Authors: Virginia Nicholson
How hard it was to admit feelings of frustration emerges in Freya Stark’s
memoir of her early life,
Traveller’s Prelude
(); she struggled with her single state until eventually – in desperation perhaps at her sense of failure – marrying the homosexual diplomat Stewart Perowne in her mid-fifties.
But already in her mid-twenties Freya – who had been disfigured by an
accident in early childhood – was suffering acutely from feelings of humiliation and physical deprivation, made worse by her mother’s all too obvious attempts to get her married off. Freya squirmed at Flora Stark’s indiscrimi— nate promotion of entirely ineligible suitors, yet she wanted what marriage
could bring:
My mother longed to see me engaged . . . and felt it her own failure if I failed to become so . . .
However this may be, my failure to find a husband made me frustrated and
unhappy, for I felt it must be due to some invincible inferiority in myself. And what is worse, I thought my natural desires in this direction so extremely indelicate as to be hardly admissible, even to myself.
And this – in the public domain at least – is about the nearest we get to a
spinster’s confession of unrequited lust.
It may have been easy for a minority of Bloomsberries and Bohemians
to discuss nymphomania, copulation and the clitoris with impunity; D. H.
Lawrence may have got away with describing how the gipsy’s body ‘rippled
with shuddering as an electric current . . .’ as he held the virgin in his arms.
But then people like that weren’t respectable. Virtuous virgins may have
known about these subjects, but they simply didn’t feel able to discuss
them.
Caring, Sharing . . .
So we find ourselves in swampy territory, walking uncertain pathways.
Beyond, the land lies submerged, unknown, forbidden. For the most part
the biographical phrase ‘she never married . . .’ represents a warning sign
inscribed with the words DON’T ASK.
But sex was in the air, and this at a time when more women than
ever were doomed to celibacy. From being censored and avoided, marital
relations were emerging as a legitimate topic of discussion, so long as they remained marital. Surplus Women were left out of that debate. Marie Though ground-breaking, Marie Stopes’s sex
advice books signally failed to embrace the
unmarried
Stopes’s books on birth control and sexual love were addressed firmly to
married women and working mothers. Unsympathetic to the unmarried
she may have been, but that didn’t stop the singles from throwing themselves on her mercy. For of course, they had sex feelings too:
Singled Out
From Miss D. E. Knight, April :
Dear Dr Stopes . . .
I am years of age, am not married, & have never been engaged; but for years now I have been troubled by intensely strong sexual feelings which have never been satisfied, sometimes the craving has been so strong that it
has almost amounted to bodily pain. I . . . have been brought up in a middle class conventional life, where to mention such feelings & to ask questions about the principal thing in life was considered most improper & degrading . . .
From Miss Hilda Winstanley, April
For the sake of a friend I am venturing to ask your advice . . .
Absolutely by chance – she is very highly sexed – it appears she produced in herself the sexual orgasm to which you referred in your book. At the ‘tides’
explained by you, she tells me she cannot resist bringing this sensation of the nerves to herself by friction. I am wondering if she is acting in a way that is harmful to herself, or as she is so terribly highly sexed and is in the very best of health, is it doing her good to give way? She says she simply has to do it . . .
From Miss NN, September
I am unmarried but the sex instinct is tremendously strong in me . . .
I feel that desire is absolutely right and natural and the normal heritage of every healthy woman whether married or not.
But I am not quite sure whether even under strong sexual desire it is ever
right
to induce excitation of the clitoris and the wonderful thrill which is the outcome of such an action? . . . Do you think that an occasional indulgence viz two or three times a month is detrimental to health – or disloyal to the highest and best we know? . . .
It may interest you to know that I am years of age and only realized the
possibility of self satisfaction at . . .
From Miss Nancy C. Thorn, October
Dear Doctor,
I am writing to you to see whether you can help me at all. I am feeling rather worried over myself at present, and have done for some time.
When I was eight years old or perhaps a little younger I stumbled by
accident on what I have since learnt is called ‘Masturbation’. I thought I was the only person who did such a thing until a few years ago (I am now ) and it did not strike me as being wrong. Now it has become such a habit that I find it very difficult to break myself of it . . .
I do not do it so frequently as I used to and I feel I am very weak in not
Caring, Sharing . . .
being able to stop. Ought I to stop at once or try gradually or ‘carry on’? I do not feel I want to do the latter.
I went two months once without performing, but felt wretched.
. . . Apologising for troubling you
Marie Stopes kept every single one of the multitudes of letters sent to her
in strictest confidence by women and men, married and single alike – an
extraordinary archive of fear, ignorance, doubt and unhappiness. She also
answered them, though not all the replies survive. In the numerous cases
of single women who put their desperate cases before her, Marie Stopes
inclined towards a brisk, no-nonsense response. It was more than her
reputation was worth to be seen to encourage immorality, and she was very
cautious about recommending masturbation, advising Miss NN that, since
she was over the age of thirty, it might be beneficial to indulge twice a
month, but only so long as she acknowledged that it was dangerous.
Generally she advised her frustrated correspondents to find something else
to fill their time, work or an absorbing occupation (knitting, perhaps?), before earnestly expressing the hope that they might marry at some unspecified point in the future: I do not know how the sex instinct can be legitimately fulfilled, except by deflecting it into sound work.
At the time of conscious need of sex, really hot baths are good in dissipating the electric energy which accumulates.
The problem you raise is, of course, one of an increasingly urgent nature since the cruel devastation of the War, and it is one which I fear individuals must solve for themselves at present.
Yours very truly . . .
This was a typical reply to an unmarried woman who wrote to her asking
how she could satisfy her sex instincts.
