It is one of the saddest truths of life that one person’s worst moment will be another’s moment in the sun and this was certainly accurate for the women Virginia Nicholson describes in Singled Out. While some seized the opportunities made available by the avoidance of marriage to carve out freedom from the tradition female role as wife and mothers, others found their enforced spinsterhood a grey prison of pointlessness and misery.
An Unwanted Surplus
Some 700,000 British soldiers were killed during the First World War while another million and half returned home wounded. In fact, more British men died during the 1914 to 1918 war than had been killed during any other previous conflict and it was this monumental loss of life in such a concentrated period of time that placed the women who were left behind in such a precarious position.
Although there had been an awareness of the statistical imbalance in the numbers of men and women since the 19th century, it was only after the Great War that the situation reached crisis point. After the 1921 Census the newspapers began scaremongering in earnest with headlines such as “Problem of Surplus Women – Two Million Women Who Can Never Become Wives” being published.
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