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Virginia Nicholson. Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived
without Men after the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008. Pp. xiv+312. \$18.95 (paper).

Jennifer Redmond

The Journal of British Studies / Volume 48 / Issue 04 / October 2009, pp 1037 - 1039
DOI: 10.1086/644829, Published online: 21 December 2012

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100014969

How to cite this article:

Jennifer Redmond (2009). The Journal of British Studies, 48, pp 1037-1039 doi:10.1086/644829

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 BOOK REVIEWS 䡵 1037

before they appeared in the press, Gregory demonstrates that the culture of hatred was
more organic and less artificially imposed than has been acknowledged.
The middle chapters examine how the war was waged at home, focusing on the devel-
opment of what Gregory calls “an economy of sacrifice” (113). Here he explores the phe-
nomenon of voluntarism, arguing that its limits, along with concerns with fairness, led to
the civilian demand for and acceptance of a degree of compulsion. The next chapter examines
how the demands for sacrifice, though in theory universal, were in practice inequitable,
leading to divisions along religious, class, and occupational lines. For example, he analyzes
the unusually detailed Honour Roll produced in Croydon to assess the occupational death
toll of 997 of 2,504 casualties. The disproportionate number of middle-class dead, between
14.7 and 37.5 percent, highlights the inequalities of sacrifice and the potential for social
tensions during and after the war. This concept of “sacrifice” is expanded in the fifth chapter
as Gregory reflects on the role of religious ideas in underpinning the popular understanding
of war.
The third section deals with the painful final two years of war, as ideals of sacrifice and
fairness came under increasing pressure, eroding idealistic concepts of sacrifice and sharp-
ening resentments and class and ethnic antagonisms. The last chapter turns to the legacy
of victory. Once the war was won, the language of sacrifice was remade in order to stress
a universal grief as the common experience of war. To a certain extent, Gregory argues, this
was a mythology designed to cover up the social tensions resulting from the costs of war:
“The luxury of victory was that it minimised the searching for scapegoats and instead stressed
universalism” (270). Yet this very universalism began to alter the memory of the war from
the 1920s. The larger spirit of reconciliation with Germany, speeded by the publication of
All Quiet on the Western Front in English in 1930, led the British to reconstruct the Great
War as “unjustifiable” (294), a verdict that Gregory dismisses as mistaken on almost every
count and which his work does a great deal to overturn.
The book’s main strength, its richly textured local detail, can in some spots also be
considered a minor weakness. By his own admission Gregory had to leave out major strands
of inquiry: gender history, military history, and Ireland, so that his narrative did not become
unbearably unwieldy. But the shifts between particular examples can be confusing at times,
and the criteria for the choice of illustrative sources should be more clearly foregrounded.
Gregory’s work is authoritative, provocative, and engaging. Perhaps its greatest contri-
bution is the rehabilitation of the reputation of the British people during the Great War.
Gregory’s analysis dispels the myth of civilians as weak-minded victims of mass enthusiasm,
manipulated by propaganda and atrocity stories and compelled through conscription and
rationing to contribute to the war effort, and restores the rationality, autonomy, and fortitude
of British civilians who lived through the war.

Amy Helen Bell, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario

VIRGINIA NICHOLSON. Singled Out: How Two Million British Women Survived without Men
after the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv⫹312. $18.95
(paper).

Nicholson’s book skillfully examines the history of the “Surplus Women” in the post–World
War I period, utilizing a range of personal sources and contemporary literature to analyze
how this cohort was variously stigmatized and celebrated in competing, and often judg-
mental, discourses. Nicholson frequently draws parallels with the modern period that, for
different reasons, has seen a rise in the number of single women and the Bridget Jones notion
of the “smug marrieds.” The concept behind the book—examining how monumental so-
1038 䡵 BOOK REVIEWS

