The ‘surplus’ post-war women who came east and forged careers

When the first world war ended, in 1918, an entirely new set of social problems arose with the outbreak of peace. In Britain alone, about two million women were regarded – unkindly, but with some degree of accuracy – as being “excess” to population requirements. These women were unable to marry because of the demographic drop caused by the carnage of war. Marriage – almost the only acceptable career for women, then – was nearly impossible because there were so few available men of marriageable age; they’d been killed at Gallipoli and Verdun, and on the Somme, and many other battlefields.

Not all of these women stayed in Britain; burgeoning employment opportunities in the colonies during the Roaring Twenties provided a chance for a new (and, hopefully, more fulfilling) life far from an embittered home existence, cooped up with a griefstricken mother who wept incessantly for her dead brothers killed in Flanders, and the ongoing social stigma that came from being “left on the shelf”.

When a newspaper advertisement for an executive secretary’s position in the Far East came up, many leapt at the chance. Colonial governments also offered employment opportunities; the 1920s and 30s saw a boom in confidential work for women. The Colonial Nursing Service provided excellent career opportunities in many parts of the world, including Hong Kong; many women who had already partially trained as wartime auxiliary nurses became fully qualified.

This generation of excess women provided a valuable role model – though few would have ever thought of themselves in those terms – for the next generation.

In particular, those who had forged a new life in the Far East offered a sense of possibility significantly lacking to those who had stayed at home.