Authors: Virginia Nicholson
understanding of the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Flaubert to bear
on advocating their works, while the study of Russian at Cambridge was
immeasurably advanced by the persuasive powers of Elizabeth Hill, Professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge University. The government turned to Margery Perham for advice on colonial administration when formulating
post-imperial policy, and Enid Russell-Smith had an entire career as an
enlightened civil servant, deeply committed to social reform, before taking
up her university post as Principal of St Aidan’s College, Durham. As an
academic, Margery Fry also poured her civic energies into penal reform;
she was made a magistrate in and was the first education adviser to
Holloway prison. After her retirement she wrote her illuminating and
compassionate short book
The Single Woman
(), in which she paid tribute to all the spinsters upon whom the smooth running of society
depended.
Classified advertisements in
Women’s Employment
(January ), a new magazine targeting the expanding female labour market The opening up of education to women gave many of them undreamed-of career openings. Elizabeth Denby studied social sciences at the London School of Economics during the First World War; it led her into the
voluntary sector, where she experienced at first hand the implications of
bad housing. Working alongside architects and local authorities, Miss Denby
was to become a leading urban reformer, and tireless campaigner for better
housing solutions in inner cities. ‘My life, my interest, enjoyment and heart, [now] lay with new building, with construction and everything it meant,’
she wrote. Brenda Colvin was another young woman whose early teaching
inspired her to set out in a new direction – in her case that of landscape
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
architecture, an undervalued branch of design at that time. From planting
and landscaping gardens she moved to the design of industrial and urban
landscape.
Humanitarian instincts, moral courage, conscience and kindliness are
qualities which distinguish many of the women whose huge range of
activities I have been describing, but the circumstances of the post-war
world demanded, and received, a surge of new and fervent commitment
to righting the wrongs of a dangerous century. In the nineteenth century
idealistic women might have meekly set out to convert the heathen in
Nigeria. They now found more vital causes in the twentieth. Hard to define
as a group, they were best described in Keats’s
Hyperion
– quoted by women’s historian Sybil Oldfield in her compendium of women humanitarians – as ‘. . . those to whom the miseries of the world are misery and will not let them rest’. Out of entries in Oldfield’s book, two-thirds
were single women or childless. But at the end of a long career working to
alleviate tropical diseases among children from Ghana to Japan, Dr Cicely
Williams felt that she was ‘. . . mother to millions of babies’. Dr Williams was one of the first women to train at Oxford University’s medical school; it was her observations in the field that led to the identification of
kwashiorkor
– childhood malnutrition. In Singapore in Cicely Williams heroically cared for a hundred sick infants dumped in the city’s dental hospital. She
commandeered milk and boiled it for them on Bunsen burners; when the
Japanese ordered her to move on she despairingly handed as many of them
as she could over for adoption, before herself being interned in Changi
prisoner-of-war camp, where for two years she endured malnutrition,
disease and the constant fear of torture. Nevertheless she continued after
her release at the end of the war to work in child health for another forty
years.
Doreen Warriner was another supremely brave and intelligent woman
who abandoned a brilliant academic career to go to the rescue of the
thousands of Jews and socialists in Prague threatened by Nazism in .
The British government’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia filled her with shame,
and she took personal responsibility for getting huge numbers of these
desperate refugees into hiding, providing them with passports and, when
Hitler’s army marched in, helping them to escape. Her contemporary
Evelyn Bark’s amazing gift for foreign languages – she was fluent in at least six – was the foundation of her work for the British Red Cross. Having set up a tracing service for people with missing relatives, in she found
herself in charge of the horrifying and heartbreaking task of reuniting
survivors from Belsen concentration camp. She was foremost among the
Singled Out
British liberators who endured terrible conditions to feed and medicate the
emaciated survivors and remove the unburied dead.
The injustice and oppression of the twentieth century offered ample
scope for such gifted, courageous and selfless women to dedicate their
lives to famine relief, interracial integration, fighting oppression, helping refugees, healing, educating, rescuing and cherishing. But the conditions of that century also enabled women to give the very best of themselves. As Cicely Hamilton wrote:
Teach me to need no aid of men,
That I may aid such men as need.
The male business world defended its inner strongholds as tenaciously as
it could, but with a vast army of ‘business girls’ camped outside in the
typing pool it was only a matter of time before a few of them began to
break in. Elsie M. Lang, author of an assessment entitled
British Women in
the Twentieth Century
(), commented on the number of women holding well-paid posts and directorships in commercial firms, from wholesale druggists to rubber manufacturers, produce agents to publishers. ‘The
majority of the great business women of to-day,’ she wrote, ‘have climbed
into positions of £, a year and even more by means of shorthand and
typing.’ Chapter described how by sheer determination Beatrice Gordon
Holmes learnt to be a stockbroker and became director of the leading
‘outside house’ in the City of London; by she was making up to
£, a year (equivalent to over £, today). But even her affluence
did not match that of Alice Head, editor and managing director of
Good
Housekeeping
magazine, who by the time she was in her thirties was said to be earning more than any other woman in Britain. Like Gordon Holmes, Miss Head had started out training as a shorthand typist. By enough
women were employed in the broadly defined field of business and the
professions for a British branch to be formed of the International Federation of Business and Professional Women. Three years later Gordon Holmes was invited to Paris to speak to their Congress on ‘Women in Finance’:
There in Paris, in July, , I saw a brilliant platform of public women of all nations. To me as an old suffragette it was thrilling . . . in we [had been] told that although women might get the vote . . . not in our lifetime could we expect to see women in Parliaments and Governments, women in public office, women in all the professions. Such progress would not be possible for our generation – if ever.
