Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Singled Out:
1. Talk about the moment when the senior mistress at Bournemouth High School for Girls announced the "terrible fact" that "only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry." Having been raised in the Edwardian era, when marriage was all women were prepared for...and expected to attain...how must those young women at Bournemouth have felt? How would that pronouncement have made you feel?
2. Consider the public's treatment of the so-called "War Spinsters." Why would the Daily Mail have labeled them "a disaster to the human race"? What made their own country-men and -women turn against them...even to the point of suggesting that they be exported to Canada? If you had been one of those women, would you have remained in the UK...or headed out to Canada or Australia?
3. What about those who deigned to give the women advice for landing a husband? Funny...condescending...insulting...?
4. Talk about the "survivor's guilt" that some women experienced—Gertrude Caton-Thompson, among others. How did they cope?
5. What difference did socioeconomic class make in how the women redefined (or did not) their lives as single women?
6. Discuss the many paths the women chose to support themselves and find fulfillment. Which of the women's stories do you find most impressive—in terms of obstacles overcome or achievements? Are there any for whom you feel particular sympathy, or whose stories make you most angry, or sad?
7. How did the women find sexual fulfillment—or did they? What about Marie Stopes' responses to letters she received from women? What about Radclyffe Hall and her championship of lesbianism?
8. What was the cultural and historical impact of the "war spinsters"? The thrust of Nicholson's book is to show not just how the women coped, even thrived, but to hold them up as forerunners of the modern career woman. Do you agree? If they were pioneers, why did it take another 50 years (at least) for feminism—career and educational opportunities, equal pay, and widespread public acceptance—to take hold? Were they real pioneers...or simply anomalies of their time?
9. Singled Out is a scholarly work. Do you find it emotionally compelling or overly academic? Also, Nicholson packs a lot of women's stories into her book. Did you find it difficult to remember them and keep them straight?
10. How lonely were these women? Does a lifetime of engaging work and service to others compensate for a lack of husband and children?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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