Singled Out (14 page)

Working-class wives were not the only ones condemned to cramped

and narrow horizons. Though not burdened with poverty, middle-class

and upper-class wives were, like their poorer sisters, expected to confine

their activities to the domestic sphere. Nobody ever thought to ask a

married woman what she did, since everybody knew: her fate was to endure

a life of endless and pointless leisure. ‘If the fire required poking, one rang for a maid to fulfil this duty. No lady made any effort,’ remembered one young lady who had grown up in Edwardian England. Flowers had to be

arranged, of course, the canary fed, and calls paid. Embroidery must be

done and bridge played. Daughters might also have to be taken to dancing

classes, and books changed at libraries, but generally speaking drawing-room life was far from arduous. Henrietta (Etty) Litchfield, the daughter of Charles Darwin, led a life of exemplary futility. Etty had been delicate as a child and, having been advised by her doctor to have breakfast in bed for a while, never got up for breakfast again for the rest of her life. She did

not have children, and had nothing to do except rest, and worry about

her health. Her niece, the artist Gwen Raverat, related that Etty had never

ever sewn on a button, posted a letter, made a pot of tea or been out

alone after dark. ‘Ladies were ladies in those days; they did not do things

themselves, they told other people what to do and how to do it.’ Gwen’s

mother, Maud, made a profession of telling other people how to do things,

despite her total lack of knowledge. Of course, as Gwen noted, their

housekeeper ‘really ran the house completely, but appearances were always

preserved’.

These women’s husbands inherited a Victorian ideal of wifehood which

was marvellously encapsulated in  by Charles Darwin himself, as he

considered the pros and cons of marriage with Emma Wedgwood. In

methodical fashion, the great scientist listed his arguments in favour of

matrimony as follows:

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

Children – (if it Please God) – Constant

companion, (& friend in old age) who

will feel interested in one, – object
to be

beloved
and played with. – better than a

dog anyhow. – Home, & someone to

take care of house – Charms of music

& female chit-chat. – These things

good for one’s health. –
but terrible

loss of time
. . .

Only picture to yourself a nice soft

wife on a sofa with good fire, & books

& music perhaps – Compare this vision

with the dingy reality of Grt. Marlbro’

St.

Marry – Marry – Marry Q.E.D.

Emma was highly intelligent, graceful and a brilliant musician; she spoke

three languages well, and was well informed on politics and literature. But

she accepted Darwin’s unspoken assumption that she was essentially a

comfortably upholstered appendage, secure in the knowledge that she was

doing her duty. She had no choice. Marriage had the weight of centuries

An illustration to Daisy Ashford’s

romance
The Young Visiters
places

the nineteenth-century wife firmly

in context

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Singled Out

of custom behind it. And for the rest of the nineteenth century, that

was the deal. Security, economic maintenance, social respect, status and

companionship in return for, in Emma’s case, lifelong devotion and the

production of ten babies. It appears that most Victorian men regarded

marriage as a state of semi-captivity for their wives in which they bore

numerous children, were financially dependent on their husbands, and at

the same time embodied the feminine ideal of mother-goddess. Their wives

were both Madonnas and martyrs. They must be beautiful and virtuous,

but they must also be younger, shorter and stupider than their husbands.

And yet whatever the drawbacks and expectations of ‘female chit-chat’,

never would it have crossed Emma Darwin’s mind to trade wifehood with

such a man for the single state. The same probably applied to her daughter

Etty and her daughter-in-law Maud.

This then was the catch. Marriage was patently unfair to women – until

the Married Women’s Property Act was passed in  all their belongings

and wealth passed automatically to their husbands – but it represented

their only chance of security, of having children, of attaining social status.

Happiness was neither here nor there. A late nineteenth-century vaudeville

song summed up the options:

I think we would all prefer

marriage with strife

Than to be on the shelf

and be nobody’s wife.

But lest they rebel, there was also the entrancing prospect of true love – a vision indulged in to the full by artists, poets and romantic balladeers throughout the nineteenth century. Blue-eyed Mary the dairy-maid gets

her ruby lips kissed before becoming the Captain’s bride; Phoebe, Nancy

and Polly all end up at the church with their dark-eyed sailors or plough—

boys.

The poetic fantasy exerted a powerful pull. Despite all the manifest disadvantages for married women, to the unmarried the grass almost invariably looked greener on the other side of the fence. ‘There is nothing so incorrigibly and loftily romantic as a spinster’s idea of matrimony . . .’ wrote one retired headmistress in the s. One of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s spinster schoolmistresses confessed to the sense of awe it inspired in her: ‘ ‘‘. . . They are elemental things, the love between man and woman, marriage, motherhood,’’ said Miss Luke . . . ‘‘The things untouched by civilization, primitive, immune from what is called progress.’’ ’ For the spinster, it was very hard
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

not to idealise the married state and it would have taken a strong-minded

woman to resist that commandment: ‘Marry – Marry – Marry Q.E.D.’

Thus romance, social expectation and money all played their part in

weighing down the nineteenth-century woman with the millstone of marriage – a heavy burden. The few who challenged it were conspicuous, like Florence Nightingale, who only by standing aside and remaining single was

able to fulfil her ambitions. Married women ‘must sacrifice all their life . . .

behind
his
destiny woman must annihilate herself . . .’ she declared. This she refused to do. But by the end of that century the institution of marriage was being subjected to scrutiny as never before. Women began to ask what was in it for them; they questioned the Victorian notion of duty which

hitherto had anchored both happy and unhappy marriages; they began to

look for personal happiness, beyond the orange blossom and the church

door. If marriage fell short in this respect, then what was the point? By the s a new breed were emerging who, collectively, were strong-minded enough to defy marriage.

