Imaginary widows: Spinsters, marriage, and the "Lost generation" in Britain after the great war

Journal of Family History

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 388-409

  Holden, Katherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Marriage; Single women; Spinsters; United Kingdom; Widows; World War I

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444519201     PISSN: 03631990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0363199005275836     Document Type: Review

References (102)

1. The Spinster 1 (February 1938): 12.
2. John Spurr, "The English Post-Reformation," The Journal of Modern History 74 (2002): 101.
3. Joan Chandler, Women without Husbands: An Exploration of the Margins of Marriage (London: Macmillan, 1991), 2.
4. See John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual and the Quest for Family Values (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), chap. 7, for a discussion of the conjugal ideal and its origins.
5. Katherine Holden, '"Nature Takes No Notice of Morality': Singleness, and Married Love in Interwar Britain," Women's History Review 11, no. 3 (2002): 482.
6. Chandler, Women without Husbands, 2.
7. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 420.
8. Postcard, "Kitchener's Men," c. 1914-1915, Beamish Archive Collection, Beamish Museum, County Durham, Humorous B3. General Kitchener's image was used on recruitment posters with the slogan "Kitchener wants you. Join your country's army!"
9. Holden, "Nature Takes No Notice of Morality," 484.
10. This term, viewed as more positive than spinster, was referred to on several occasions in interviews undertaken in the early 1990s with unmarried women born in the first decade of the twentieth century.
11. See Norah Smaridge, "Frankly Forty-Five," Woman's Friend (July 23, 1938);
12. Brooke Hanlon, "Miss Green and Miss Gold," Woman's Weekly (May 11, 1929): 789;
13. D. E. Stevenson, Miss Buncle's Book (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1934);
14. and E. H. Young, Miss Mole (1930; London: Virago, 1983).
15. Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (New York and London: Putnam, The Knickerbocker Press, 1911), 217. Myrtle Reed (1874-1911) was a prolific American writer of romance fiction who also published cookery books under the pseudonym Olive Green (http://www.writepage.com/others/unknown.htm). The Spinster Book had a British audience and was reprinted eleven times between 1901 and 1911.
16. For further discussion of this subject, see J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan, 1986), 65-100;
17. and J. M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). About three-quarters of a million men died or were killed in the British armed forces during the Great War out of a total of more than six million who served in the war. In addition, two hundred thousand people in Britain including ten thousand British soldiers died in the "Spanish flu" pandemic at the end of the war.
18. More than half a million of the soldiers who died were bachelors; Winter, The Great War, 274, Table 8.9.
19. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 131.
20. Winter, Sites of Memory, 2.
21. Susan R. Grayzel, '"The Mothers of Our Soldiers' Children': Motherhood, Immorality and the War Baby Scandal, 1914-1918," in Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925, eds. Claudia Nelson and Anne Sumner Holmes (London: Macmillan, 1997; New York: St Martin's Press, 1997).
22. Ibid., 135.
23. See Jane Lewis and John Welshman, "The Issue of Never-married Motherhood, 1920-1970," Social History of Medicine 10, no. 3 (1997): 401-18.
24. Vera Brittain, "An Open Letter from Her Mother to Her Son," The Manchester Guardian (August 4, 1934)
25. reprinted in Mary Stott (ed.), Women Talking: An Anthology from the Guardian Women's Page (London: Routledge, 1987), 185.
26. See, for example, Charlotte Cowdroy, Wasted Womanhood (London: Allen and Unwin, 1933);
27. and Jean Ayling, The Retreat from Parenthood (London: Kegan Paul, Trench Trubner).
28. Item on "maiden aunts" in Woman's Hour, BBC Radio Four (January 6, 1999), presented by Jenny Murray.
29. The popularity of this topic is suggested by the fact that Woman's Hour featured at least five items on spinsterhood and female singleness between 1999 and 2003. Public interest in spinsters also suggests an awareness of the important contribution they made to society and the fact that they are now rarer and perceived to be of less significance in family life.
30. Alan Bennett, Talking Heads (London: BBC Worldwide Ltd.), 88-91.