cietal change impacts the personal lives of women—is one that could also be usefully applied
to other areas.
The shocking impact of the First World War is starkly outlined in the first sentences of
the book, detailing the fact that three-quarters of a million men died in the conflict. This
left a “surplus” of almost 2 million women with little chance of marriage and motherhood,
the ideological pinnacle of women’s lives during the period. The fact that many women
were girlfriends or fiancées of men killed during the Great War is emphasized as a contributing
factor to why they were not afforded the same public sympathy or government support as
war widows; the bond of marriage secured a status for women simply unavailable to them
if they were single.
The illustrative material is superb, combining contemporary caricatures, photographs, and
illustrations, bringing to life the often derogatory and sarcastic commentary on the “Surplus
Women.” The research in the book is also outstanding. Nicholson has unearthed contem-
porary works from many fields and sought out rare or forgotten novels, memoirs, letters,
autobiographies, diaries, and “instructional” (or what we would now term “self-help”) works
that do much to illuminate her points. Nicholson has also, therefore, highlighted the writings
of women forgotten within the historical narrative of the period and the canon of literature
in many cases. At times the book veers perhaps toward a literary history rather than a
standard archival history of the period, but the contemporary fiction alluded to by Nicholson
does reveal the cultural milieu and the imaginative constructions of single women in this
era, often revealing both the extreme views on women at the time and the negative, tactless,
and sometimes spiteful opinions that existed on the “abnormality” of single women’s lives.
The book brings together the two major arenas of change experienced by women in the
twentieth century—employment and relationships. In the former, the middle-class bias of
the book becomes evident as Nicholson’s most abundant source material relates to women
who were in the professions. This is a weakness of the book at times, as the privileges enjoyed
by wealthy women or those who were able to earn a higher wage shielded them from much
of the hardship experienced by working-class single women. Although Nicholson makes the
proviso at the beginning of the book that she has tried to source material from all classes
of women, a biased perspective comes through at times, most evidently in the story of the
“Maiden Aunts” who were living a “parsimonious existence” in a small London flat “with
one maid” (29). What about the maid? The inclusion of biographical material from women
of the middle and upper classes is of course understandable in many ways because of the
greater propensity of such women to leave autobiographical material. However, the book
does leave the reader wondering how well working-class women of the period would relate
to the stories, many of which come from women who may have been their employers.
In relation to employment, the emphasis in the book is on women’s predominance in
the caring professions, such as nursing and child care, perhaps in order to compensate for
the lack of such a role in their personal lives. It is interesting to consider this factor as a
contributory factor in the stereotypical depictions of women throughout the twentieth
century as supremely suited toward a caring role, one that is often attributed to married
women’s role in the home without considering the actions of single women. This again
forms part of Nicholson’s examination of the trajectory of opinion on single women from
“Surplus Women” to “Singletons.”
The tragic quality of the personal lives of Nicholson’s women is given most poignantly
in their memories of the romantic moments in their lives. These are often fleeting and, to
the reader, inconsequential, yet for many they raised the hope, however brief, of ending
their single lives and embracing marriage. The fact that a look or a single dance with a man
could raise this kind of expectation and romantic fantasy bears testament to Nicholson’s
argument that marriage was prized above all else for many women who lived their lives in
a heightened state of hope. The sexual frustrations described in letters to Marie Stopes are
 BOOK REVIEWS 䡵 1039

a stark reminder of the psychological, sexual, and emotional constraints in society that
impacted on women’s sexuality, including masturbation.
The various strategies women adopted to attain happiness as single women, or indeed to
try to marry, makes for fascinating reading. Subsuming themselves in care for family mem-
bers, pets, or each other; emigrating to the colonies; taking up political causes related to
the plight of the spinster and suffrage; writing, running businesses, taking holidays, and
learning trades are all activities taken up with gusto by women in this book. Many were
pioneers, and in this sense their singleness may have been their opportunity: Would they
have accomplished their goals if they had been married and running their homes? This is a
speculation that Nicholson raises but the book, naturally, cannot answer. On the other hand,
the sadness, loneliness, and embitterment many women experienced is not ignored, but
Nicholson is careful to balance these references with detailed contextualizations and stories
of women who refused to be cowed by their single status. Love, as Nicholson’s women
asserted, was not everything in life.

Jennifer Redmond, NUI Maynooth

IAN KENNEALLY. The Paper Wall: Newspapers and Propaganda in Ireland, 1919–1921. Cork:
Collins Press, 2008. Pp. 250. $33.95 (paper).

It has long been a staple of the historical analysis of the Irish revolution that two of its key
battlegrounds were British and Irish public opinion, and that Dáil Eireann’s 1919–21 coun-
terstate was most effective at projecting an image of genuinely popular government, while
IRA violence is best understood as a kind of psychological warfare. And, as with every other
aspect of the struggle, they succeeded in outsmarting their inept British adversaries and won
the propaganda war. Until recently, however, such conclusions had not been matched by
much in the way of systematic research or analysis—not since D. G. Boyce’s pioneering
Englishmen and Irish Troubles first tackled the subject in 1972.
However, thanks to the recent boom in Irish history—and particularly this period of
history—the press and propaganda are historiographical growth industries. Ben Novick’s
Conceiving Revolution (2001), Brian Murphy’s The Origins and Organisation of British
Propaganda in Ireland (2006), Maurice Walsh’s The News from Ireland (2008), and a shoal
of articles, most notably by Keiko Inoue, have addressed both the machinery and the content
of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary spin. Kenneally’s book does overlap Murphy’s
and Inoue’s work to some extent, and draws on Walsh’s original thesis, but it is still the
first to attempt to describe and assess both protagonists in the propaganda war, as well as
to examine how newspapers acted and reacted.
The structure of the book is straightforward. The first chapter is devoted to the British
effort, which only really got going in the summer of 1920 when Basil Clarke, a former
journalist, was appointed to head Dublin Castle’s Public Information Branch. He tried
gamely to institute a coherent strategy but was regularly undermined by the police and
army, both of which had their own publicity men. The government also had considerable
powers of censorship, which it was willing to use against the “mosquito press” as well as
ordinary newspapers deemed to cause disaffection. If that didn’t work, angry Black and
Tans (British ex-soldiers recruited as Irish policemen) might pay a call to an offending
newsroom or printing press, to make their views forcibly known.
The second chapter deals with Dáil Éireann’s Ministry of Propaganda (later renamed
Publicity, as the word was already acquiring a taint), whose own former journalists usually
outperformed their opposite numbers. Their great success story was the Irish Bulletin, a