something about assert photographs that just clicked with me. this is a great photograph to use. again, i wanted stuff that was pretty good photographically, mostly in focused and sharp. and i don't say that as a joke. but the longer you stand still -- i wanted stuff that is technically quite good, but i wanted stuff that grabs people by looking at faces. there's something about looking at a volvo. this is in instead of real time. ..

about infering the colors from the photographs and i did you must have done some of that on an unconscious level because for an instant, you could look at the tone and not be able to tell if it was blue or red, but you would be able to tell this is and yellow because it would have come out much later, so i think there was a little bit of that going on. >> to some extent, there was but more of that for me, more of that word artistry than that

felt like to me and i never looked upon it as this has to technically match or anything like that. it was more on the photograph and that to me was what you had on the leave mechanics behind and go beyond that for a picture. >> you've done an incredible job, this is so impressive. >> appreciate it. a great job. >> my pleasure. you may buy one for any one of your choice right here and john will sign it. this one is the one that grabbed me. it was a cold harbor 7,000 people died and 30 minutes and this is african-americans who have been tasked with cleaning up the battlefield, and it's

really a startling picture in color. >> thank you. a great job. [applause] >> you are watching book tv come on fiction authors and books every weekend on c-span2. now book tv in london. book tv interviewed virginia nicholson to talk about her research on women in wartime and famous family. she is the author of four nonfiction books including singled out how to million british women survive without men after the first world war and millions like us, their lives and war and peace 1939 to 1949. this is just over half an hour. >> host: joining us from london is author virginia nicholson. a couple of her books are about women and the war. where did you come up with that

topic? >> guest: when in and of war seems to me both ideas were to the 20th century. i think the women's movement as inextricable from the idea of the war. so, i started out by writing a book about the effect of the first world war on women and that was a rather specific topic in a way that one that i hope appeals for a strong lead to a large number of women today called singled out and the idea was to look at women who had been left single after the huge and terrible slaughter of world war i. in this country nearly three-quarters of a million men died in the trenches and dreadful circumstances on the western front, and the result was that women growing up in this country that had a kind of more or less assumed that

marriage, mother -- motherhood was their birthright turned around and realized there were not enough to go around. when they did the census in 1921 in britain, they worked out that there were approximately 2 million more women than men in this country. and that meant having to reinvent themselves, look at their lives and try to figure out who they were in their identity and in their economics and finding a path for themselves and life. and i discovered when i went deeply into the subject that of course what it had done is to sort of kickstart the feminism in the 20th century. it had already begun. we know about the suffrage and women chaining themselves to the railings but in a sense that took off in a big way simply because there were so many women flooding the market who had to

find lives for themselves and who actually made lives for themselves and turn their own lives are bound and the lives of other women in the process. so that was the first book here yet i picked up where that left off when i wrote another book very much about the women in the war in fact more so called millions like us, women's lives in the war and peace. it was looking a decade of the 1940's, and for me this was kind of the link into the unknown. i do not make any claims to be an academic historian in fact i do not make any claims on that front. i am someone i see myself as writing for a very general, very popular readership. i'm with a mainstream publisher. so in a sense, my lack of knowledge to begin with was almost an advantage that meant i was seeing things a new.

i said to myself what do i know about the second world war? well, what i know is but a lot of people in this country know of my generation. and indeed other generations. for me the second world war is about the battle of britain, it's about aircraft, about a battleship's, about men in uniforms storming the beaches of normandy, it's about eisenhower and above all it is about winston churchill with that kind of tone exhorting us to fight on the beaches and so on and so forth. in other words it is about guns and metal and men and for me there was one side of the story. i couldn't relate to it. i could add my gear and fuel fascinated but they didn't seem to have anything to do with me. so i decided kind inevitably after the previous book to look at it through the eyes of women

and that is what i set out to do. >> host: you said the women had to reinvent themselves after world war i because of the death of so many men. what were some of the ways the reinvented themselves? >> guest: well, i think it is safe to say that the 1920's, the decade following the first world war was a decade of first, it was when a lot of women started to be allowed to think into the professions which they hadn't been permitted to do. they started to be allowed to sit on juries for example, which they had previously not been a lot to do. and all kinds of specialized areas, bill wall, politics, the council. all sorts of achievements in

sports. these were women who were finding their way because they couldn't marry. there was no one to marry. that was one direction they took was to kind of pushed into the professions and push into new fields campaigning and activism. there was a wonderful organization called the national association set up by one of these that lived in the north of england in bradford and she was a forceful woman with perfectly circular spectacles like big lamps and she set out to try to get proper pension rights who she felt were discriminated against. they were having to make their own way and the government wasn't giving them proper welfare arrangements. so she was great at campaigning. i think in other fields, more

