Authors: Virginia Nicholson
deafeningly noisy, grim and dangerous factory. She never forgot those years, nor the friends she made then: Polly, Rose, Martha . . . poor women whose jobs required them to stand all day at a machine, whose calloused feet had
worn holes in their shoes, who worked at Tankard’s all their lives, who
never married, and who died young. The injustice of their lot affected
Florence for the rest of her life.
But their lot was not hers. Florence had inherited her father’s mercurial
streak; bossy and driven, all her life she was given to temper tantrums and
excesses, though her nieces were also to remember her as deeply thoughtful
and generous, funny and warm-hearted. When she was eighteen, in ,
something gave way, and she broke down. She never went back to the mill.
The family now managed to move to a slightly larger house belonging to
an uncle, where Florence and Annie started dressmaking and giving piano
lessons. This was a step up the social ladder, and the moderate success of their business gave the sisters a new-found freedom. Leaving their uneducated mother to mind the house, Florence and Annie would gad off on outings to
Blackpool and Ilkley; they took an interest in local politics and the suffrage movement. Their relationship was quarrelsome but deeply affectionate.
Florence White had a wartime love affair, but the information on it is
scanty. She was already thirty when she and Albert Whitehead became
engaged in . Any hopes she had for wifehood or motherhood must
have rested on this relationship, but he and Florence were doomed to join
the grievous statistics. Albert was sent home from France to a military hospital, presumably to recover from wounds. There he died from pneumonia in .
Florence’s sister Annie had a boyfriend too, a plumber called Charles.
But Florence had become used to having things her own way in the White
household, where, as eldest daughter, she ruled the roost. Charles was seen
as unacceptable and Florence jealously did everything in her power to kill
off the romance. Despite engineering secret assignations with Charles,
Annie’s will failed her, and the unfortunate young man was left to languish.*
* Annie got her revenge years later when Florence, in her fifties, showed signs of fancying a train driver from Bournemouth. Annie wasn’t going to let her get away with it, and this time it was Florence who caved in.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
Thus the pair settled in for long-term spinsterhood. Florence was stout
with gig-lamp glasses; she certainly neglected her hair and most probably
she adopted inelegant poses. Annie and she were well into their thirties
now, and marriage hopes had waned. In the early s their mother died.
Their nieces, the daughters of their brother, were living with them, and
the dressmaking business was keeping them modestly. Florence and Annie
might have drifted into the twilight zone of aunthood had it not been for
Florence’s restless nature, which drove her to seek out causes. Ideas were
seething in her busy little brain.
She did not have far to look. On her doorstep, at Tankard’s Mill, were
many women unluckier than her, unmarried and living in poverty – women
like her friends, the three sisters Polly, Rose and Martha Jackson. Worn
out, all three of them died before they were sixty-five, before they were
eligible for a retirement pension.* It was their deaths that galvanised
Florence. Already working for the Liberal Party, in the early s she set
up a sub-committee to look at women’s pensions: Florence had finally
found her life’s work. Stop feeling sorry for the widows and orphans, was
her message. Think about the spinsters! In , in a church hall in Bradford, more than single working-class women attended a public meeting addressed by Florence. By the end of the evening the National Spinsters
Pensions Association was born to fight for their rights, with rules, membership, officials and subscriptions, and Miss Florence White at its head.
*
In when Muriel Spark wrote
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
she was able to look back twenty-five years and finally give the image of the interwar spinster her most enduring, if retrospective, incarnation. The
character of Miss Brodie is the antithesis of the maiden aunt. She is sexy,
romantic and subversive; wrong and ruthless, but inescapably influential.
Her ‘set’, five schoolgirls growing into young women, are mesmerised by
their liberated schoolmistress. Far from looking on her as a pathetic specimen, Rose, Eunice, Sandy, Jenny and Mary are enraptured by Jean Brodie’s exhilaratingly different approach to lessons. An English grammar session
is replaced by Miss Brodie’s stirring reminiscences of her dead lover, one
of the ‘Flowers of the Forest’, who ‘fell like an autumn leaf, though he
was only twenty-two years of age’. They are equally obsessed by their
* Lloyd George first introduced old age pensions for those over seventy in ; in
this was updated to entitle anyone earning less than £ a year to ten shillings a week from the age of sixty-five, provided they had paid their contributions.
Singled Out
teacher’s sex life, by her bosom – sometimes flat and straight, on other days ‘breast-shaped and large, very noticeable’ – and by her talk of Shakespeare, Cimabue and Mussolini. Inevitably, Miss Brodie’s seditious educational methods bring her into conflict with the school’s principal; while her
amours provoke jealousy and, eventually, betrayal. But in her prime, Miss
Jean Brodie is irresistibly dangerous and different: ‘Safety does not come
first,’ she tells the girls. ‘Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow
me.’ And they do.
Though Muriel Spark asserts in
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
that her heroine was by no means unique as a type of ‘war-bereaved spinster’, and that there were indeed ‘legions of her kind during the nineteen-thirties’,
still it took time and distance to turn the thwarted spinster into such an
icon. A few decades on, Helen Fielding has given us urban u¨ber-singleton
Bridget Jones as a role model for our own times – drunk, nicotine-addicted,
modern, funny and, along with her angry-young-woman friend Sharon,
determined not to be squashed by the Smug Marrieds:
‘. . . I’m not married because I’m a
Singleton
, you smug, prematurely ageing, narrow-minded morons,’ Shazzer ranted. ‘And because there’s more than one bloody way to live: one in four households are single, the nation’s young men have been proved by surveys to be completely unmarriageable, and as a result there’s a whole generation of single girls like me with their own incomes and homes who have lots of fun and don’t need to wash anyone else’s socks. We’d be as happy as sandboys if people like you didn’t conspire to make us feel stupid just because you’re jealous.’
