Authors: Virginia Nicholson
to her, it belonged: well below her personal ambitions and ideals. The only
young man who got close to her was eliminated when he turned out to
have entirely unreconstructed views over the matter of a village scandal.
Caroline had taken the side of a young unmarried mother who had been
thrown out of her home. She intervened and persuaded the angry parents
to take the girl back. Her own young man was horrified, and informed
Caroline that he could not continue to walk out with her if she made such
an unladylike spectacle of herself; she must choose between him and the
girl. Caroline’s principles prevailed, ‘and that was the end of that romance’.
Caroline must have known that she would never be a teacher or a wife.
The evidence suggests that for her remaining single was a conscious choice;
aware that her unusual gifts would be eclipsed within marriage, she opted
to express them to the full in the interests of her sex. But in she was still uncertain of what direction to take next, and complied submissively
Singled Out
with the suggestion of a family friend that she enrol at a commercial college in London, before taking up employment in the clerical department of this friend’s boiler company. Boilers made sense to Caroline. She was soon
familiar with all the company’s products, made herself invaluable to her
surprised bosses, and met with no opposition when, towards the end of the
war, she asked to be transferred to the factory in Scotland for some hands-on experience in boiler-making. ‘As soon as I got into the works, I knew this was my world,’ she later remembered. ‘In this new and exciting atmosphere
of men and machines, she found her spiritual home,’ wrote Caroline’s
biographer.
Caroline Haslett was far from alone among women who got their hands
dirty during the war and by so doing learnt the value of industrial method
and mechanisation. But she was rare in her determination to use that
knowledge to try to better the lot of her entire sex. Machines, she felt sure, could help women to escape from the endless round of coal-scuttles and washing-baskets, and give them a life as exciting and rewarding as they
deserved. The more she pondered this, the more it became her mission to
emancipate women from domesticity by the use of machinery.
When after the war women workers were driven back to the kitchen by
the returning menfolk, a door seemed to have closed. But not on everyone.
The Surplus Women were free to make their own way in that ‘great new
world’ that the war had opened up for them, and Caroline was one. For
her, the wives were the losers; she saw herself as among the lucky few.
At the age of twenty-four she picked up an advertisement which read:
‘Required: Lady with some experience in Engineering works as Organizing
Secretary for a Woman’s Engineering Society.’ Such a post was made in
heaven for Caroline Haslett; she applied, got the job, and started out on
the pioneer path that was eventually to make her a prominent public figure.
The Engineering Society was a forum for ‘technical women’; women like
her who found satisfaction among the oil and dirt of a noisy workshop
were still very rare. The society offered these lonely few the resource of a professional organisation. It was also a campaigning body and, braving masculine resistance, Caroline became extremely effective at persuading
colleges and institutes to open their doors to women trainees. As editor of
the Society’s Journal,
Woman Engineer
, she also used its pages to pursue her personal mission to release women from drudgery and allow them to lead fuller lives. She held a competition in which the contestants had to place
imaginary home improvements in order of preference. Top of the winning
list was a dishwasher, operated by a hand-pump. Runner-up was a thermo—
static oven which doubled as a food-warmer. Other entries included a
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
hydro-powered knife-cleaner, a floor-polisher operated from a standing
position, and a hostess trolley that doubled as a coalbox on wheels. ‘In the early days of these women pioneers they were dreams that seemed as unattainable as the crock of gold at the foot of the rainbow.’ In
Caroline organised a Society conference at the British Empire Exhibition,
attended by the great and the good of royalty, politics, science and feminism.
The Women’s Engineering Society was on the map.
It was a small step from the advancement of engineering to the promotion
of electricity in the home. In it was already clear to Caroline that
electrical power offered extraordinary potential for liberating women; this
scintillating force was for her a means to the realization of a dream. She
aspired to the day when by its miraculous power every household in the
land would be cleaned, dusted, washed, heated, lit and fed. When that day
came women might rest from their labours, lay down their mops and their
dustpans and, like men, turn to the great causes of human advancement. In
November that year the Electrical Association for Women was born, with
Caroline Haslett as its first director. ‘I see in this new world a great
opportunity for women to free themselves from the shackles of the past
and to enter into a new heritage made possible by the gifts of nature which
Science has opened up to us,’ she wrote.
Caroline practised what she preached. A journalist who came to interview
her in found her in buoyant mood in her attic flat; with help from a
friend she had entirely rewired it and installed cunning gadgets such as a
square kettle and saucepan which fitted together over a single hotplate, thus using half the power. A woman’s need for economy, home planning and independence guided her every step. Caroline herself was a woman whose
ardent sense of purpose never clouded her charm, mischievous humour
and appetite for life. She inspired intense loyalty. Never without a scribbling pad to jot down the ideas with which her mind teemed, she was also a careful listener, a devout Christian and an eager enjoyer of the good things in life. She loved her garden (the flowerbed of her Kentish cottage was cut to the shape of an electric light-bulb) and she loved good food, so much so
that she was soon fighting a losing battle with her weight. Spells at health farms became part of her calendar; she would go off for a week at a time to be hosed with mud, fed on prunes and tortured in the gymnasium. It
never made much difference. ‘I think she was a woman who loved life and
made the most of what she had to offer to anyone she came in contact
with. I don’t think personal gain ever occurred to her,’ recalled her niece.
