The 1921 census revealed that immediately after the First World War women exceeded men by 1.75 million.  Headlines shrieked of a 2 million “surplus” and deplored them. Apart from the 80,000 women who served in the forces as non-combatants during  World War One, the story of this social fall out remains largely ignored.  And yet it played a major part in the formation of ‘modern Britain’ and “women’s lib”.   The book by Virginia Nicholson “Singled Out – How 2 Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War” salutes the intrepid women whose dreams of marriage, considered a virtual birthright then awere destroyed by war.

One hazy morning in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School For Girls stood up in front of the assembled sixth form and announced to her hushed audience:  ”I have come to tell you a terrible fact.”  Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact. “Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. “The war has made more openings for women than there were before. But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle.”

Sitting in the assembly hall among her shocked and silent schoolfellows was 17-year-old Rosamund Essex. She was never to forget those chilling words, recalling: “It was one of the most fateful statements of my life.” When Rosamund, who never married, wrote her memoirs 60 years later she accepted that her teacher’s pronouncement had been prophetic. “How right she was,” she recalled. “Only one out of every ten of my friends has ever married*

In a pre war society women’s position in society was such that from an early age they were pre destined to fulfil their very existence through marriage and family and little else. A little girl’s nursery card game demonstrates the preoccupation with marriage as female destiny in which there was no winner only loser left humiliatingly unpartnered - the loser’s card being the “old maid”.  

It also charts the astonishing public hostility against them – the Daily Mailfigures prominently here; Lord Northcliffe, its owner, publicly referred to “Britain’s problem with two million superfluous women” and abhored their new found occupations, singledom and mutual sometimes sexual friendships.

Total war created incredible social change with these ‘surplus’ women newly relying on clerical work and coming to terms with the fact that they would not only never marry and have a family but never fall in love or know a man. 

Not given to keeling over and simply disappearing, these strong women were by necessity carving out new paths for themselves to the shock of those around them - as engineers for example.   Documented in the book: Caroline Haslett DBE, with her passion for the liberating power of electricity,  a long-term campaigner and first director of the Electrical Association for Women,  designed a square kettle and saucepan to fit a single hotplate in her home.  Women pioneers, female successes, women who beat all of the odds…there are hundreds of stories like these in the book:  Beatrice Gordon Holmes, suffragette, founder of the Association of Shorthand Writers and Typists, and tremendously successful city businesswoman; the middle-class young lady Victoria Alexandrina Drummond, who against fervent opposition became a marine engineer and in 1940 worked her ship to safety and won the Lloyd’s war medal for bravery at sea; Mary Milne, who became matron of St Mary ’sPaddington, known, unusually for a woman in that role, for her sympathetic handling of trainees and junior staff.   The changes effected in society gave rise to women’s associations forming to protect single women.  As a London office worker earning 23 shillings a week, novelist Ethel Mannin was “always ravenous”; provincial city offices paid even less, sometimes as little as 10 shillings.  Single woman and former mill worker Florence White campaigned to make life easier for women on low incomes such as these. In April 1935, she established the National Spinsters Pension Association; within less than a year, it had 16 branches

These are the original ‘liberated women’, grouping together for protection.  Together with a new focus on the vote, in effect the social changes out of the horrors of World War One gave rise to the first stages of the feminist movement and one which elicits much sympathy.

 Fast forward to the sixties and seventies however which brought about a step change in how women organised, ostensibly by way of new female academics and social analysers who seized on women’s successes on their own and twisted them into “women’s lib”.  Instead of women creating the momentum themselves, organising for justifiable economic reasons at a pace that reflected what they truly wanted and extracting a gradual step change in the way women’s roles were perceived, academics set about attacking every aspect of family life with a view to destroying it completely.  Whereas I can fully relate to the experience of women wanting to secure their futures and completely pity the circumstances they found themselves in where society was ill prepared for the changes and resented them, I cannot in the least bit identify with the newly formed feminist movement which pitted men against women and vice versa. You could witter on all day about the roots of this movement, it’s various shrill voices and the Left’s claim to “own feminism” but the way I see it is that in claiming to own women for the Left there’s the problem. The start of identity politics and political carving out of women from a variety of backgrounds, classes and faiths who most definitely would not have all seen eye to eye on the kernel of family life.

