Authors: Virginia Nicholson
Even as the horizons for women started to broaden, the pervasive stereotypes barely shifted. The audience at Gilbert and Sullivan’s
The Mikado
() would have been doubled up at their outrageous portrayal of mad
old bat Katisha, a raucous harridan ensnaring the younger Ko-Ko:
k o - k o :
Is a maiden all the better when she’s tough?
k a t i s h a :
Throughout this wide dominion
It’s the general opinion
That she’ll last a good deal longer when she’s tough.
k o - k o :
Are you old enough to marry do you think?
Won’t you wait till you are eighty in the shade?
There’s a fascination frantic
In a ruin that’s romantic
Do you think you are sufficiently decayed?
Light verse, popular fiction and children’s books found a wealth of material for caricature in the unfortunate image of the maiden lady. Hilaire Belloc’s Aunt Jane was ‘a gorgon who ought to be shot’. Hideous and interfering, Aunt Jane is visited only by irreproachable clergymen, has a lady companion, bullies her servants and generally behaves like a disapproving rhinoceros.
Disappointed spinsters were fair game too for Noe¨l Coward:
We must all be very kind to Auntie Jessie,
For she’s never been a Mother or a Wife,
You mustn’t throw your toys at her
Or make a vulgar noise at her,
She hasn’t led a very happy life.
Richmal Crompton (herself unmarried) wrote in her
William
books of sniffy boy-hating maiden aunts with piles of darning to do; their function
is to dampen and impede the irrepressible William in his exploits. Dorothy
L. Sayers fixed the image of the academic spinster forever as a round—
shouldered woman in a yellow djibbah, with hair coiled in shells round her
ears and a face like the back of a cab. Agatha Christie’s knitting detective
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
Hilaire Belloc’s ‘gorgon’ Aunt Jane settling up with her maiden
lady companion
Miss Marple incarnated the spinster sleuth, while shrill scheming old maids
likened to hyenas and birds of prey stalked the pages of E. F. Benson.
*
Being reviled as a bossy, warped, cat-loving virgin with thick legs was
hurtful, but one could live it down. It would be po-faced and humourless
to object to a spot of harmless comedy; after all, nobody thought the
demonic Miss Elizabeth Mapp was
real
. But unmarried women had to contend with attacks by writers who failed to disguise their venom under
the mask of fiction.
In Walter M. Gallichan wrote
Modern Woman and How to Manage
Her
, followed a few years later by
The Great Unmarried
(). Gallichan was what we would probably now describe as a sexual psychologist, though he also wrote books on travel and trout fishing. In these two works Gallichan set out to make sense of what he saw as the growing alienation of women from their natural role – that of marriage. It was in those early years of the twentieth century that the ‘spinster problem’ had started to make itself felt.
Hitherto the maiden ladies had appeared content to knit passively in the
chimney corner. Now, as men like Gallichan observed, ‘The present is the
Singled Out
era of the man-contemning, man-hating woman’. It worried him, for he
had begun to observe that not all these man-haters ran true to type:
She is not always an ugly woman, with an unpleasing voice, and dressed like a dowdy. On the contrary, she is sometimes beautiful and very attractive to men, though sexually abnormal.
Gallichan became preoccupied with trying to define and ‘manage’ the
modern woman. What was to be done with these ‘Ann Veronicas’?* Who
The literate spinster, with her ‘busy little brain’, was an easy target for
caricaturists like Nicolas Bentley
was to blame for their thrusting moves towards independence? Gallichan
had the grace to concede guilt on the part of the British patriarchy ‘. . . who have kept their womenfolk under lock and key . . .’ and therefore had only themselves to blame, but he was also himself deeply patronising, raining
blame on the rampancy, defiance and fanaticism of modern woman:
Ideas are seething in her busy little brain. She is desperately intellectual. One day she tells you that she is prepared to die for the cause of Women’s Suffrage. Next week she will be immersed in economics, or vegetarianism, or free love . . .