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
And there in front of me on that Paris platform in July, , were contingents of women parliamentarians from all countries . . . distinguished women doctors, lawyers, teachers, writers, artists . . . It had the effect on me of a revelation: I felt like Rip Van Winkle. Since I had been absorbed in earning my living, making my way in the business world . . . Only there in Paris, listening to speeches and reports covering every form of human endeavour, did I realise the immense amount of public work that women were doing in every section of society all over the world, by means of organised groups working through definite national and international programmes.
The magnificent regiment of women! Yes, I suddenly seemed to blink my eyes
open into and on to a new world at that Paris Congress in July .
Gordon Holmes was justified in feeling part of that magnificence. Her
reputation was made. Elsie M. Lang’s book credited her as the first woman
stockbroker. A decade after the war, Lang catalogued the inroads made by
women into the male domain. Despite being temporarily interrupted by
the return of male employees after demobilisation, their onward march was
steady. And it is impossible not to be struck – as Lang respectfully refers to the ladies by their titles – by how many of them were single. Just some of them, extracted from her list, are as follows:
Miss Ellen McArthur – the first woman to be awarded the degree of DLitt by the University of Dublin Miss Nairn – winner of the gold medal and first woman to obtain Classical Tripos at Cambridge University Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, first woman JP to be sworn in in London
Miss Faithfull, Principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College
Miss Margaret Beavan, Liverpool’s first Lady Mayor
Miss Edith Beesley, manager of the West End branch of the Southern Life
Association
Miss Reynolds, head of one of the largest publicity firms in England
Miss Kathleen Britter, the first woman conveyancer
Miss Harris Smith, in made a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants Miss E. D. Clarke, estate agent and auctioneer Miss Robert of Liverpool, awarded Williams’ memorial prize at the Royal Veterinary College Miss Dicker, film production technician The two Misses Banks, the first two women to run a second-hand bookshop
Miss Gladys Burlton, Principal of the Burlton Business Institute
Miss Irvine, the only professional tea-taster appointed by HM Government
Singled Out
Miss Gertrude Mann, manufacturer of mosaics
Miss Lorimer, buyer in the Oriental Department of one of the big London stores Miss Gwen Nally, pageant producer Miss Maud West, detective
If the idea of a woman detective would have been unthinkable in, say,
, men had fewer problems with the idea of a woman artist. The arts
have never been the exclusive preserve of men, and music and watercolours
were deemed sufficiently dainty and useless for the fairer sex to be allowed to participate, so long as they were amateur. By the turn of the century even a woman novelist was no longer expected to write under a male
pseudonym, though eyebrows might still be raised when daughters went
on the stage, and much brow-beating took place when women abandoned
all for the easel. But Virginia Woolf ’s battle-cry for writers in
A Room of
One’s Own
() – ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ – carried with it the imperative of nostrings
professionalism. As Woolf pointed out, women had, since time began, been
too busy giving birth to and bringing up the human race to have time for
serious writing. Their talent could only thrive if that ceased to be expected of them. In other words, there must be no babies, no housework and no demanding husbands. Extend that to musicians, painters, performers, poets,
and it is easy to see why, in a world where babies and husbands were
denied, professional women artists flourished. Without the contribution of
unmarried women the British cultural scene would have been notably
poorer.
The preceding chapters have already discussed some of the writers who
remained unmarried – women like Elizabeth Goudge, Phyllis Bentley,
Winifred Holtby, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elizabeth Jenkins, Sylvia Townsend Warner, F. M. Mayor, Richmal Crompton and Irene Rathbone. And there were more: Rachel Ferguson, Mary Renault, Noe¨l Streatfeild, Edith
Sitwell, Valentine Ackland, Rhoda Power, Lettice Cooper, Muriel Jaeger . . .
Recruitment to art schools was higher in the interwar period than it
had ever been before, and it was estimated that of the , self-styled
artists working in Britain up to , the majority were women, though it
appeared that a minority of these actually lived by their art. Gwen John and Dora Carrington are perhaps the best-known single women artists of the early part of the twentieth century, but there were others: Margaret Pilkington, one of the finest wood-engravers of that generation, the textile designer and illustrator Enid Marx, her friend the potter Norah Braden, the figure painter and landscape artist Nano Reid . . .
The Magnificent Regiment of Women
The stage and screen too were lit up by the talents of a clutch of
formidable spinsters: the grand comic Irene Handl made batty old ladies
her speciality, perhaps feeling herself to be one. Doris Speed and Margot
Bryant both became familiar faces throughout the land with their roles in
Coronation Street
. Miss Speed played Annie Walker, the withering landlady of the Rover’s Return, for twenty-three years, and Miss Bryant played Minnie Caldwell, the naı¨ve little old lady often to be seen with her glass of stout gossiping in the pub snug. Dame Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies made her name in the leading role of Shaw’s
Back to Methuselah
in , and went on to star as Juliet to John Gielgud’s Romeo; their stage partnership was to last half a century. Dame Flora Robson’s personal life was as dramatic as that of the many heroines she played. In the early s she too worked with
Gielgud, but fell madly in love with his contemporary, the director Tyrone
Guthrie. Her yearning to have children by him drove him away; ten years
later Guthrie married a cousin. Flora had a knack of falling for unavailable men, like Robert Donat and Paul Robeson. Her anxiety was that she would inevitably find herself typecast as a tortured spinster, and ironically enough it was her final role, at the age of seventy-three, as the quaint Miss Prism in Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest
, that was to bring her immortality.