Thought Portal

After the First World War, there was a great flowering of female independence as more women chose to live single lives. This change, and the backlash to it, is all there to be found in the murder mysteries of the period, if you just dig a little below the surface. From self-contained, professional women like Mary Whittaker in Dorothy L Sayers’ Unnatural Death to dear, fluffy Miss Marple, there are a multitude of single women’s lives to discover. But let’s go back to the beginning. This particular story starts with the surplus women.

Find more information about this episode and links to the books discussed at shedunnitshow.com/surpluswomen. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that in your app of choice.

Contributors: —Rosemary Cresswell, senior lecturer in global history at the University of Hull. Follow her on Twitter @RosieCresswell. —Camilla Nelson, associate professor of writing at the University of Notre Dame Australia. —Helen Parkinson

Further reading: —A field guide to spinsters in English fiction —‘Surplus women’: a legacy of World War One? —Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived Without Men After the First World War by Virginia Nicholson. —The Shadow of Marriage by Katherine Holden —Unnatural Death by Dorothy L Sayers

You can find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/surpluswomentranscript.

These men become perverse celebrities, partly because they are, of course, still alive — but also because their crimes can be framed as cautionary tales about evil sociopaths, that don’t require a reckoning with, for instance, the real effects of toxic masculinity and the violence it often leads to. This media framework in which the criminality of white masculinity is always individual, and always a shock, is especially relevant at a moment when the ongoing radicalization of white men has shown itself to be a genuine threat, and yet one that even the government has had trouble naming.

Of course stories that require grappling with cultural problems can’t easily fit into the moral imagination of tabloids and cable news, a world of individual monsters and innocent victims, and one that — in these particular tales — offers viewers and readers the promise of avenging a death, and setting their world back as it should be. Who could possibly resist?