London General Hospital, Camberwell, Vera Brittain now pictured their

reunion and allowed herself to hope. While he was on leave they might

get married. And then – if only he would survive the war . . . Maybe after

it ended they could both earn a living as writers or lecturers, ‘. . . even

though – oh, devastating, sweet speculation! – I might have had a baby.’

As Christmas approached she found herself close to prayer: ‘Oh, God . . .

do let us get married and let me have a baby – something that is Roland’s

very own, something of himself to remember him by if he goes . . .
do
let me have a baby, dear God!’ Within weeks, her hopes and prayers came crashing down around her.