intimate, more kind of in a sense in word and emotional if you like, single women also had a great challenge they had to work at. if you couldn't be married and couldn't have children, what were you going to do about your urge towards motherhood and your physical needs and that is something that give of exploring. it's not the easiest way to research. it is something the women had to deal with today and i did a lot of research in the archive. now it was a pioneering birth control expert, and she wrote a book published in the early twenties called married love

note and was completely targeted at really exploiting sex to married couples. you have no idea how ignorant people can be. just phenomenal the stuff people didn't know. we are accustomed to being deluged with information on sex. this is not the case in the interim war period. it was really a tragic and the amount of ignorance so enormous numbers road to her and said you know, can you explain things to me and tell me how to stop having babies etc.. i went to the archives where there were loads of letters and among them, very sad letters from single women saying what am i to do about these urges that i am feeling and was very

unsympathetic to them and her career was worth to see herself condoning extramarital sex. as she would reply to them saying i'm sorry this is a problem and we to have to solve for yourself for the moment i recommend cold baths. the solutions that the women had found for dealing with their sexual urges, things i think would be very familiar to us today but women were way out should i be doing this? if i do, will it harm me? should i do it more than once a month, you know, is it going to cause terrible damage? as i say i'm afraid they didn't get much feedback to get there was also of course -- and this was a very difficult area to research. the whole question of female homosexuality and there is no

question that women who didn't have male relationships in their lives, marriage and their lives formed very close relationships with other women. and on whole, these were regarded as innocent until and absolutely and flem free book was published in 1929 caldwell of loneliness which i expect some of your viewers may have heard of written by radcliffe and it is still a lesbian tracked. it's never been out of print. and the minute that hit the press, a terrible scandal broke out and was banned which guaranteed its popularity. and suddenly female friendships didn't look so cozy after all so you would get the female teachers going off to get their

day started to look suspect. now i tend to say innocent until proven guilty. that is the way that we work in this country. so why do not make any assumptions that women that live together or necessarily cavorting in bed, but i'm pretty sure some of them were. >> host: was there a rise in single motherhood during this period because of the two million-plus women? >> guest: i can't give you the statistics because this is a book i wrote about six years ago there certainly was the phenomenon of women having to cope with single motherhood, and a lot of women again very sadly, for a tragically decided if they allowed themselves to have sex with a man that is perhaps

taking advantage of them it might bring them happiness, it might bring them a relationship and of course, you know, maybe many times they were abandoned. there was an interesting case of a woman who was i think more or less resigned to singlehood but was not re-signed to the lack of motherhood. she set out and selling going to adopt and she went out and adopted at the age of 49 and she was a woman of the church. she was a preacher and a religious journalist who became the editor of the times and she adopted a little too-year-old boy and it gave her enormous happiness and it is a very touching story actually. another fascinating thing -- this is slightly from the point, but i explored very deeply the relationship with their pets,

animals come in and of course animals so often become a substitute. there's one that devotes an entire chapter of her memoir to all of those that she ever lived in her life which for about 17i think. i try not to be judgmental about disputed i think it's the relationships and if you love of all the that is an emotional release, isn't it? >> what about poverty rates and social programs for their increases in both of those because of the single women after world war i? >> guest: know, people were very unsympathetic on the whole. i think they felt that they were a problem, and when the statistics were released in 1921

after the census, i can't give the exact figures but it approximated 2 million more. the women were described as the surplus and in some cases the superfluous one man and the attitude is what do we do about them? they are a problem. they do not fit in. they do not be long. they aren't doing what they are supposed to do. how do we kind of get rid of them? a lot of people suggested shipping them abroad to look for in those days known as the dominions to new zealand or canada or australia where it was fought there weren't men in search of lives. i didn't think many tried this. one thing that did go up considerably boost immigration by single women. so, the kind of than board and on ships and set off across the

oceans and when they got to australia it turned out to be not quite so simple because of course the first world war had imploded dominions and many soldiers had come to fight on the western front from australia , canada australia. many of them died so there wasn't such a shortage. they were at the jungle or in the bush and actually coming in, that wasn't necessarily where you wanted to be. >> host: this is book tv on c-span2 and we are talking with author virginia nicholson about some of her books. we've been discussing her first book on women and war "singled out," about world war i. her most recent book is about world war ii and it's entitled "millions like us." what happened to british women once world war ii began in this

nation? >> guest: well that is something i set myself up of the task of finding out and call me naive, i didn't realize until i started looking at the second world war that the women in this country were conscripted. no other country conscripted women. that situation was so bad in the sense that there were men doing desk jobs and factory jobs that were actually needed as soldiers, so there was -- you had to do something about it. so the women were conscripted and if you're between the ages of 90 and 50 and you didn't have young children or elderly dependents, and you had to do either the work of national importance in the factories, on the farms, you had to join the forces, or work in health care.

