Singled Out (21 page)
Authors: Virginia Nicholson
After his Auntie Winifred’s untimely death, seven-year-old John Edward
was silent and miserable for weeks, heartbroken.
Manacled by small children, Vera Brittain at times envied Winifred
Holtby’s freedom and confidence. Wisely, the childless creamed off, when
they could, the joyful aspects of childcare, leaving the chores to the mothers.
Here is a snapshot from the diary of Harriet Warrack, a single laboratory worker from Kent, in her mid-thirties, well-read and educated, living independently, with a wide circle of friends. It describes an afternoon spent with her sister’s family: Sunday September th
. . . . the boy aged ¾ immediately asked to get out of his go-cart and rushed to me and insisted on accompanying me . . . he would insist on climbing banks – which I let him do – and also on pushing the go-cart violently along. After a time
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with a little tact I got him to get into the cart and ran along pushing it much to his joy . . .
. Played game of make-believe in the garden with Michael.
.–. Went to my sister’s house, gave Michael a bath – He would drink the bath water – I let him, felt flattered as he would not let his mother bath him – I suppose because I let him do what he likes ie spit, and splash.
.– Sat by his cot and looked at books with him.
Harriet’s relationship with her little nephew is fun, loving, and joyfully
irresponsible; she gets all the pleasure and none of the burden. At the end
of the day she can walk away.
Harriet Warrack may have felt the ‘incessant aching longing’ for babies,
but she could see for herself that children were hard work. Michael’s mother mustn’t let him spit in the bath; she can, and in return he adores her. Harriet may have consoled herself in thinking she had the best of both worlds with her sister’s boy. Angela du Maurier would have concurred. She had planned
to have six children; by the age of eighteen she had chosen all their names: Domini, Julian, Sonia, Michael and twins David and Deirdre . . . until she had to face the fact it wasn’t going to happen. Sunny-tempered by nature,
Angela looked for the compensations, and found them in godchildren,
nieces and nephews. ‘There is nothing I enjoy more than taking a collection
of children for beach picnics to climb rocks and splash and swim, unhampered by their adult relatives.’ Not having become a mother herself, she felt that the child in her was still alive. One eleven-year-old godson, firmly persuaded of Angela’s playfully youthful qualities, made up his mind that at thirty-five his single godmother would make the perfect wife. ‘How
dearly I loved him.’ And when regrets got the better of her she would try
to recall her own father’s favourite maxim when she and her sisters were
being troublesome: ‘Blessed are the Barren.’
Cicely Hamilton reasoned that not having a future generation to fear for
in this troubled world was compensation enough for being childless, but
other women looked on childlessness as positively liberating. Realistic and
level-headed, the model Rani Cartwright weighed up the pros and cons of
motherhood and made her choice in favour of freedom. No children meant
no conflict on that front. Anyway, as she explained, not only were the
majority of children nasty spoilt brats as far as she was concerned, but they were unpredictable: ‘You just don’t know what they’re going to grow into.’ Rani wanted to be in control of her own life. The author Elizabeth
On the Shelf
Jenkins also shrank from the prospect of having babies; they were the last
thing she wanted. If marriage was off the menu because it was far too boring, having children was an equally unpalatable prospect to this high-spirited and mercurial young woman: ‘I never thought it would have been nice to have children, and I will tell you why: whenever I thought about it I had an
absolute horror of the idea of childbirth. My mother used to say ‘‘That’s
what you think now, but when you’ve got the baby you’ll be surprised –
you’ll believe that you never didn’t want her, or him’’ – but I’m extremely
cowardly. I can’t endure the idea of physical pain. I was born absolutely
without a spark of courage. So, anyway, I just shuddered at the idea of
childbirth and then went on to something else.’
*
Women like Rani Cartwright, Rose Harrison and Elizabeth Jenkins toppled
the pedestal on which men had once idolised their wives. For far more –
Olive Wakeham, Winifred Haward, Winifred Holtby, Amy Gomm, Phyllis
Bentley, Gertrude Caton-Thompson, May Jones, Miss R. Williams – the
pedestal was violently and forcibly kicked from beneath them. Most of
these Surplus Women no more chose their unmated futures than their
mothers had chosen to remain pointlessly penned in the kitchen or parlour,
compelled by a patriarchal society to produce eight babies and delight their husbands with female chit-chat. The singles had no real alternative to making their own way in the world, but in the post-war era that way was
now broader and brighter than it had ever been before. You weren’t
condemned to captivity in the twilight zone.
‘We are not going to pity the Surplus Woman after all,’ wrote a columnist
in
The Woman’s Leader
( August ). ‘So far are we from pitying her that sometimes we think she has the best of it.’ Picking their way among the shattered plinths that once supported the matrimonial temple, many
individuals found the courage to abandon the wreckage of their hopes and
start anew. If you could ride over the reproach and disappointment, your
own and others’, life could be good listening to the lions under an African
sky, or writing about the brotherhood of man, or just seeing the children’s
faces as they munched their milk and biscuits at bedtime. Women like this
were not machines; they might well feel smug at avoiding the daily grind
of washing, scolding and scrubbing which fell to their married sisters.
Gertrude Caton-Thompson turned to archaeology with the enthusiasm
of one who had found her life’s consummation. Amy Gomm set out with
invincible optimism to take up a clerical job with a tailoring firm in Ealing: ‘. . . I’d show ’em. The sky was the limit . . .’ Vera Brittain remembered
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Winifred Holtby, a childless spinster who died young, as ‘. . . the most
brilliant journalist in London . . .’, and as one whose ‘zest for life had a physical as well as a spiritual quality . . .’ And Margery Fry, looking back at her generation at Oxford University, while noting that only seven of the twenty-four who had entered Somerville College with her had married,
and between them had produced a mere fourteen children, felt an intense
pride in their achievement:
You will find that in transforming nursing and education, in changing the whole status of women, in bettering the position of children, they have supplied, not only the leaders, but the rank and file and the enthusiasm. They have addressed the meetings and they have addressed the envelopes.