31. Robert Wall, "English and German Families and the First World War, 1914-18," in The Upheaval of War, Family Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918, eds. Richard Wall and J. M. Winter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 67.
32. Barbara Wootton, In a World I Never Made: Autobiographical Reflections (London: Allen and Unwin, 1967), 50. Barbara Wootton became a leading social scientist. A university professor, Justice of the Peace, and one of the first women to be admitted to the House of Lords in 1958, she had a particular interest and expertise in the juvenile criminal justice system.
33. Winter, Sites of Memory, 29.
34. Janis Lomas, '"Delicate Duties': Issues of Class and Respectability in Government Policy towards the Wives and Widows of British Soldiers in the Era of the Great War," Women's History Review 9, no. 1 (2000): 137. Lomas argues that any war widow who did not live up to this standard risked reprobation.
35. Wootton herself chose not to draw a widow's pension.
36. Iris Barry, "We Enjoyed the War," Scribner's 96 (1934)
37. quoted in Lomas, "Delicate Duties," 137.
38. Di Prickett, "Unpublished Biography of Florence White," chap. 4: 15, 16, West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS), Bradford, Ref. 78D86/6/2. This case was frequently cited by Florence White who organized the campaign.
39. To get some idea of what this sum meant at the time, it is useful to compare it with Margery Spring Rice's statistics on the health of working-class married women in 1939. She found that nearly half the women who had less than 4s per head per week housekeeping money were in very poor health, compared with only 17 percent of those who had 10s or more per head; Margery Spring Rice, Working-class Wives: Their Health and Conditions (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1939), 214.
40. See, for example, Charlotte Haldane, Motherhood and Its Enemies (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927);
41. Arabella Keneally, Feminism and Sex Extinction (London: Allen and Unwin, 1920);
42. A. M. Ludovici, Woman: A Vindication (London: Constable, 1923);
43. Marie Slopes, Enduring Passion (London: Putman, 1929), 51-52. For discussions of this issue
44. see Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880-1930 (London: Pandora, 1985);
45. and Alison Oram, "Embittered, Sexless, or Homosexual: Attacks on Spinster Teachers 1918-1939," in Not a Passing Phase: Recovering Lesbians in History 1840-1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London: Women's Press, 1989).
46. See Mary Scharlieb, The Bachelor Woman and Her Problems, (London: Williams and Norgate, 1929), 10, 12, and chap. 3 (esp. 48-49);
47. W. E. Sargent, The Psychology of Marriage and Family Life (London: Independent Press, 1940), 146;
48. Laura Hutton, The Single Woman and Her Emotional Problems, 2nd ed. (London: Balliere, Tyndall & Cox, 1937), 59-60.
49. Census, 1931, England and Wales, General Report and Occupation Tables, Her Majesty' Stationary Office, 1931.
50. Wall calculated that in a sample of 836 widows aged over sixty-five living in England and Wales in 1921, 34 percent lived with never-married children, the majority of whom were daughters. Robert Wall, "Elderly Widows and Widowers and Their Co-residents in Late 19th- and Early 20th-century England and Wales," History of the Family 1 (2002): 143, Table 4.
51. Letter from Peg (née Elkins) to Kate's great niece, Helen Kendall, February 24, 2004 (possessed by recipient).
52. Rosamund Lehmann, Invitation to the Waltz (1932; London: Virago Press, 1981), 44.
53. See, for example, Leslie Weatherhead's comparison between the missionary who lives "happily ever after" with husband, work, and children and the one who gives up the chance of going abroad to look after her parents in "Quest of a Kingdom" (1943), reprinted in Roxanne Arnold and Olive Chandler, Feminine Singular: Triumphs and Tribulations of the Single Woman: an Anthology (London: Femina Books, 1974), 178, chosen by the National Council for the Single Woman and Her Dependants.
54. See Anthea Ducquenin, "The Importance of Marital Status for Women's Lives" (unpublished Ph.D thesis, Plymouth Polytechnic, 1984);
55. and Diana Gittins, "Marital Status, Work and Kinship 1850-1930," in Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940, ed. Jane Lewis (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
56. Health visitors visited mothers in their homes to assess the health and welfare of their babies and young children and to give advice.
57. Interview with "Ellen" (born 1908), September 22, 1993.
58. For example, Noel Streatfield, Ballet Shoes (1936; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1960), 37;
59. J. H. Byron Lewis, Molly's Chance (London: Thomas Nelson, 1926);
