Surplus Women

Vestal Virgin, by Antonio Canova (Getty Museum)

In the podcast episode “Surplus Women,” Caroline Campton says, 

In 1921, the British government published the results of a census. It recorded that there were just over 44 million people in total in the country, an increase of around two million from a decade before, despite the loss of life during the First World War. The figure that attracted the most attention at the time, though, was a striking disparity between the numbers of men and women. For every 1,000 men, there were 1,100 women, or “an excess that amounts to 1,906,284,” as one newspaper put it at the time. At this point, the First World War had been over for three years. 700,000 British men had been killed. The casualties were disproportionately young, unmarried and from the middle or upper classes.*

Campton continues, “Some characterised these women as ‘imaginary widows’, unmarried yet mourning the husbands they should have had.” Perhaps the best-known poem on the subject was written by Vera Brittain: “The Superfluous Woman.”  It opens with the lines, “Ghosts crying down the vistas of the years” and closes with the cry of “But who will give me my children?”

Irish author Katharine Tynan (m. Hinkson) was a generation older than Vera Brittain. Her reputation as a poet had been established years before, and she was a friend of WB Yeats, Christina Rossetti, and Alice Meynell. At the start of the Great War, Tynan was married with three children, two of them grown sons. Her sons enlisted with the British Army, Theobald (“Toby”) serving in Macedonia and Palestine, while Giles (“Bunny/Patrick”) was in France. Both survived the war, but Tynan knew many men who did not. In her autobiography, she recalls that during the First World War, “at one time, I was writing a hundred letters a week to the bereaved of the war.** 

Tynan’s youngest child, her daughter Pamela, grew to adulthood during the war: she was a 14-year-old child when war was declared, and an 18-year-old young woman when peace was settled. During the war and the Irish Easter Uprising of 1916, Pamela Hinkson lived in a world of anxious uncertainty, reading casualty lists and waiting for news of her brothers. Before the war ended, Katharine Tynan realized that the Armistice and the return of the surviving soldiers would not end women’s experience of war. Her poem “The Vestal” appears in Herb O’ Grace (1918).  

The Vestal

She goes unwedded all her days
   Because some man she never knew,
Her destined mate, has won his bays,

   Passed the low door of darkness through.

Sometimes she has a wild surmise
   Of what dear name he used to have,
And what the colour of his eyes,
   And was he gay, or was he grave.

Or if his hair was brown or gold,
   Or if his voice was low and clear
To tell his love with, never told
   To hers or any woman's ear.

His voice is lost upon the wind
   And when the rain beats on her heart
His eyes elude her, warm and kind,
   Where the dim shadows steal apart.

What of their children all unborn?
   What of the house they should have built?
She wanders through her days forlorn,
   The untasted cup of joy is spilt.

She lives unwedded, — as for him
   He sleeps too sound for any fret
At their lost kisses, or the dream
   Of the poor girl he never met.

            —Katharine Tynan

Pamela Hinkson

In a letter to a friend, Tynan had written, “My Pam sometimes goes to bed & turns her face to the wall for comfortlessness. Only this week we have heard of the death of a dear friend, captain Johnston.... He was a dear big simple boy.” In another letter Katharine wrote, “All our hearts are opposed with this nightmare war, dragging on & on. I am going to be a Suffragist after the war, for women must never again permit such a horror as this. Every day the young, the beautiful, the brave, are falling around us like the leaves of Autumn.”***

Like her mother, Pamela Hinkson became a writer; her novel The Ladies Road (1932) was a popular success as it “explores with delicacy... the predicament of that lost generation who... came into youth during the War.”† In 1995, research identified her as the author of two additional post-war novels, The Victors (1925) and Harvest (1927), written under the pseudonym of Peter Deane. She never married. 

The Sydney Morning Herald published this review of Harvest in 1927: 

“Harvest” is a collection of powerful short stories by Mr. Peter Deane. The title is symbolical; the miseries of war do not end with the war itself; there is a grim aftermath to be reaped. The setting of several of these stories is the occupied zone in Germany, where, we understand, the author himself served with the British force, and he skillfully communicates the atmosphere of tension and suspicion.... Other stories deal with conditions in post-war Germany, and paint a dark picture of poverty and distress. In most of them women are the chief sufferers. As one of the characters ironically remarks: ‘War would be much simpler without women.”††

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* Caroline Campton, transcript of “Surplus Women,” SheDunnit, 13 Oct. 2018, https://shedunnitshow.com/surpluswomentranscript/

** Katharine Tynan, Years of the Shadow, Constable and Company, 1919, p. 176. 

*** Katharine Tynan, The Selected Letters, edited by Damian Atkinson, Cambridge Scholars, 2016, pp. 413, 425. 

† John Wilson Foster, “Postscript: ‘The Ladies Road’: Women Novelists 1922–1940,” in Irish Novels 1890–1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction, Oxford UP, 2008. 

†† “New Fiction,” Sydney Morning Herald, 5 March 1927, p. 10

Image of Tynan from New York Times, 2 Nov. 1913.