Perhaps the Editress of Heart-to-Heart Chats was right when she counselled, ‘. . . never worry. Marriage is not everything in life dears. There is work for all, and in work we find our true content.’
But for innumerable women destined to face life without men, work
was an economic necessity.
Today nearly one million women in the UK own their own businesses.
Women make up nearly half the workforce of this country; they can take
their pick from the full range of professions and occupations, and the
number of women directors and managers is steadily increasing. We have
had a woman prime minister, and in January Clara Furse was appointed
the first woman Chief Executive of one of the oldest Gentlemen’s Clubs
in Britain, the London Stock Exchange. The term ‘career woman’ no
longer contains any element of shock.
More than sixty years ago when Beatrice Gordon Holmes* published
her autobiography,
In Love with Life – A Pioneer Career Woman’s Story
(), she knew that the tale she had to tell was one of success against the odds, of triumphant breakthrough. In the s it was almost unthinkable for a woman to work in stockbroking. Gordon’s rise from £-a-week
typist at the age of nineteen to affluent director of the leading ‘outside
house’ in the City of London would barely excite notice today. But in
early twentieth-century Britain this woman’s energy, acumen and performance were virtually unprecedented. Beatrice Gordon Holmes showed it could be done.
She came from an unpromising background. Born in London in ,
Gordon was the daughter of an indigent doctor and a possessive, house-proud mother who ran everything on thirty shillings a week. The family lived in City Road, within striking distance of that hub of metropolitan
finance which was later to become Gordon’s adult territory. Until she was
eleven years old she stayed at home, schooled in the basics by her mother.
Gordon developed an appetite for books, and the house was full of reading
matter: Dickens, Kingsley, Scott, and endless copies of the
British Medical
Journal
. She described her childhood as ‘serene and repressed . . . I never knew the glow of real happiness until I got out of the home and was earning my own living – and then the happiness lasted for the rest of my life.’
Schooling was erratic. Gordon had no formal education until the age of
* Like many lesbian women, Beatrice Gordon Holmes adopted a masculine sobriquet. All her friends knew her as Gordon; I will follow suit.
Singled Out
eleven. She excelled at lessons, but only went to school when her father
could afford to send her, which wasn’t always. He chose the cheapest he
could find, and his daughter was expected to economise by walking the
four miles there and back, doing without lunch, and submitting to wearing
her mother’s horrible home-made clothes. Her father took her away at the
age of fourteen, but was persuaded to part with four guineas for a ten-month course at Cusack’s Secretarial College, where she absorbed shorthand, typing, the basics of commerce and a miscellany of instruction on Greek
history, music appreciation and essay-writing. Thus equipped, she landed
her first job as a typist at the glorious sum of twenty shillings a week. It was , and to her this seemed ‘incredible wealth’. Not for another three years did Gordon have her eyes opened to the world of ideas, science,
culture, mathematics and philosophy – by a visiting uncle who took her
under his wing and told her she had a brilliant mathematical mind.
Gordon’s first proper employer ran the London office of a Danish egg—
exporting firm:
Business interested me from the word ‘Go.’ We imported millions of Danish eggs into the British Isles, most of them sold before landing through a team of agents all over the United Kingdom . . . The great thing was to sell consignments at top speed. Eggs won’t keep and cold storage charges were heavy . . . We were the premier firm and the premier brand. [We] ruled the market.
Eight years of egg-selling made Gordon familiar with the world of
capitalism. The business had taught her all about deliveries, prices, concessions, bills of lading, the rise and fall of markets and trade etiquette; about accounts, consignments, shipping documents, branding and packing, commissions and sales, loss and profit. Meanwhile, outside the office, she
had become involved with the Suffragette movement, helped found the
new Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists, and immersed herself
in music, literature, philosophy and theatre. When she left in , having
saved enough money to take her mother on a trip to America, Gordon had
transformed herself from the gauche, dowdy maid of her teenage years and,
determined to increase her salary from £ to £ s a week, was ready to
take on the world.
I answered dozens of advertisements for several months, quite without result. My ambitious demand for £ s put me out of court as a typist, and there were hardly any other jobs for women in the business world in .
Business Girls
Interviewers regarded her ambitions with astonishment. Even when she
had the necessary qualifications, she was told that under no circumstances
could such and such a firm employ a woman. She was unwanted. Finally,
under threat of a deadline, she railroaded Mr Thorold, the Canadian chairman of a Lombard Street stockbrokers, into offering her a three months’
trial. ‘I knew nothing of finance.’ Thorold however plied her with reading
matter, ‘. . . including Hartley Withers’s fascinating and amusing ‘‘Stocks
and Shares’’ . . .’, and thus armed, in August , Gordon Holmes began
her financial career.
Thorold was a hard taskmaster, brilliant, maverick and mercurial.
‘Women are incapable of understanding financial matters,’ he asserted,
following up with, ‘Your only limitations are the limitations of the female
mind.’ Tetchy and prejudiced though he was, Gordon impressed him. She
unearthed an irrational system being used for client recruitment, overhauled it, and in doing so quadrupled the company’s client base. Thorold’s approval was enhanced when one of his top clients spotted Gordon’s talent and pronounced: ‘No price can be placed on a woman like that! She is invaluable
to the firm that gets her!’ From then on her abilities were established, if
precariously, in her employer’s eyes.
Those first years in the City! Those for me were the romantic years, the golden years in which everything was new and fascinating . . .