‘Singletons!’ I shouted happily. ‘Hurrah for the Singletons!’
The Surplus Woman has come a long way – but Ms Bridget Jones only
echoes the anonymous correspondent who wrote to the editor of the
Daily
Mail
back in February , remonstrating with the author of that alarming article entitled A MILLION WOMEN TOO MANY: Sir, – A million women too many; it is indeed a bombshell that Dr Murray Leslie has hurled among the women who are so valiantly striving to take and hold ‘a place in the sun’.
But there are consolations. No girl, anyway, until she is well past girlhood, considers that
she
is one of those excess females.
All the same, if a woman would definitely decide to be ‘in excess’ then she
should enter a profession or business with no fear that marriage would ruin her career. She could help in the world’s work in another sphere.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
Why should not some of us bury our hopes and form a Union of Surplus
Women who mean to succeed? Why should we be downcast? The more of us the
merrier – and we are a goodly company.
A MILLION WOMEN TOO MANY – HUSBAND HUNT,
proclaimed the
Daily Mail
headline reporting Dr Murray Leslie’s lecture to the London Institute of Hygiene on February . The report stood alongside other stories – Princess Alice had visited the Ideal Homes Exhibition, Brinsmead’s famous piano factory in Kentish Town had closed, and the price of petrol had increased by d a gallon.
The
Daily Mail
’s story covered the main points of Dr Leslie’s lecture, and reported his grave concerns regarding the disturbing excess of women over men (which, as the Census was to show the following year, was an
underestimate of almost a million).
Dr Leslie could see no redeeming features; on the contrary, he observed
only the disadvantages. Social stability was threatened by female discontent.
The disproportion led to young women having greater freedom, and failures
in discipline and parental supervision permitted sexual licence. ‘The old
ethical standards’ were crumbling, he noted; there was ‘a lowered standard
of morality’, and a collapse of marriage and family life brought about
by infidelity among married men, who readily availed themselves of the
numerous unattached women. Economically, inflation meant that single
daughters were forced out of the home and into the workplace, where
market competition ensured that our most able women got jobs, leaving
only the unskilled lower orders to breed for the nation. Meanwhile ‘jazzing
flappers’ with their claws out, desperately displaying their nubile bodies in over-revealing garments, fought like cats over ‘the scarce and elusive male’.
Spellbound by the availability of sex, young men ‘with dance invitations
four and five deep’ were becoming jaded and spoiled. In short, the country
was going to the dogs. Reassuringly, there was still space at the foot of the column for a comforting advertisement placed there by a convenience food manufacturer: ‘In these days of changing and uncertain values, there is one
article which has remained standardised in quality – Symington’s Soups.’
The
Daily Mail’s
correspondents, however, took Dr Leslie’s comments to heart. The majority of them were women; over the next few days they wrote in with their reactions to this calamitous state of affairs, and recounted
On the Shelf
their own experiences: ‘Most of us are looking for husbands, and the
competition is keen . . .’; ‘To attract men, girls will dress daringly, and
generally try to appear very bold and dashing and knowing . . .’; ‘I want to get married, but my chances do not seem very bright . . .’; ‘There are just not enough men to go round . . .’ Never mind the effect on the nation, Dr
Leslie’s lecture had clearly touched a sore nerve with Britain’s ‘matchless
maidens’. The letters told of their blighted hopes, their sense of having
been cheated of a prize owed to all. Marriage was woman’s crown, her
glory and her birthright. If there were a few dissenting voices whispering
that a husband represented anything other than a happy ending, the
Daily
Mail
did not think fit to report them.
*
And yet in the early years of the twentieth century marriage was being
scrutinised and redefined as never before. Plainly, for the majority of
women, wifehood fell short of the joyful ideal. All too often, once the
confetti had settled, the new bride had little to look forward to beyond a
life of drudgery, oppression and ennui. No matter what their social class,
women found themselves condemned to a kind of house-arrest, sentenced
to a lifetime of food preparation, needlework and childcare. There was no
escape.
When young Frances Graham set up home in County Durham with her
miner husband Jim in she had no hot water, no electricity and no
bathroom. She had been trained by her mother for a lifetime of housework:
‘I don’t know what made us like this but when I was married, that day I
swept the confetti out of the lobby myself.’ Frances generally worked from
. in the morning till . at night, on her feet. Scrubbing, washing and fetching hot water were back-breaking tasks; life was a permanent battle with soot, bugs and coal-dust. If you had only a distant outside toilet, there was the necessity of emptying chamber-pots; sanitary towels, too, had to be soaked and washed by hand. Cooking, laundry, dusting and scrubbing
were the tyrannical, never-ending reality of the housewife’s day. The
unlucky ones also had to endure drunkenness, savagery, abuse and infidelity
by their husbands.
Even by , when the birth control campaigner Margery Spring Rice
published
Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions
, little had improved for the sample of over , wives interviewed: My life for many years consisted of being penned in a kitchen feet square, every fourteen months a baby, as I had five babies in five years at first, until what with
Singled Out
the struggle to live and no leisure I used to feel I was just a machine . . . Our men think we should not go out until the children are grown up . . . It isn’t the men are unkind. It is the old idea we should always be at home.
I pay s d for two rooms I have a sheet board ceiling when it rains it runs halfway along this ceiling and then drips on the floor we have a bath in the middle of the room to catch the rain . . . the council people offered us a flat at / per week . . . how they think we could pay that out of / when my husband is out of work I don’t know. I have just had my th baby . . .