Photo by Howard Coster / National Portrait Gallery One of the most pressing concerns after the First World War was the problem of “surplus women”. The census of 1921 confirmed the numbers: there were almost two million of them, creating “a question so immense and so far-reaching that few have yet realised its import”, as a Times editorial warned. How was this newly enfranchised mass to be supported, occupied, or – perhaps hardest of all – placated? Psychologists predicted dire outcomes from a surge of spinsterism, including the spread of “false views of life” by hordes of unmarried female teachers and a decline into “psychic sclerosis” for the women themselves, leading to possible criminality and lunacy. The rhetoric used against virgins was of rotting fruit, withering leaves and dry stream-beds, but the sexually voracious unmarried woman was also terrifying, and the woman who couldn’t care less was of course the worst.…