Singled Out (16 page)
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
girl, with no lofty ambitions, and doomed to disappointment.
* Jane Austen laughs at Marianne, the heroine of
Sense and Sensibility
, when she has her declare: ‘A Woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again.’
But perhaps the obvious hyperbole also insulates the author – in her thirties when the book was published – against her own feelings of spinster exclusion.
On the Shelf
In the s the magazine problem pages didn’t usually differentiate
between emotional questions and queries about how to wash corsets, reno—
vate the bathtub or remove superfluous hair. But in the face of evident
need, they now began to publish replies to a barrage of letters from women
desperate to fill the gap in their lives. From a sense of delicacy and privacy lacking in today’s agony columns, the letters themselves were not usually printed, and one is left reading the loneliness and unhappiness from between the lines of the replies. Take the following example from the ‘Fireside Friends’ page in
Woman’s Friend
of , addressed to ‘A LONELY
GIRL’:
I am very sorry that I cannot put you in touch with a young man, my dear, but it is against our rules to give private addresses. If you write to the Salvation Army they will let you have particulars about their emigration scheme . . .
Or Mary Marryat’s advice to ‘LONELY DOROTHY’ on her page in
Woman’s Weekly
, published in :
I do not know of a whole book on how to make paper flowers, although we have published separate articles at various times. I am so sorry for all you tell me, Dorothy. I do hope and trust that ‘home of your own’ will come along soon . . .
It is hard not to conjure up a picture of poor Dorothy assuaging her
sad longings with attempts to fashion garlands of paper roses – phantom
bouquets for the never-to-be bride.
‘TIRED OF LIFE’ also wrote to Mary Marryat in great distress at her
inability to find a ‘nice young man’ to marry. She felt her ‘young life was
all wasted’, and worried that loneliness was driving her down the road to
ruin. Marryat agreed:
By all means join a girls’ club. Your friends are quite right. It is very wrong, and running a terrible risk, to ‘pick up’ men ‘friends’ in the street. If you do so you may rue it very bitterly one of these days.
Meanwhile in her ‘Heart-to-Heart chats’ page the ‘Editress’ of
Woman’s
World
was at pains weekly to provide the balm of Christian consolation to her broken-hearted or lonely readers:
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Not ‘broken-hearted’, sister dear – very, very sad, and very lonely, but with a heart too brave and true to break because the boy you loved has passed over to join the glorious army of God’s heroes . . .
Cheer up, sister. Twenty-seven is many years too soon to give up hope that love will come into your life . . . We cannot all be married, but we can all make the world the better that we have lived in it . . .
Cheer up, dears, the right men will come along your way sooner or later . . . And if it is not your destiny to meet and mate, then never worry. Marriage is not everything in life dears. There is work for all, and in work we find our true content.
Did it help, being told to ‘Cheer up’? Probably not much, though reading
of others’ experiences might have consoled the readers of
Woman’s World
in feeling that there were others like them.
But while
Woman’s Weekly
and its like doled out sympathy with one hand, their editorial slant told another story. Men may have been in short
supply, but the housemaids, typists and mill-girls who read such papers were never discouraged from dreaming. Even if marriage was not ‘everything in life dears’, the ideal of the ‘wee wifie’ who snares Mr Right pervades the
sixpenny magazines, from their romantic fiction to their advice columns.
In the midst of a man-shortage (August ),
Woman’s Life
ran a column directed at pickers and choosers ridiculing all the Mr Wrongs for their defects: cranks, mean men, know-alls, flirts, golf-freaks and grumblers
(though it didn’t include the shell-shocked, the disabled or the stretcher
cases). The author was ‘the kind of nice ordinary girl who always DOES
get married’. Beggars can’t be choosers, but a girl can dream.
