Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Women were supposed to be pure, lovely brides in white, but they were
sex objects too. A spinster offended on both counts. Often losing her looks
as she pushed into middle age, she was also likely to be a virgin. The
existence of the Surplus Women, and their huge numbers, challenged a
man’s most dearly held beliefs about his honour and his potency. And so,
like Gallichan and Ludovici, the men fought back, vilifying the unhappy
singles and blaming them for the blamelessness of their lives.
Small wonder, then, if the spinsters themselves sought what consolation
they could among their own sex. Female friendships like that of Vera
Brittain and Winifred Holtby, Geraldine Aves and Gwyneth Jones, or Miss
Patch and Miss Prior were immensely common. But instead of being
accepted, such necessary and desirable relationships were often accused of
being deviant and perverted.
Caring, Sharing . . .
Few women could hope to live up to the virginal ideals of a generation of Englishmen, middle-aged spinsters least of all (
Strand Magazine
, December ) Already the sight of corduroy-clad landgirls alongside women dressed in
the uniforms of the auxiliary forces of the war, followed by the boyish
fashions of the s, had given the
bien-pensant
bourgeoisie some anxious moments. Now, with the vocabulary of homosexuality, inversion and Uranianism* entering the language, the dividing line between friendship
and lesbianism was becoming very fine indeed. Doreen Potts, who talked to
me about her life as a single woman in the s and s, was eager to point out at the very beginning of our interview that she had lots of good girlfriends – ‘but that’s all they were! I wasn’t a lez!’ Vera Brittain was also guarded.
After Winifred Holtby’s death, when she wrote and published her eulogy
Testament of Friendship
, she was careful to be unambiguous about the nature of that friendship. She had married; Winifred had not. She did not want anyone to think that Winifred had played the role of substitute husband.
The prosecution of Radclyffe Hall in for her lesbian romance
The
Well of Loneliness
raised public consciousness of same-sex female relationships as nothing before, and many women innocent of anything more sinister * The word, though not in the
Oxford English Dictionary
, seems to have been coined by Edward Carpenter (–, author of
Love’s Coming of Age
[] and
The Intermediate
Sex
[]) to describe both male and female homosexuality.
Singled Out
than sharing a church pew found themselves the subjects of hostile insinu—
ation. Beatrice Gordon Holmes thought
The Well of Loneliness
a dreary book, but having lived through a period when parents insisted that their daughters were chaperoned by other women every minute of the day, she couldn’t help finding the resulting furore amusing:
Oh! The vicarages and country homes who felt their peace of mind forever
poisoned as they contemplated Daphne, Pamela, Joan, and Margery all living
together with unthinkable consequences . . .
Gordon was completely broad-minded. Tender, loving emotions, she rightly
claimed, ‘know no barriers in the human heart’. A little psychoanalysis goes a long way, was her view, and the attached jargon was too clumsy and inexact a label for what were entirely natural, suitable and passionate friendships.
It is hard to do anything but guess at how many of such friendships
included an element of passion. The taboos against it were strong but, as
we have seen, so was the need for sexual release and the expression of
physical affection. Marie Stopes had her share of worried correspondents
agonising over their lesbian leanings. Miss L. Redcliffe wrote to her in
begging for advice:
. . . I have a very strong tendency to be attracted by my own sex.
I have made great efforts to overcome this – but the force of it is so strong that it seems to me most important that if there is anything I am ignorant of I should have advice . . .
The reply was benevolent but dismissive:
Such a feeling as you describe is sometimes more or less normally developed in late adolescence, and is a phase to pass through just as teething in a younger stage . . . Keep your mind off the physical side of that aspect as much as possible and lead as healthy and as busy a life as you can. Some good hard brain work on some subject of study would probably be a very beneficial thing and I think you will find the normal sex attraction will assert itself and this phase pass entirely away.
Sybil Neville-Rolfe,* the author of
Why Marry
? (), was less inclined to view lesbian feelings as ‘just a phase’. She stated her view that lesbians * Founder of the Eugenics Society, later the British Social Hygiene Council, which promoted eugenics, sex education, marriage, and order and decency in public places.
Caring, Sharing . . .
should be looked on as sick and abnormal. But her condemnation was
tempered by compassion. Poor dears, they couldn’t help it: ‘the war left
behind it a generation of Eves in an Adamless Eden . . . Starving for love,
deprived of homes and denied the joys of motherhood, many women
found in friendship one with another some sort of substitute for these
normal but lost relationships.’
Neville-Rolfe felt the need to clear up any ambiguity and educate her
readers. She had had so many letters from women who didn’t understand the
difference between ‘normal’ crushes and dangerous, predatory relationships.
One of her correspondents, a forty-year-old teacher, had gone to a lecture
by a psychologist who had terrified her with dire warnings about the
dreadful things women got up to if they were left alone together. What
was she to do? She had been making plans to share a home with her best
friend, a forty-five-year-old widowed postmistress. But what if it were
harmful? Another young lady had written to her to bemoan the fact that her
mother was interfering with her relationship with her greatest friend, Doris, whom she saw as ‘undesirable’. This young lady couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. Doris was clever, well-read and was planning to take her on holiday to Italy – what could possibly be the harm in that? After all, it wasn’t as if Doris was some kind of temptress, on the contrary: ‘Doris can’t stand men and is never the least interested in them. I think she is much too like one
herself ! You’ve only got to see her to realise she isn’t ‘‘fast’’ . . . she always dresses [plainly] . . . and looks awfully well in . . . the top part of a man’s evening dress and a short black skirt. However, that is just to prove to you that she would look after me all right in Italy and wouldn’t be dashing about after men.’ This case was used to demonstrate how careful one should
be; ‘looking after’ could mean all sorts of things. Forewarned is forearmed.