* The eponymous heroine of H. G. Wells’s shocking novel
Ann Veronica
() readily gave her name to independent-minded women like her who ran away from home, experimented with emancipation and broke the moral taboos of the day.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
‘I don’t mean to marry,’ she says, with a ring of disdain. ‘I want to live my own life.’ . . . She tries to disguise her sex attractions by dressing dowdily, neglecting her hair, wearing square-toed boots, and assuming inelegant poses.
Inelegant poses were one rebellion too many for this concerned but conventional observer. His next book was published during the war, when men were already dying in great numbers. Reflecting the nervousness felt
by men like him, it was much more unforgiving in tone. In
The Great
Unmarried
, Gallichan solemnly noted that the increase in spinsters would end in tears. He prophesied a calamitous post-war fall in the birth-rate, and the swamping of the labour market by working women; he also issued a stern warning against spinster teachers who, he said, would disseminate
‘false views of life . . . oblique and distorted conceptions of love . . . and intellectual insincerities . . .’ Such women, because they had not known ‘conjugal love’, would be tyrannical, domineering and censorious. He went
on to diagnose ‘psychic sclerosis’, and produced a damning range of statistics proving that ill-health, crime, lunacy, early death and suicide were vastly more prevalent among the unmarried than the married.
Men’s fear of unmarried women grew as the numbers multiplied after
the war, and as their potential for wage-earning increased. The anxiety
produced by the feeling that they were in a minority took curious forms.
In the press it was, for instance, felt necessary to emphasise the scientific aspects of housewifery; this might help to deflect women from careers and independence. In the s, propaganda in the dailies urged women back
to re-dedicate themselves to the home, which more than ever must be
dainty and spotless. Wonderful labour-saving devices and convenience food
conspired to lure women back to the hearth, the shops and the kitchen
sink. One advertisement for floor wax portrayed a row of beautiful brides
driven to become ‘scrubwomen’ at forty, because they didn’t use the
Johnson Electric Polisher. Those brides could have stayed ‘fresh and lovely’
for so little . . .
Then there was the frightening reality that women had emerged into the
post-war world physically superior to their damaged men. How can Harry
Pearson have felt, with his smashed shoulder and bullet wound, when
confronted by Winifred Holtby’s lithe greyhound beauty? Castrated, no
doubt. The sad remnants of men who returned from the war maimed,
gassed and psychologically scarred were subjected to the spectacle of jolly
Jazz Age flappers dancing, golfing, motoring and mountaineering. Women
like the svelte and shapely Mollie Stack, who began teaching keep-fit in
to support the family after her husband was killed in the first months
Singled Out
of the war, going on to found the Women’s League of Health and Beauty,
can only have exacerbated men’s feelings of emasculation.
After the Census there was no disputing the figures, and a relatively
moderate disquiet about the Surplus Women was replaced by open consternation and intolerance. Society itself was in peril. In
Lysistrata, or Woman’s
Future and Future Woman
() by Anthony M. Ludovici,* the author’s fear and hostility are audible.
Ludovici was English, born in of Italian ancestry; the son of an
artist, he himself abandoned art for literature and became enthralled by the German philosopher Nietzsche, six of whose works he translated. Ludovici’s own beliefs are now so shockingly unfashionable and misogynistic that
they are almost entirely neglected; he opposed modern art, democracy,
liberalism, miscegenation, birth control and feminism. His polemic against
women was published in . Ludovici held an unshakeable conviction
that women must mate. Their ‘bodily destiny . . .’ was sexual – leading to
maternal – satisfaction; women were born from women whose grandmothers and great-grandmothers before that had known ‘the ardent embrace of a lover, the ecstasy of consummated love, and the clinging
adoration of adoring offspring’. It was against nature to rupture this time—
honoured lineage of love. And now . . . ? Two million women, condemned
to bitter sub-normality, the arts and virtues of the home lost; sewing,
cooking and the nurture of the young forgotten; young women, reft from
the home, withered and broken by long years of secretarial work . . .