60. Dorothea Moore, Rebel of the Third (London: Nisbet, n.d.).
61. A. P. Herbert, "Other People's Babies: A Song of Kensington Gardens," Ballads for Broadbrows (1930)
62. reprinted in Arnold and Chandler, Feminine Singular, 163.
63. For an example of the former, see Lorna Rea, "Four in a Family," Good Housekeeping (June 1933).
64. Interview with "Emily" (born 1900), November 18, 1993.
65. Jane Lewis, Women in England: Sexual Divisions and Social Change 1870-1950 (Sussex, UK: Wheatsheaf, 1984), 2.
66. Winter, The Great War, 250, 255-56, 261-63.
67. See also Wall, "English and German Families and the First World War."
68. For a discussion of this issue in relation to professional women, see Alison Mackinnon, Love and Freedom, Professional Women and the Reshaping of Personal Life (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
69. Winter, The Great War, 255.
70. See Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies;
71. Oram "Embittered, Sexless, or Homosexual";
72. Pam Johnson '"The Best Friend that Life Has Given Me': Does Winifred Holtby Have a Place in Lesbian History?" in Not a Passing Phase: Recovering Lesbians in History 1840-1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London: Women's Press, 1989).
73. Interview with "Dora" (born 1903), February 21, 1994.
74. Winter, The Great War, 98.
75. Rosamund Essex, Woman in a Man's World (London: Sheldon Press, 1977), 5.
76. Ibid., 15.
77. Phyllis Wilmott, A Singular Woman: The Life of Geraldine Aves (London: Whiting and Birch, 1992), 28.
78. Ibid.
79. Susan Pederson, "Gender, Welfare and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War," American History Review 95 (1990): 1006.
80. Ibid., 1005-6. By 1921, 239,000 widows and 395,000 children had been awarded war pensions.
81. Parliamentary Debates (H.C.), 5th series, 161, March 6, 1923, col. 382
82. quoted in Pedersen, "Gender, Welfare and Citizenship," 1006.
83. Ibid.
84. John Macnicol, The Politics of Retirement in Britain, 1878-1948 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 310-11.
85. Ibid.
86. Similar treatment could be accorded to war widows who risked losing their pensions and having their children removed from their care through any lapse in moral standards (including cohabitation, drunkenness, prostitution, and child neglect). In such circumstances, war widows were not entitled to poor relief. Janis Lomas, "Delicate Duties," 137.
87. The National Association for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child was formed in 1918. The Church Army and Salvation Army also provided homes and hostels for unmarried mothers.
88. Over Thirty Association, "Forgotten Women," undated pamphlet, c. 1930s.
89. Rosamund Tweedy, Consider Her Palaces: A Study of the Housing Problem of Lower Paid Single Women Workers in London (London: Over Thirty Association, 1936).
90. Dulcie Groves, "Onward, Spinsters, Onward! The National Spinsters Pension Association 1935-58," (paper presented at the Centennial Suffrage Conference, Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, August 1993). The campaign gained most support in Lancashire where the long-term decline of the textile industry was exacerbated by the depression, leaving many middle-aged textile workers unemployed or at risk of losing their jobs;
91. H. Smith, "Gender and the Welfare State: The Old Age and Widows' Pensions Act," History 80 (October 1995): 389.
92. Ibid., 386. An amendment to the act in 1929 offered a similar pension after 1931 to widows aged over fifty-five whose husbands had died before 1926 but who had been insured under the 1911 National Insurance Act;
93. Groves, "Onward, Spinsters, Onward!"
94. Smith, "Gender and the Welfare State"; The Spinster 1 (February 1938): 3;
95. and The Spinster 1 (March 1938). Although they never achieved their demands, disbanding finally in the 1950s, it was partly as a result of their efforts that the retirement age for all women was lowered to sixty in 1940.
96. The Spinster 1 (February 1938).
97. Smith, "Gender and the Welfare State."
98. Smith lists a large number of organizations opposed to the campaign, not all of which were middle class in membership, including some trade unions. The issue divided the labor movement.
99. My thanks to Dr. John McNicol for this interpretation.
100. White defended her position by portraying feminism as a middle-class movement focused on sex equality. It was irrelevant to working-class women who were in jobs that did not compete with men. Smith, "Gender and the Welfare State."
101. By 2015, this gender differential will no longer exist, and the retirement age for women will once again be sixty-five.
102. Picture Post, October 8, 1938, 29, WYAS, Bradford, 78D86/1/5.