Nicholson - Singled out: how two million women survived without men after the First World War

1. 191418: the pitiless destruction of a generation of young men.

2. Wartime munitions workers: in those same four years the female workforce increased by nearly a million.

3. In the late nineteenth century a new world for single women was flickering into life. Bicycles were among the heralds of change.

4. Somerville students in 1917. Winifred Holtby, seated, on the far right.

5. Margery Fry was Principal of Somerville College, Oxford from 196 to 1931; she was also a noted penal reformer.

6-7. Celebrating physical vigour, the Womens League of Health and Beauty may not have done much to comfort men scarred and crippled by a remorseless conflict.

8. Richmal Crompton: the last surviving example of the Victorian professional aunt.

9. Society belle Isie Russell-Stevenson was fortunate in experiencing marriage and motherhood, but the war was to change her elite social scene for ever.

10. Rani Cartwright, a celebrated catwalk model who described herself as free range.

11. Joan Evans lost the man she loved in 1915, and by the age of twenty-two had given up hope of marriage.

12. Cicely Hamilton lived like the traditional spinster, with a cat for company.

13. With the help of Jessie Monroe and her dogs, Elizabeth Goudge (right) learned to deeply prize the blessings of a single life.

14. Rose-coloured carpets were mine; stockbroker Beatrice Gordon Holmes photographed in the 1940s.

15. The staff of the Electrical Association for Women honour their founder Caroline Haslett, awarded the DBE in June 1947.

16. Career woman Bessie Webster chose to be photographed leaning against her Chairmans Rolls Royce.

17. After thirty-seven attempts, Victoria Drummond passes her Chief Engineers exam.

18. Gert and Daisy: Elsie and Doris Waters.

19. I thought a god was there: Richard Aldington in 1931, the year Irene Rathbone first met him.

20. Irene Rathbone, featured in a round-up of book reviews in the weekly Everyman, 1933.

21. Private View (1937) by Gladys Hynes. Unmistakable in the centre of the picture, Radclyffe Hall and her lover Una Troubridge saw no need to conceal their sexual orientation in such tolerant milieux.

22. A Universal Aunt.

23. Other peoples babies; but there were compensations to be had in the rich social life led by nannies between the wars.

24. Mary Milne, Matron of St Marys Hospital, Paddington. Her fianc was killed in the war.

25. Tea, sympathy and iron discipline; in the 190s nursing was one of the few professions seen as respectable for decent young ladies.

26. After her mothers death, Phyllis Bentley rediscovered a guiltless freedom.

27. Rowena Cade, founder of the Minack Theatre, Cornwall.

28. Winifred Haward and Louis Hodgkiss: a great love that survives the night and climbs the stars.

29. I would live my life over again: ladys maid Rose Harrison.

30. Post-war, women replenished the ranks of white-collar workers killed in the trenches.