Not everyone was so portentous about the results of female ‘friendship’.
The sex advisers were well aware that when women cohabited one thing
might lead to another. Laura Hutton, for example, delicately hinted at
the unconscious forces at work when women’s friendships progressed to
intimacy. Hutton believed that the sex element in these friendships was far
better recognised and accepted than repressed. Putting the lid on it was
asking for trouble: guilt, resentment and tension were bound to result. For
Hutton sex between women was ‘a problem to be worked out with care’.
Esther Harding, author of
The Way of All Women
(), was still more tolerant. For her, sex was subsidiary to love, and to women’s particular genius for intimacy. Harding commented on the prevalence of pairs of
women setting up house together, and noted that more and more women
seemed to be adopting ‘a somewhat masculinised dress and manner, as
Singled Out
well as certain masculine characteristics’. But instead of condemning these
women as perverted predators waiting to pounce on innocent ingeńues and
carry them off to Italy, Harding saw them sympathetically as a sign of the
times. Women in the post-war world were entering professions, rejecting
domesticity and becoming independent; they were crossing into male territory and, to prove it, they put on men’s clothes. Instinct will out, however: you could take the woman out of the home, but you couldn’t take the home out of the woman. Deep down ‘. . . she wishes to have a home of
her own’. And so these loving meńages grew up – comparable only to
marriage in their richness, stability and permanence. But with a difference: empathy and harmonious relationships were the special sphere of women, and even the best heterosexual marriages could rarely provide the quality
of emotional satisfaction and security to be found in many female friendships. And Harding went further: Love between women friends may find its expression in a more specifically sexual fashion which, however, cannot be considered perverted if their actions are motivated by love.
Esther Harding’s endorsement of sex between women would probably
have fallen on stony ground with Elizabeth Goudge. She was a devout and
obedient Christian; nevertheless Harding’s emphasis on love would have
struck an answering chord. Drained dry after her mother’s death, the only
thing that could replace that crucial relationship was a new and wonderful
friendship:
Without my mother’s vivid presence the place was dead . . .
The weeks dragged by and kind friends came to visit me, but I lived in a dusty desert. Everything, I felt, had come to a dead end. There seemed no way out or through. Then the autumn came bringing with it what I suppose is the greatest miracle of every human life, the miracle of renewal . . .
Facing solitude was the hardest thing she had yet confronted. It was something of which she had no experience and, ignorant of her own inability to cope, she tried for a while to battle on. Friends saw that she was failing.
One of these, determined to help, tried to persuade Elizabeth to write to a
single woman she knew who she thought would keep her company, at
least for a while. Doubtfully, she did so, receiving an equally doubtful reply, but a promise nonetheless to pass the winter in Devon. And in this way Jessie Monroe entered her life:
Caring, Sharing . . .
[I] went out into the garden and heard a very clear voice saying the words that are now so delightfully familiar. ‘I’m sorry I’m late.’ We looked at each other. I saw an upright, capable-looking young woman with a head of hair like a horse-chestnut on fire, and the white magnolia skin that goes with such hair. Her eyes were very direct. She looked young enough to be my daughter and I doubted if she would stand me for long, yet when I went to bed that night to my astonishment I found myself flooded with happiness, and slept deeply.
Jessie has stood me for twenty-one years and has been the most wonderful event that ever happened to me.
Thus in her final home near Oxford, together with Jessie and a succession
of adored dogs, Elizabeth Goudge found peace in advancing age to write,
to remember and to reflect on what she had gained and given to life.
Her autobiography,
The Joy of the Snow
, came out in . In it she struggled honestly and scrupulously to balance out the joys and the sorrows.
The realisation that she would not marry was mitigated for her by the sense
that the women of her generation had value in the workforce; she would
not have argued with Mrs Fawcett’s view that war had liberated a generation
– and surely the ‘women’s libbers’ of the s had missed the point? For
people like her it had all happened fifty years earlier. And though it had
taken many years and much regret – for above all she had found it hard to
bear the thought that she would never have children – she had learned to
‘recognise and deeply prize the blessings of a single life’ and to feel grateful: For the childless woman there is no lack of children in the world to love, even if they are not her own, and nothing to prevent a single woman experiencing the richness of falling in love now and again all her life. And indeed it
is
richness, for to every human being the pain of perhaps not having love returned is less important than the blessed fact of loving.
Elizabeth Goudge loved bountifully: her mother and her father, her nanny,
her friends, the many strangers who wrote to her about her books, her dear
dogs, Jessie Monroe, and above all her God. There had been loss, grief and
heartache, but as the title of her autobiography suggests, in this woman’s
life joy tipped the scales.
*
It is perhaps too easy to describe a single woman’s religious feelings as a
substitute for a real relationship. For many their religion was entirely real, their faith built on a rock of certainty. In the s the social researcher
Singled Out
F. Zweig interviewed an elderly unmarried factory cleaner in Lancashire.
After this woman’s mother died she had looked after her invalid and
mentally retarded sister for twenty-two years. ‘I stayed single because of
her. What husband would want her in his house? Mine was a wasted life
but in a way it wasn’t, because I have done my duty . . . I am religiously
inclined. I believe God picks out certain jobs and gives them to those
people who will do them. Nowadays people are fond of pleasures. They
are out for all they can get but not out for work . . . I am not lonely. I
believe in the Divine Presence. When my sister died, I felt panicky at first, but I prayed and after that I was quite calm. I know when I die I won’t be alone.’ The isolation had been dreadful but for this woman, unlike poor