Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived Without Men After the… (2007)

This is a really interesting read. It details the situations faced and dealt with by the generation of women born in the UK between 1885 and 1905, those that came of age during the first world war an found themselves single due the the lack of available men. In a sense it is very sad, as a number of them clearly long to have married and had children, but at the same time, without this generation of ground breakers women today would have a much harder life. it seems to me that the advances that took place at the instigation of this generation of women far exceeds that if the feminist movement or the women's lib of the 60s & 70s.

I knew very few of these women, although both the Great Grannies that I knew fell into this generation. In both cases, the war intervened and they both had their children significantly later than would have been the case. Great Granny Bloy (according to family legend) lost her boyfriend during the war, only to marry in her late 20s and have her children (including my Grandma) in her early 30s - late compared to the standards of the prewar age.

Not all of them chose to be single, not all of them enjoyed the life they led with no regrets, but all of them managed and carried on and made themselves useful to their families and to society as a whole. It is largely because of this generation that my generation leads a life they would not recognise. ( )

The premise was a sound one. The author is an academic who served as a documentary researcher for BBC television. Her research background glows in this book, but for me it simply pulled me down into a quagmire of tons upon tons of details.  If one story could have made her point, she chose to give us three or four examples.  It was like waiting for a train to pull away from the platform--- it just never developed enough steam to hold my attention.  It often rang of the poor dears in DOWNTON ABBEY who just couldn't quite figure out what to do with all these women.  As a result, I found myself reading the first three or four paragraphs of each section, and then skimming.  I also think because I had already started reading Vera Britain's Testament of Youth where the author was experiencing many of these same issues but reporting them in much more elegant prose that I just couldn't settle into this one.

If you are a detail oriented person who needs lots of reinforcement to prove points, this one is for you.  It's an important work in its thesis, and worth at least a look-see.  It certainly covers an important aspect of how this War changed the way women were regarded and regarded themselves.  ( )

Lots of interesting stories of women's lives and work in the years and decades after the first world war in this book, but I did have some issues with how it almost feels that your story cannot be included in this book if there is no sob story about a boyfriend/potential husband/friends and brothers lost in the war which then gets romanticised and used as an explanation for everything that you did afterwards; and how at times the narrative seems to be holding up a binary of married-a-man and never-married-a-man as if the latter category doesn't actually include lots of different possibilities (lost boyfriend and didn't want anyone else, happily single, in a relationship with a man but not married, happily single lesbian, in a relationship with a woman, etc.) despite some examples of women pursuing these other possibilities being discussed here and there. ( )

What a fascinating book. In all of the WWI reading I've done, it never occurred to me to consider the women who would never marry because so many men had died. But this book does it. I think that her writing is a little haphazard--I couldn't find a lot of rhyme or reason to the sequence of it--but it really didn't matter a lot. There are stories of fairly famous women (Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Elizabeth Goudge) and some who I had never heard of before, but all with the same theme: "This is what we've got. Let's see what we can do with it." Here are the original seeds of feminism. I had commented on the MO Readers group that this attitude could account for a lot of the women we have read about who were so independent and adventurous in the early 20th century. I would highly recommend this book for anyone who thinks the women's movement started in the 60s. There may have been a lull after WWII, and they thought they were the instigators, but they were wrong. Great book! ( )

Virginia Nicholson has used interviews, published and unpublished autobiographies, novels and various records and writings to tell the story of the “Surplus Women.” According to the 1921 British census, women outnumbered men by 2 million. Some of these women lost fiancés to World War I, some were prevented from marrying by family responsibilities, and some simply were unable to find a mate. In a society where women were expected to marry and, unless poor, be supported by their husbands, this was a grave crisis, and suggestions to solve it included shipping British women to various places in the Commonwealth to find husbands. As Nicholson recounts, however, a great many women built their own, sometimes very unconventional lives as spinsters, and help create enormous change in British society in the process.

One of the things that makes this book so superb is Nicholson's willingness to enter into the women's lives on their own terms rather than judging them either by contemporary standards or her own preferences. (Nicholson herself is married.) Sex left many of these women in a no-win situation: they were mentally ill if they remained virgins, and sluts if they didn't. She admires the courage of women who made the best of a bad deal, who broke professional barriers, who simply preferred their career to marriage. Many of the women in this book led lives of distinction and attained honors rarely given to women before this time. I think there should be at least a statue to Dame Caroline Haslett, who, along with other female engineers, was determined to create electrical labor-saving appliances to reduce the arduous and never-ending struggle to keep house.

In the United States, the 1950s brought a move to renewed domesticity and early marriage, partly as a reaction to World War II, and temporarily reversed many of the interwar social changes. If this happened in Britain, Nicholson does not address it, although many of her subjects also lived through that period; one wonders whether they felt that they lost ground.

An outstanding piece of social history, especially for those interested in 20th century history, World War I and its after effects, or women's history. ( )