The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–60 (review)

In Ivy Compton-Burnett’s 1931 novel Men and Wives, she has Rachel Hardistie say, “Of course I see how civilized it is to be a spinster . . . I shouldn’t think savage countries have spinsters. I never know why marriage goes on in civilized countries, goes on openly.”¹ Compton-Burnett’s novels, characterized by their elliptical withholdings, gaps, and silences, are some of the few to give voice to the unmarried. She counts among her characters the spinsters and bachelors, aunts, uncles, governesses, and teachers whose lives were intimately intertwined with the heterosexual family unit even as they remained on the erotic, economic, social, and domestic margins. It is the work of Katherine Holden’s excellent and necessary new book The Shadow of Marriage to reclaim these figures.

The place of the single person in the period covered by Holden’s study is deeply problematic due to the documentary and socioeconomic evidence available, or lack thereof. Thus, she argues, it is profoundly complicated from a methodological standpoint to understand the population and therefore all the more imperative to uncover it for the issues of gender, class, and national identity it raises. The institution of marriage was considered to lay at the foundation of British society and its empire from the First World War to the rise of the welfare state, yet a significant number of people existed outside that institution. Census data detailing household composition erased these individuals; communities found ways to exploit and marginalize them by denying them the benefit of social support. Families slipped them into the silences that speak volumes about their tenuous status even as they played crucial roles in sustaining the family unit at home and abroad.

Holden’s study attempts to capture both single men and women; however, as she details throughout the book, she encountered difficulties emerging from these silences and gaps in the available data. Her introduction outlines her methodology, definitions, and theorizations of the concepts of couples, households, and the married/single dichotomy. The Shadow of Marriage draws on oral history—including Mass-Observation records and Holden’s own interviews (detailed in a fascinating appendix)—memoir, census and welfare data, parliamentary records, advice manuals, and novels. Holden notes that:

moving between these sources and levels shows how, for example, changes in sex ratios, family size and structure, attitudes to sex and reproduction, and patterns of employment and leisure impacted upon single men’s and women’s behaviour, decisions, and choices (or lack of choices). Equally, we can see how household and marital categories adopted by the census and social surveys often obscured the significance of single people’s position and importance both within and outside their families.

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A further problem arises from the distinct narratives and tropes that surround single people of each gender. Single women are much more present in novels and memoirs, as well as in available information about education and other caring professions; they helped to raise children as aunts, nannies, and teachers, they were more open about leaving behind life-writing about female companions; and the position of the single, especially the childless, woman, played a much more prominent role in public discourse about national identity and the family surrounding the two world wars. Single men, on the other hand, are more elusive: since they have not traditionally been defined as dependents, and since data collection presumes a man as head of a household—even if that household is not part of a marriage—the bachelor is harder to pin down. Of course, the obscuring of homosexuality and those who would form such attachments further problematizes the public and private place of the “single” man.

Seven chapters exploring different facets of the question of singleness go far towards teasing out the various roles these men and women played in the interwar period and beyond. Within each thematically focused chapter, Holden presents her evidence chronologically and by type. She focuses on lifestyle, sibling relationships...