a lot of them worked and munitions factories and were not mending or repairing or building aircraft or ammunition. a large number joined the territorial service. the top service that women enjoy and and the one that was most desirable work of the women's royal naval surface, and i think the reason for that -- again i am straight slightly but one of the things that amused me is the thing that governed most women's decision was the uniform and it was very chic. it didn't have mulkey pockets. it had a beautifully tailored jackets and this adorable hat so that was very popular, as was

the women's aircraft axillary. they all had to participate. >> host: virginia nicholson, were these married women single women and how many were conscripted? >> guest: i am sorry to say i cannot produce a figure of the top of my head. many thousands. we are talking, you know, well over a million women that were conscripted into the services and probably two or three times that if we are talking about the factories and farms. most of them tended to be single for the reason they didn't have children though there were plenty of examples of married women whose children were a little bit older but still fell into the age parameters.

i have a story about a woman who decided to work on transport in bradford. she had a 14 year old son and her husband was away so her 14-year-old basically looked after himself and would get up at 4:00 each morning and work on the city trends come home at the three in the afternoon and she would have all of her housework and shopping to do. it was a juggling act because women who were doing those kind of jobs and who were mothers or wives were expected to have meals on the table. they were expected to do the shopping. it wasn't that you stopped being a fulfilling normal expectations of women, you just doubled, you just did everything plus. >> host: or most of them housewives going into world war ii?

>> guest: most of them were young women that had come out of the training should university jobs, perhaps women who had been working. the job range for women at that time wasn't huge. you probably went into retail work or clerical work, process delete cannot possibly teaching. those were the kind of jobs the women were expected to do. there was a gender division. so they would come out of those jobs and july and into the effort. >> host: what is a school lever? -- school leaver. >> guest: somebody that left school. a left at either 14 or 16. >> host: and moved into -- >> guest: and moved into an employment basically. the vast majority of girls in

this country left school at 14, the vast majority. the leaving age wasn't raised until the late 1960's in this country. so they left school at 14 the likelihood is you would maybe do a job in a shop or a factory for four or five years and then get married young. >> host: so when the board ended what happened to all of these women that are now employed in a professional job? >> guest: well of course they were expected to go back where they had come from. it was difficult of all sorts of finance and difficult for them because they had discovered that they could do all sorts of things. they had capacities they hadn't dreamed of. it had opened up their world for them. they traveled, they met people,

the next on the social class. they had amazing response a lebanese. when the war came to an end it didn't happen overnight. it wound down slowly. the ones who were married rejoined their husbands and that led to a very large number of complex situations. men would be away for five years returning to find their wife many had an affair or an illegitimate child. they themselves would have had traumatic experience. they may have been imprisoned or wounded. they might have been tortured as many were in the far east in japan. relationships couldn't pick up where they left off.

there was adjustments needing to be made. and i explored a lot of individual story is when that happened. just to give you an example i have a story of a woman that talked terrifically passionately in love with a young man working in london as a young woman she was 18. the relationship took off the end of the war broke out. he was away for five years and was one of the ones who was tortured in japan. meanwhile she had a really interesting time and she joined and was involved in the normandy landings and she had a lot of boyfriends. she didn't know where the first boyfriend was and when the war ended about a year later she got a job at the bbc as an assistant, production assistant

and there was a ring at her doorbell and was him and she only just recognized him and they had to be light the spark from where it had almost dwindled to nothing. he was a broken man and she realized the love was still there but nothing else was. she sacrificed to the rest of her life to him. his health was ruined, his mental state was dreadful and she took a backseat the rest of her life and it's a very sad story. there are many examples of that kind. i think you have those happening in the states as well. >> host: were you able to conduct oral histories for these books? >> guest: why do those for all of my books. my background as a television

journalist, so why don't just deal with facts and archive material. i'm not that kind of a historian. i'm very journalistic. i talked to the women who have been through the experience is in the case about the single 1n - talking to women in their late nineties and early 100 because it was such a long time ago. in the case of these women there were still many out there and at first i talked to was my mother who is 96 now but at the time was 92 and she told me her story which was not unusual. naim isn't too tall story of unusual when and i want to tell the stories of ordinary, frightened women who could have been me and that is when i started with my mother put them of course it spread out.

her story was very sad pity if she was in love with a man that was killed in 1943. she had to get through the rest of the war in the state of tragic loss and she then picked up her life post war in a very interesting way by taking up the job in the reconstruction of germany. she went out to germany in late 1945 and stayed until -- i think cn which state of germany she said we had it bad here in london berlin was flattened. she went to see the concentration camp after it had

been liberated obviously after the people had been released but i think she was shocked and put her own suffering into perspective and started the healing process so that she was able to pick her life up after that and of course she did leader meet another man and had lived long happy marriage with him. >> host: first of all your first book is completely unrelated to the women in the war. is there any connection between charleston and blueberry house and garden and your leader books on women in the war? >> guest: without was the book that started me as a writer and was done in collaboration with my father -- >> host: who is -- >> guest: whose name was quentin. he knew he was dying and he asked me to help him which i think was a way