Surplus? Perhaps Not. Determined? Definitely.
I’ve made my way through Virginia Nicholson’s Singled Out: How Two Million Survived Without Men after the First World War, wide-ranging survey of a generation of English women. While Nicholson’s prose is sometimes dull and often repetitive (especially as she transitions from one subject to another), reviews of the book have been mostly upbeat, the result of the strength of the material she’s working with.
As this review point out, Nicholson’s command of historical interpretation is not as strong as might be wished: Nicholson leans too heavily on the millions of "surplus woman" canard. Demographically there were roughly the same number of "surplus" women before the war as there were afterwards.
Never mind that though. What Nicholson does well is tell the stories of the unmarried women she surveys whether they were clerk typists or engineers. And she has a knack for selecting good photographs–the snapshot of Victoria Drummond holding up her hard-won Chief Engineer’s certificate will stay with me as long as the more formal portrait of a group of grim veterans each with one or more amputations.
It’s the sort of book that is simultaneously annoying and pleasing: annoying because it tells snippets of so many lives and pleasing because it leads in so many directions. I’ve already ordered a biography of Drummond (how exactly does a goddaughter of Queen Victoria manage to wangle an apprenticeship in a Dundee shipyard?) and wouldn’t mind hunting out more stories about Caroline Haslett of the Electrical Association for Women or Florence White of the National Spinsters Pension Association
Heather