Guido is right to identify a certain group of women who right up until the 90s and even now have set about the family with a wrecking ball whether women wanted that to happen or not. Regardless of which government was in charge this poisonous academic thought carried right the way down to the way local councils carved up welfare. Harriet Harman, deputy leader of the Labour Party is one part of a wider western issue and it is well past time such idiocy was fought on every level. If not now then when?:

 

It was Erin Pizzey, the founder of the first refuge for battered women, who in the late eighties identified Labour’s then radicals Harriet Harman and Patricia Hewitt as dangerous feminist  ideological enemies of the family. Harman and Hewitt were in those days leading lights of the loony left’s radical feminist wing, arguing in pamphlet after pamphlet that “It cannot be assumed that men are bound to be an asset to family life, or that the presence of fathers in families is necessarily a means to social harmony and cohesion.” After decades of agitation, which influenced social policy as well as social workers, their attack on men and their role in modern life has reached its nadir in Tottenham. Local MP David Lammy put it bluntly last week: “We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men’s lives..” Harriet Harman is the ideological single-mother of those gangsta rioters.

Peter Oborne correctly identifies that behind the scenes New Labour’s party policy was captured by the likes of Harman and Hewitt who viewed the traditional two-parent family as an instrument of male, patriarchal oppression. The riots are the toxic legacy of such poisonous “progressive” attitudes.

Harman’s 1990 IPPR  pamphlet “The Family Way” was described by Feminist Review as “An attempt to combat stultifying, traditionalist concepts of ‘the family’”. We have reached the end of that decades long struggle by Fabians and feminists to undermine the family; with 40%  of children born outside marriage and a minority of childhoods completed in the household of both biological parents. It is now apparent to all that few if any of Harriet Harman’s gangsta progeny come from those supposedly stultifying traditional families.

We’ve leapt from creating and “despising” superfluous women to creating and lauding superfluous men. In these dramatic social step changes the latter has not arisen from necessity and survival but from remote out of touch academic meddling - and it is this which has given rise to civil partnerships being considered insufficient as legal recognition of gay pairings and marriage once again becoming a “fortress to be stormed”.  

There was a sense of despair from women who felt that family would elude them not simply because of the economic struggles that would ensue but the knowledge that this most instinctual aspect of human nature, man-woman-family, would be cruelly denied.  These days it is increasingly children who are cruelly and deliberately denied - and who grow up lacking any kind of empathy with those around them. It will be children again who suffer when we break down marriage to simply mean romantic pair coupling - no longer the lifelong union of a man and woman entered primarily, though not exclusively, for the purpose of raising children.

Graeme Archer on fathers in How to Destroy a London Borough

Fathers were mentioned in passing, but are very important, and their eradication from inner cities must be part of your long-term strategy. Children, despite the best efforts of the social theorists whom you will have placed in charge of some of the teacher training colleges, have an unfortunate tendency to respond to the stimulus of homelife. So create a benefits system which actively rewards couples to not stay together, and which, far from attaching a social penalty, or stigma, to teenage pregnancy, handsomely rewards it with money. Simultaneously, the liberals will create an atmosphere which scoffs at anything as judgemental as a belief in the stability of marriage, but which instead aims to celebrate the diversity of different relationships. This has the great effect of rendering it impossible for the mainstream to criticise the explosion in the number of children who grow up without access to a proper male role model: to do so would be to make a value judgement on somebody’s “lifestyle choice”. Then sit back, and enjoy the rise of your most important weapon: a generation of boys, raised without fathers.

The Tories are now hopelessly confused about family and the stability that traditional marriage affords it. It is ironic that Graeme who speaks so clearly and robustly to the idea that “an atmosphere which scoffs at anything as judgemental as a belief in the stability of marriage, but which instead aims to celebrate the diversity of different relationships” cannot apply the same logic to the concept of gay marriage and civil partnerships. For to seek to protect marriage as separate from civil partnerships whilst upholding the latter, sees people ludicrously castigated as “bigoted”.

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  Tower Tales

I’ve left Twitter. 

I’ve witnessed weeks on end of nastiness and spiteful rubbish back and forth between people in my timelines. Like an idiot I’ve even attempted to back people up when they are being bullied.

The self control required on my part these past few weeks as issues which personally stir brutal or painful memories has been a huge strain to maintain. I think I’ve been remarkably cool about it all up til now..

Violent threat tweets. Weeks of brutal and usually SILLY Twitter wars. Being exposed to endless casual indirect judgments and “nuanced” discussions on sensitive topics handled all too bluntly. The easy way these Twitter wars leave battered casualties in their wake and noone cares. I contacted Twitter about abusive tweets on someone’s behalf -in the end I was left high and dry on that score so why did I bother. Clearly people blow hot and cold on how affected they are by these rows when it suits them.

So sadly cheerio. I love you for political jousting and the contact it has provided with some lovely people and I hate calling quits.

Not that anyone cares what I think of course. This is all about big personalities and I am not one of those . For the time being, this hen will sit on her egg quite happily as Battlement Clare so sweetly put it and blog about issues in silence and to an audience of one (possibly two, lol) instead. 

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  Tower Tales