Ludovici mourned their fate, but he also blamed and cursed the victims.
Like an enraged animal who feels himself to be under attack, he lunged
and charged at his wounded enemy. The spinsters are ‘malign . . . thwarted
. . . jealous . . . bitter . . . deficient . . . wretched . . .’ And society will live to repent the appalling feminist tendencies that have led to the disastrous desertion by women of their natural place:
A large body of disgruntled women, mostly unmarried, who having turned away
from Life and Love either through lack of mates or the nausea acquired in modern matrimony, are prepared to slander not only Life, but also motherhood, domesticity and Man . . .
* The book draws its title from Aristophanes’ drama about the Peloponnesian War, in which the heroine, Lysistrata, attempts to bring an end to the conflict. She does this by persuading the women on both sides to withdraw their sexual favours from the men until they agree to peace.
‘A world that doesn’t want me . . .’
Now Ludovici waxes apocalyptic. These disgruntled women will rise up,
he cries, and take over the world. They will slander and destroy their
married sisters and all mankind. They will try to prove to the world that
they can live without mates, and war will break out between the sexes.
But, paranoid as they seemed, some of Ludovici’s prophecies were not
so far out. Next, he raved, the feminists will call for ‘extra-corporeal
gestation – science will be allowed no rest until a technique is discovered
that will meet the public demand . . . a means will be discovered by which
the fertilized ovum will be matured outside the female body . . . Legislation will now be passed, which will make it a felony for a man to give a woman a child in the old corporeal sense, and any man found guilty of such an
offence will be sentenced to death or else to a long term of hard labour.’
Now ‘triumphant feminism will reach its zenith’. And the form of that
triumph? Evolution will bring about a de-sexed woman, with only her
hairlessness and genitalia to show that she was once – a wife.
Men will then be frankly regarded as quite superfluous.
Fortunately, Ludovici’s proto-fascist views represent an extreme which
would have been better received in Nazi Germany than it actually was
in twentieth-century Britain. Nevertheless he was widely published, and
Lysistrata
articulates the widely-felt threat that unmarried women seemed to pose to men, and to society as a whole.
*
Arch-critics of the spinster like Gallichan and Ludovici were not Victorian
throwbacks. The language had changed; the lid was off sex now, and
bottling it up was simply passe´. Between them, Freud, Havelock Ellis,
Marie Stopes and D. H. Lawrence had seen to that. Nineteen-twenties
Britain was in a ferment of candid debate about free love, contraception
and permissiveness. This didn’t make it any easier for the singles. Dark tides of passion were bringing orgasmic bliss and maternal fulfilment to liberated women, but only so long as they had men with the loins and vigour to provide it for them. In a world whose male population seemed composed
of amputees and trauma victims, the dominant and often overt female
fantasy was of the athletic super-stud, be it gamekeeper, black boxing
champion or smouldering-eyed sheik. The picture palaces had typists
queuing up for their next hit of Rudolph Valentino’s romantic virility.
Where did that leave the Surplus Woman? Too often sitting quaking in
her cold lodgings, wondering yet again how she had managed to get left
Singled Out
out. The nineteenth century ignored women’s sexuality; yet that ignorance
had been a form of salvation for the spinster. Probably, if she thought about sex at all, the gorgon Aunt Jane would have counted herself deeply fortunate at not having to go through all that nasty messy stuff endured with clenched teeth by her married sister-in-law.
But now it looked as if the married sister-in-laws were having all the
fun. They not only had respectability and babies; they had gorgeous sex
too. The novel
Treasure in Heaven
() by Rosalind Wade (herself married with children) tells the cruel story of Fanny Manningfield, a lively, contented and busy single woman aged fifty who has filled her life with useful activity – until events force her to confront the devastating fact that she has been repressing her ‘natural’ instincts all along. Fanny’s zest for life, her enthusiastic energy and useful occupations have, it turns out, been nothing but substitutes and compensations for love, home, protection and babies