Evidently, single women did endure frustration, but it is hard to discover
what proportion allowed it to get the better of them. A psychological study
of single women conducted in America in the early s revealed that
a third of them had had ‘a love interest’. Of these, under a third had had
sexual intercourse – or one woman in every nine. Four hundred and forty
of those women were virgins. From the same sample, it was estimated that,
though only one third of the women actually admitted it, four out of five
of the women had masturbated.
None of this is surprising, and it is surely reasonable to assume that these
Singled Out
statistics would apply equally to women in Great Britain. It would appear
too that many women accepted the generally held view that sublimation
of the sex instincts was easier for them than it was for men; ‘I think a
woman is different to a man. She doesn’t get so frustrated,’ remembered
a spinster interviewed for the BBC in her nineties. ‘It’s more necessary for a man. A woman can divert her stream of energy elsewhere.’ This lady, Irene Angell, did her best to divert her own energies into her job; after the war she was working as a secretary, but when her divorced boss and she fell in love the atmosphere became suffocating, and she fled, fearing scandal.
In old age none of Miss Angell’s regrets were for the sex she’d missed out
on, they were all for the companionship, love and children.
Nevertheless, as the letters to Marie Stopes reveal, and as some of the
quotations from the American case histories demonstrate, the attendant
misery could be acute:
– She complains at thirty-seven that two doctors have told her she ought to get married, one a year ago. ‘I’ve cried every night since.’
– ‘Could you not introduce me to a man who would be a suitable husband?’
– ‘About masturbation, it is my greatest comfort that the doctor does not know all; the shame, the sorrow, the never-ending struggle.’
Marie Stopes’s postbag tells the same story. A lonely twenty-eight-year-old
wrote to her as a last resort for advice on how to lose her virginity: ‘I am craving for real love and affection. Every heart desires a mate! . . . I am unable to find a companion.’ This woman had turned for help to a psychologist, who told her that being a virgin at her age was most unusual, and advised her to hurry up and get some sex at the earliest opportunity. But
how? ‘I was brought up that a girl must refuse having relations before
marriage. I am in despair.’
Unhelpful exchanges, unsympathetic doctors – to whom could the single
woman turn? As we have seen, there were a number of books aimed at
singles, and these tried with the best of intentions to meet a crying need.
In her
Sex Philosophy of a Bachelor Girl
(), Clara Amy Burgess urged her celibate readers to seek out the silver lining. Doing without sex meant doing without venereal disease, without gynaecological or obstetric complications, and without ‘the nervous and mental disorders which follow on too frequent sex-indulgence’. Burgess adamantly maintained that succumbing to passion was more injurious than celibacy, for intense passion overwhelms, absorbs and harms; it is impure. The woman who gives in to
Caring, Sharing . . .
the sex instinct becomes morbid, melancholy and rude. Somehow the
bachelor girl must learn to disregard the prevailing obsession with the
physical and animal. Modern novels, for example, were degenerate. Don’t
Sex and the single woman: by the s there was no shortage of literature on the subject (illustration from
Live Alone and Like It
by Marjorie Hillis) read them, she urged. She also asserted that suppressed sex could in itself be a resource, channelled in the right way; far from becoming frigid and
withered, the sexual energies would course through the bachelor girl’s veins and find new outlets, causing her to glow with health and find a new spring in her step.
As far as possible, and she knew this was asking a lot, Burgess advised the
bachelor girl to isolate and banish all her sexual feelings. ‘Keep sex in a
strong-box, with other interests sitting on the lid to hold it tight.’ The other interests she recommended – among them cleaning up slums, organising neighbourhood clubs, learning a language and folk-dancing – were aimed
at refreshing the mind and wearying the body, thus promoting healthy
sleep. Anyone who still felt like a spot of exciting friction at bedtime after such an action-packed day surely wasn’t doing her bit.
Nevertheless, Clara Amy Burgess had a point about looking on the bright
side; society did not tolerate extra-marital sex, nor was the post-war world a propitious one for casual sexual relationships. A man could sow his wild oats, but a woman who did so was a slut, and risked pregnancy. Contraceptives were often faulty, and in any case not widely available, and chemists were disinclined to sell them to single people. Unmarried mothers got little
Singled Out
sympathy or help; very few of them chose to battle on alone. The mothers
were sometimes condemned to asylums, while their babies were put out
for adoption or sent to reformatories. In the government estimated
that up to , illegal abortions were being carried out yearly, a substantial minority on single women. It was also widely believed that one in five of the four million soldiers who had returned to England had brought back
with them a venereal disease; syphilis was then incurable. There were
indeed compensations for being a virgin.
Despite this, the stigma of being a spinster was so fearful that many
women succumbed to sex, believing they’d get a husband that way. Betty
Milton, who was in service as a kitchen-maid after the war, felt that at
twenty-six her marriage prospects were receding. Life in service didn’t offer many opportunities for meeting men, apart from the boy who delivered the groceries. She wasn’t very keen on him, but she started seeing him and
eventually agreed to have sex because he promised to marry her. ‘I began
to consider myself left on the shelf, an ‘‘old maid’’ . . . I hated it but at twenty-six I was dead scared of losing him.’ Betty got caught by the man’s mother, who abused her with every name in the book; she was lucky not
to get pregnant, for the man was nowhere to be seen. Poorly paid and
dependent, women of this class were particularly vulnerable: the ‘superfluity’ of women was even more pronounced in the world of Upstairs— Downstairs, where they outnumbered men by five to one, than it was in
the wider world. Men could take their pick, and were often ruthless.
For, as ever, double standards prevailed among the male population.