Just Finished Reading: Singled Out – How Two Million Women Survived Without Men after the First World War by Virginia Nicolson (FP: 2007)

In the early years of the 20th Century a woman’s position and role in life was clear. When you are of age you find a suitable man, marry him, set up a home and have his children. You might have a job for a little while for a number of reasons but you were never expected to work for long, support yourself or, God forbid, have a career. No, that was very much a man’s job. Until, that is, everything changed. With the horrors of WW1 and the every growing casualty rates it moved from expected, to difficult to impossible for a large number of women to find any man, never mind a suitable one, marry him and have children. In a stroke millions of women where denied a role that their whole society has designed for them. The question from everyone, the women themselves, their parents, society at large, politicians and all other interested parties was: Now What?

At first no immediate answers where forthcoming. It was as if the very problem of the quickly labelled ‘surplus women’ (inevitably the women were seen as an ‘excess’ rather than as a result of an actual shortage of men) had to be ignored. But that couldn’t go on for long. Eventually seen as a real problem – economic, social, moral – the so-called solutions offered, from taking up knitting to supress any ‘unnatural urges’ to enforced emigration to the colonies deemed to have a woman shortage didn’t really address the core problem: What to do with up to 2 million often poorly educated and often simply poor women to cope with a life essentially alone. While some organisations attempted to put the genie back in the bottle others offered advice and hope to the millions of desperate women deprived of their expected birth-right (in more ways than one) through no fault of their own. Then there were individuals who simply decided that they would no longer remain docile and would carve out their own destiny come what may. In these cases instant ‘spinsterhood’ was as much an opportunity rather than a curse releasing them from home, hearth and nursery to fulfil dreams of exploration, business, art and more. It was these women, as well as the slow pressure, and presence, of the unrecorded multitude that broke moulds and boundaries and, to a great extent, created the world we live in today where women bus drivers, pilots, doctors, lawyers, politicians, heads of state, scientists, educators and countless others are women who never get a second thought given to their gender. Arguably modern feminism began when the guns fell silent in 1918.

Despite a modicum of repetition this was an engaging and often fascinating of how millions of ordinary and extraordinary women coped in a world without men – or without enough men. Rising to the occasion, suffering and struggling to exist despite everything in their way they changed the world often without realising that was exactly what they were doing. Peppered with stories of heroism, both small and large scale, this was often an inspiring read as personal tale after personal tale was related each showing a coping strategy or the women in question. Some worked extremely well, others resulted in a lifetime of struggle but all showed bucketful’s of grit and determination to survive in a world not of their making and not of their choosing. Some of the stories could be made into great films of personal triumph over national tragedy. If you have any interest in WW1 and especially its aftermath then this is definitely the book for you. Recommended.