‘Showing Them How’: the cultural reproduction of ideas about spinsterhood in interwar England

Abstract

This article uses psychoanalytic theory to suggest how ideas about spinsterhood were transmitted to young girls in mid-twentieth-century England, drawing upon children's fiction and women's autobiographical writings. Spinster stereotypes were often invoked in these sources to portray unmarried women as ‘bad’ maternal substitutes in contrast to an exciting, adventurous masculine ‘other’. Spinsters in children's fiction could also be ‘good’ mothers, offering a place of safety in the absence of the birth mother. Autobiographical stories bring out tensions in these representations. The maternal spinster's lack of a heterosexual partner raised concerns about emotional dependence on the child. Conversely, the presence of a woman partner provoked anxieties in some children and such partners often became the object of negative projections. These stories must be understood primarily as growing-up fantasies, reflecting children's contradictory feelings about dependence on adults and wishes to be in control of their own lives.

Notes

J. H. Byron Lewis (1926) Molly's Chance (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons), pp. 15–16.

Katherine Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England 1914–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

Katherine Holden, Amy Froide & June Hannam (2008) Winners or Losers?: single women in history 1000–2000: Introduction, Women's History Review, 17(3), pp. 313–316.

Holden, The Shadow of Marriage, chapter 2, pp. 25–52.

See, for example, Eileen Yeo (2008) Virgin mothers negotiate the doctrine of motherhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, in Rudolph Bell & Virginia Yans (Eds) Women on their Own: interdisciplinary perspectives on being single (London: Rutgers University Press), pp. 40–57; and Moira Martin (2008) Single Women and Philanthropy: a case study of women's associational life in Bristol, Women's History Review, 17(3), pp. 395–417.

Sigmund Freud (1909) Family Romances, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 9 (London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psychoanalysis).

Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink & Katherine Holden (1999) The Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy 1830–1960 (London: Longman).

See Elizabeth Buettner (2004) Empire Families: Britons and late imperial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

John Hodgson (1993) The Search for Self: childhood in autobiography and fiction since 1940 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press), p. 13.

Ibid., p. 55.

Ibid., p. 51.

Leonore Davidoff (2005) The Decline of the ‘Long’ Family: context and consequences, paper presented at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 20 May 2005.

This offers one answer to Nicola Humble's question as to why mid-twentieth-century novels focus on large families at a time when two children had become the norm. See Nicola Humble (2001) The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 150.

Rosemary Auchmuty (1999) A World of Women: growing up in the girls’ schools story (London: The Women's Press). See, for example, the Dimsie series by Dorita Fairlie Bruce, published between 1921 and 1941. A detailed discussion of this issue can be found in my MA dissertation, Not the Marrying Kind?: images of single women in England between the wars (University of Essex, 1991).

Katherine Moore (1966) Cordial Relations: the maiden aunt in fact and fiction (London: Heinemann).

Rosemary Auchmuty (1992) A World of Girls: the appeal of the girls’ school story (London, The Women's Press), pp. 3–4. See also M. Cadogan & P. Craig (1976) You're a Brick Angela: a new look at girls’ fiction from 1839–1975 (London: Victor Gollancz).

Auchmuty, A World of Women, p. 91.

Shelia Jeffreys (1985) The Spinster and her Enemies: feminism and sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora); Alison Oram (1992) Repressed and Thwarted, or Bearer of the New World? The Spinster in Interwar Discourses, Women's History Review, 1(3), pp. 413–434; Maroula Joannou (1995) ‘Ladies, Please Don't Smash These Windows’: women's writing, feminist consciousness and social change, 1918–1939 (Oxford: Berg), chapter 3, pp. 77–101.

Lewis, Molly's Chance, p. 53.

Angela Brazil (1935) The School at the Turrets (London: Blackie & Sons), p. 65.

Valerie Walkerdine (1990) Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso), p. 92.

See Juliet Mitchell (1975) Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 370–373, for a discussion of the incest taboo. The danger of those feelings between father and daughter is shown in an earlier Brazil story, The Fortunes of Phillipa (1907), where an intense father/daughter relationship is ended by the girl's removal to another household at the onset of adolescence.

Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions, pp. 91–93.

See Juliette Mitchell (Ed.) (1986) The Selected Melanie Klein (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Eleanor Graham (1965) The Children Who Lived in a Barn (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 54. The book's popularity is suggested by the fact that it was reprinted in the 1950s and 1960s.

‘Noel Streatfeild ’, in Humphrey Carpenter & Mari Prichard (Eds) (1984) The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Noel Streatfeild (1936) Ballet Shoes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 edition), pp 110–111.

Names have been changed.

Founded in 1892, Norland Nannies, now based in Bath, remains the most prestigious training college for nannies. Graduates command high salaries and students still wear old-fashioned uniforms, including white gloves.

Unpublished autobiography of Jane Reid, ‘A 1930s Childhood’ (1998), held by Jane Reid. Reproduced by permission of the author.

Unpublished autobiography of Noreen Torrey (1995), held by Noreen Torrey. Reproduced by permission of the author.

Ibid.; Interview with Joan Holden, 26 December, 1990.

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Notes on contributors

Katherine Holden

Katherine Holden is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. She has been convenor of the UK Women's History Network and is co-chair of the West of England and South Wales Women's History Network. Her main research interests are in the history of families with particular reference to marital status and singleness. Her publications in this field include (1999) The Family Story: blood, contract and intimacy 1830–1960, co-authored with Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle and Janet Fink (London: Longman); (2005) Imaginary Widows: spinsters, marriage and the ‘lost generation’ in Britain after the Great War', Journal of Family History, 30(4) and (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England 1914–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Her current project is the history of nannies in twentieth-century England.