How pioneering women at the turn of 20th century changed the course of British gardening | House & Garden

In March 1910, readers of The Daily Mail were confronted with an advertisement that read, ‘Ten Thousand Englishwomen could be ranged in a line and shot. No one would be sorry. Everyone would be glad. There isn’t any place for them.’ This was pretty strong stuff, but it was just an extreme example of a widely held belief: that the country was burdened with ‘surplus women’. In 1854, author and social campaigner Harriet Martineau estimated that there were over 500,000 more women than men in Great Britain; by 1891, the number had risen to over 900,000. The chief reason given at the time was the high level of emigration among young men seeking opportunities across the British Empire. Every young man signing up to be a colonist, a member of the armed forces, a civil servant or a trader in the British colonies was one less for the women left at home to woo and catch. There was real anxiety that as a result there were ‘surplus women’ who would not find a husband to take care of them after their fathers died. The ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant’ women that bothered commentators most were middle- and upper-class women. Single working-class women were not viewed as surplus; they could go into paid occupations deemed suitable to their station, such as domestic service or factories. For ‘respectable’ women higher up the social scale, however, conventional society offered very few options.

For many commentators, the solution to the excess supply of unsupported spinsters was obvious: the wholesale shipment of single women to the colonies where the marriageable men were. The Daily Mail advertisement quoted earlier was actually placed by the Canadian Pacific Railway as part of a campaign to encourage female emigration to Canada. However, many