The same year
Woman’s Weekly
contributor Rosalie Neish published
How to Attract Him
. The stakes were high, she wrote, but the prize was great. There were so many things a girl must do: ‘. . . keep a man on tenter-hooks . . . let him
feel
you think him a super man . . . let him see you are a home-maker and a home-lover . . . be careful about your appearance . . . if you use a henna shampoo, don’t overdo it, and
don’t let him know
. . . Listen to him . . . above all be cheerful and gay and sunny-tempered . . . put him in a holy and sacred niche in your heart . . . Finale! The Wedding March
and orange-blossom and that ‘‘little grey home in the West’’ – matrimonial
heaven.’
If the girl played her cards right, she would catch her man, provided she
satisfied his conditions. And it appears from the pages of the women’s
magazines that his conditions hadn’t changed much since the days of Charles
Darwin. Women’s magazine editors gave men plenty of column space. In
On the Shelf
August
Woman’s Life
ran a page written ‘by the ordinary kind of nice young man who lives in every street’ headed: ‘The Girl I’d Hate to Marry!’ This was a cautionary reckoning of the negative attributes to be
shunned by any woman hoping for a husband. The ‘nice young man’ had
no time for jazzing flappers. The wearing of ‘extreme fashions’ came top
of his list of Don’ts; sartorial extravagance would scupper your chances
without a doubt (but ‘. . . the home-made girl often marries before the
Bond Street Girl – men admire her clever fingers . . .’). Being ‘self-centred’
was out too: ‘I mean to pet and make much of my little wife when I
marry, but I shall want her to make much of me in return.’ Like Charles
Darwin, the nice young man was perhaps finding that dogs didn’t quite
measure up. And nice as he was, the young man came down even harder
on ‘the insane craze for ‘‘independence’’ and ‘‘equal rights’’ . . . Preserve me from a girl like this . . . a woman’s true happiness comes with a husband, a home, and children of her own . . .’, and he followed this with a tirade against girls who chose to live in digs rather than houses, girls who insisted on earning their own living after marriage, girls who were ‘clever’ but couldn’t dish up a decent dinner, and girls who talked loudly in public.
What hope for a hard-up young woman who just wanted to make her
own way?
The same message can be heard in
Woman’s Weekly
. ‘A Bachelor’ writes that ‘although there are at least three eligible females to every bachelor, it is more difficult than ever to find a nice modest girl’. What he is after, he explains in a subsequent article, is reserve, decorousness, and that subtle, exquisite and indefinable quality, ‘Womanliness’. We are back in fainting and blushing territory. Though not enamoured of the blue-stocking or
highbrow, ‘the featherbrained thoughtless girl sooner or later has to join
the surplus million . . .’ Perhaps Winifred Haward should have paid more
attention before George ditched her.
Perhaps George simply felt frightened off by Winifred’s neediness. There
were plenty of instances of attractive young men afraid that every woman
who approached them, however innocently, was trying to hijack them into
marriage. After her brother Edward was killed in June , Vera Brittain,
desperate to learn the particulars of his fate, relentlessly pursued his injured colonel, who as it happened had not only been awarded a VC but was also tall and good-looking. Despite this, Vera had no interest in him but for his knowledge of Edward’s last hours; to this end she haunted his hospital bedside and took every opportunity to get him to talk, but the young
colonel was vain, cold and reluctant. He seemed ‘nervously afraid that every young woman he met might want to marry him’. The more she pursued
Singled Out
him, the more he avoided her. In the end she was never able to get him to
divulge what he knew, and ‘lost sight of him altogether’.
By the late s single women were so numerous that men went on
the offensive. In their February issue
Woman’s Fair
commissioned American psychologist Bertram Pollens to attack the breakaways in an article entitled ‘Running Away from Marriage’. Marshalling a number of
spurious premises, and summoning some ill-digested Freudian psycho—
jargon to his aid (‘the career woman who unconsciously wishes to be a
man . . .’, the victim of ‘neurotic ailments . . . repression . . . inferiority complexes’), Pollens presented the case that ‘. . . any girl who declares she prefers to stay single is only fooling herself ’: If you are still clinging to single blessedness, the chances are that there is something wrong with your emotional make-up or your attitude or that you are the victim of false ideas . . . Knowledge and guidance on the subject may help you to change your attitude and outlook.