This breed came to be called the New Women. Mutiny was in the air,

and to the consternation and alarm of reactionaries, the New Women took

a cool look at wifehood and decided to reject the mess, the boredom, the

misery and the exhaustion. They left their families, not to get married, but to live in lodgings, to occupy a kind of nether-Bohemia, writing poetry and novels, discussing ideas and earning their own living. Their mantras

were independence, equality, freedom and, of course, the vote. In 

over  per cent of the membership of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social

and Political Union were spinsters. These women were both influential

and threatening. Grant Allen, Ibsen, H. G. Wells and Shaw observed them

with fascination and created heroines out of them. Walter Gallichan lay

awake at night worrying about the problem of
Modern Woman and How to
Manage Her
.

Social advances of many kinds contributed to the anti-marriage revolution: the Married Women’s Property Act, the divorce laws, contraception, improved health care, labour-saving devices, female emancipation all played

their part in giving women the freedom to marry or not to marry. Plainly

as a vocation marriage left much to desire, and the modern world was

starting to provide women with alternatives. Thrilling to the idealistic vision of Walt Whitman, the young shop assistant Margaret Bondfield looked to fulfil herself through service to humanity and, above all, through her

involvement in the National Union of Shop Assistants, her co-workers.

‘This concentration was undisturbed by love affairs. I had seen too much –

too early – to have the least desire to join in the pitiful scramble of my

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workmates . . . I had no vocation for wifehood or motherhood, but an

urge to serve the Union.’ In  Miss Bondfield became one of the first

three women Labour MPs. Spinsterhood could be a conscious choice, not

a failure.

By  Dr Leslie’s assumptions, and those of the
Daily Mail
, were already – in advanced circles at least – starting to look out of date. It was evident to most people that with the war history’s tide had turned. The time when every Jill got her Jack was past, and the Surplus Women would

have to look elsewhere for fulfilment. For them, the New Women had

gone before, like John the Baptist, pointing the way to salvation and release from bondage. And though the
Daily Mail
continued to print only letters from women who longed to be wives, that tide had turned for ever.

Mr Wrong

British women were all too aware that the war had cheated them, not just

of marriage but of marriage with Mr Right. Even women who in time

married continued firmly to believe that the cream of their generation

had all died. Rosamond Lehmann, born in , grew up convinced that

the alternatives were all second best. ‘I had it lodged in my subconscious

mind . . . that the wonderful unknown young man whom I should

have married had been killed in France, along with all the other wonderful young men; so that any suitor – and quite a few uprose – would be a secondary substitute, a kind of simulacrum.’ Vera Brittain’s suitors were

just as inadequate. In
Testament of Youth
she tells how in the early s she was importuned by cynical married men, sugar-daddies, ‘fussy and futile’ middle-aged men, lechers, wimps and drippy poetic types who

‘hadn’t the brains of an earwig’. They were ‘insufferably second-rate’. How

desperate did one have to be? When Vera finally met Gordon Catlin, the

man whom she was to marry, she was tortured with doubts. Shortly before

agreeing to be his wife she had a terrible dream that Roland Leighton had

never really died, but had gone missing with amnesia, and after terrible

suffering had returned to England ‘anxious to marry me’. She woke racked

with anguish.

But for most, the cruel statistics remained: in the s British women

had lower chances of getting a husband than at any time since records were

kept. Winifred Haward was one of them. In  she was starting out in

the world aged twenty-three, with a history degree and a short plump figure, stubbornly resisting the compulsion to become a teacher. Teachers were spinsters. Undeterred by the obvious deficiencies of matrimony, Winifred

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was yearning for a great love, and she wanted to marry, but with the

Husband Hunt in full cry, her prospects weren’t looking too good. Instead

she got a job as lecturer at Bedford College in London, which was unlikely

to improve her chances, since the college was women-only, and she lodged

in a segregated hostel in the Euston Road. However, she was earning nearly

£ a year, which made it easier for her to indulge – ‘I tried to dress well.

It was useless trying to look smart and sophisticated but I could wear

well-cut clothes and bright colours . . .’ Over the next couple of years she holidayed in Brittany, Italy and Austria; there were no boyfriends, but she was seeing something of life.

Winifred’s best friend was Muriel, a fellow lecturer at Bedford College,

and in  they decided to share digs together. Part of the attraction for

Winifred was that Muriel was attractive, rather ‘fast’, and had a foreign

admirer called Gustav (he was married, but Muriel thought he would soon

divorce and marry her); she also had a stylish widowed mother who saw

her daughter’s friend as a challenge. On the widow’s advice, the dowdy

history lecturer was got up to look bold and dashing and knowing. She

had her hair shingled, started using make-up and was persuaded to have all

her skirts shortened. Winifred marvelled as Muriel’s mamma transformed

her into a s flapper. ‘ ‘‘Don’t waste your legs,’’ she said – ‘‘Think of

Mistinguett’’ – Mistinguett being an actress famous for her nether limbs

. . . I felt quite encouraged.’ Thus with her not-so-nubile body suitably

revealed, she and Muriel set up home together in Hampstead, Winifred

hoping that her friend’s honey-pot good looks would lure some of Gustav’s

male friends into their little circle, and that with luck, one of them would spare a look for her nether limbs, and might even want to marry her . . .

Muriel was quick to disillusion her on this front:

You and Gustav wouldn’t get on. You wouldn’t get on with his friends. You’re too virginal, Winifred, too ‘good’. If you haven’t had a man by the time you’re thirty, it will be too late. You’ll get more frustrated and unhappy. Husbands are scarce but lovers grow on every tree . . .