Caroline held the post of director of the EAW for the next thirty-two
years. When in she was honoured with a DBE she knew her life’s
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work really had made a difference. It was a life of campaigning and writing, managing and delegating, travelling and speech-making. Her qualities of An advertisement in a issue of
The Electrical Journal
visualised the miraculous potential of electricity to transform women’s lives
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
integrity and practicality made her invaluable to the many other public
bodies and committees on which she served. She lived to see the EAW
with a ,-strong membership, though not long enough to see the
association disbanded when by it became clear that its aims had been
so fully achieved that it was no longer necessary. By then electric ovens,
refrigerators and dishwashers were commonplace. Women worked for
wages. Some men even shared the housework, compliantly flicking the
simple switches that operated the automatic washing-machine or multi—
function vacuum cleaner. Dame Caroline Haslett died in and was, at
her express wish, cremated by electricity.
*
Not being married allowed Florence White, Rosamund Essex and Caroline
Haslett to play to their formidable strengths. They were pioneers. Single
women like this changed the world they lived in. And there were so
many of them: scientists, teachers, doctors, politicians, lawyers, artists and explorers. The vicissitudes of life – ridicule, prejudice, disappointment – had not subdued this parade of indomitable ladies. A thread of determined ambition ran through them. They would fly, they would discover, they
would build, educate, help, cure, protest, transform. This book has
attempted to tell the stories of some of them, both famous and forgotten.
To highlight only a few is to do an injustice to the extraordinary numbers
of single women between the wars whose confidence, energy and courage
still inspire; fortunately there are encyclopedias-full of them.
Today the organic farming movement honours Miss Eve Balfour for
work done at a time when holistic agriculture was regarded as cranky if not
downright mad. Lady Eve, daughter of the nd Earl of Balfour, used her
privileged background to pursue her own passionate interest in farming. In
nobody noticed that the vigorous young woman in charge of training
a gang of landgirls on a Monmouthshire farm was not twenty-five, as she
claimed, but only nineteen. After the war she and her sister purchased a
Suffolk farm where in the s, having discovered that eating compost—
grown vegetables cured her rheumatism, she began her experiments with
organic cultivation. Her book
The Living Soil
() was the influential text behind the formation of the Soil Association, which she co-founded in . Not content with her role in this (literally) ground-breaking project, Lady Eve played saxophone in her own dance band, passed her pilot’s licence in , crewed sailing ships and wrote successful detective novels.
‘I am just surprised to see that what I stood for all my life is no longer
derided but more or less accepted,’ she remarked at the age of ninety.
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The drive to reconstruct the ground beneath her feet consumed Miss
Rowena Cade for over fifty years; in her case it was the granite headland
which suggested a natural amphitheatre overlooking the sea at Porthcurno
in Cornwall that inspired her to build the Minack Theatre. Miss Cade had
loved theatricals since she had played a childhood Alice in
Through the
Looking Glass
at home in Derbyshire. After the war she settled in Cornwall, bought the headland for £ and had Minack House built. The cliff-face theatre project was the irresistible outcome of her desire to put on plays.
From she devoted her energies to its creation, and with the help of
her devoted gardener and a local craftsman set out to smooth the crags into
a stage and seating. Craggy, silver and gaunt herself, she is still remembered by villagers hauling bags of sand on her back up the steep cliff path from the beach. The first production at the Minack was
The Tempest
, with lighting provided by car headlights. Over ensuing years a proper auditorium
was created, followed by pathways, walls, parking space, an access road –
all painstakingly hewn out of the rocky cliffs, and financed by Miss Cade,
who gradually saw the magic spell of the Minack growing in reputation.
She herself worked on, in sun and in rain, until her mid-eighties; her
elaborate sketches for weather protection at the theatre have still not been accomplished.
Miss Ellen Wilkinson was elected Labour MP for Middlesbrough East
in , while still lacking the household qualification that entitled women over thirty to vote. Ellen had grown up in a grimy terrace house with an outside privy; though her parents were uneducated she gained a university
scholarship. ‘I learned all too early that a clear decisive voice and a confident manner could get one through per cent of the difficulties of life,’ she remembered. The only proper boyfriend she ever had introduced her to
Marxism. She broke off the engagement, but socialism was in her blood.
‘If a girl has not shown an overwhelming desire for public life by the time
she is eighteen . . . really [she] had better teach, or become a secretary, or get married.’ For her there was simply no time to be married (though she squeezed in a couple of affairs with politicians). In ‘Red Ellen’ was at the head of the famous Jarrow crusade with the jobless of the north-east; as an international socialist her anti-fascism brought her prominence. In the Labour government she triumphantly managed to raise the school— leaving age to fifteen while finding resources for free milk and free school meals. ‘The thrill of leadership . . . being in the battle with the workers . . .
doing things that matter . . .’ were what drove her, and though tiny – she
was only four feet ten inches tall – she didn’t allow herself to be intimidated.
Her instincts were those of the rebel. In manner she was outspoken and
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emotional, in style exhibitionist: hatless, crop-headed, she caused gasps of astonishment when she walked into the House of Commons in an emerald green dress. Miss Ellen Wilkinson made both enemies and loyal friends;
and she made a difference.
The sure march of women into male-held territory continued throughout the interwar period, though in those days the House of Commons made few compromises for them – in the women MPs had to walk a
quarter of a mile from their cramped office to get to the nearest ladies’
lavatory. For the Liberal party Megan Lloyd George energetically represented her constituents in Anglesey and opposed appeasement, while from the other side of the House Miss Irene Ward campaigned for women’s