These editors knew their readership. Throughout the interwar period
the magazines continued to offer advice on how best to sell yourself in the
marriage market. The scarcity of buyers made it all the more important to
undercut the competition by whatever means. In a July interview
with Phyllis Dare,
Woman’s Life
asked the popular musical comedy actress for her secret of how to charm men – ‘We may pretend we don’t care, but we do!’ the article opened, ‘ – specially in these days of ‘‘surplusness’’, when the race is to the fair, and the battle to the guileful!’ Miss Dare confessed herself a traditionalist who still believed in the power of women to enchant through mystery: ‘A woman should be different – alluring . . . like a delicate piece of porcelain . . .’
In October the same magazine ran yet another piece on how to charm
men, entitled ‘Cupid’s Bow and Arrow’. How come, its writer asked, men
married plain girls like ‘Gwen’ while some of the prettier ones were left on the shelf ? Gwen, it turned out, was hideous, dumpy and had a dreadful complexion. She had no conversation at all, but just sat and smiled and
listened . . . ‘ ‘‘Exactly!’’ I said, ‘‘she listens! Most men love a good listener.’’ ’
How reassuring such articles must have been for its more unlovely or tongue—
tied readers – for it went on to assert that ‘. . . in nine cases out of every ten, it’s the plainer girls who get married before their prettier sisters . . . the pretty girls can pick and choose . . . but the plain girl hasn’t so many chances, and so she knows right away when the One Man appears on the scene, and she grasps her happiness when it is offered to her.’ So, Never say Die:
On the Shelf
An old maid is only an old maid when she makes up her mind that she
is
one and gets upon her shelf unaided. Girls get married so late in life sometimes that no one can really be called an ‘old maid’.
Cupid’s bow and arrow are waiting for everyone . . .
Other writers dwelt on such issues as shyness (‘. . . the shy girl seldom
marries easily . . .’), loneliness (‘. . . for every lonely girl there is a lonely man . . .’), and ageing (‘. . . you can keep your heart young!’).
Articles like these kept hope alive for the working-class girls who read
them. ‘Marriage was the goal of every woman servant . . .’ Rose Harrison
remembered in her autobiography
Rose: My Life in Service
(): It wasn’t easy for them. After the war men were scarce, the demand far outweighed the supply and a maid’s limited and irregular time off was an added disadvantage.
Then there was the having to be back by ten o’clock which made every date like Cinderella’s ball, only you didn’t lose your slipper, you could lose your job. There was no status in being a servant, you were a nobody; marriage was the way out of it.
Early in her career, Rose Harrison worked in London for Lady Tufton;
but at Christmas the family and staff all decamped for the festive season to Appleby Castle in Westmorland, where the female staff locked horns with the local girls over the available male talent. Any dance within ten miles,
and the four parlourmaids, three housemaids and two ladies’ maids would
descend on it with the one aim of enticing the village boys away from the
rural maidens. It was locals versus city slickers – and the locals, it appeared, didn’t stand a chance against the perceived sophistication of Gladys, Miss Emms, Rose and the others. ‘We were an attractive set, although I say it . . .’
Rose remembered. Gladys, the second parlourmaid, snared the Mayor of
Appleby’s son – ‘a big coup in the servants’ hall’.
Rose spoke for her contemporaries, but her own case was different. She
described herself as ‘partial to the boys’, and it seems – though she is
extremely discreet about her romantic life – that they were partial to her
too, for she managed to go as far as being engaged. It got no further, however, for Rose, a stubborn, outspoken and ambitious Yorkshire lass from a poor background, was a career girl, determined to see the world, and for
her service was the ladder to a wider experience. It was plain to Rose that
Singled Out
kitchen work would never take her abroad or provide opportunities to
meet interesting people. She could also see that if you wanted the world to
open up to you, you had to become lady’s maid to someone sufficiently