S3 E10 The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

First, you should rush to read Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests, a fantastic romance thriller set in 1922, post World War 1 England.  We don’t give spoilers, exactly, but the historical context we cover gives you some idea of events and situations that come up in the novel.  And the novel is wall-to-wall women’s issues:  society’s expectations of decorum, cooking, cleaning, birth control, wifely duties, sex, widowhood, spinsterhood, motherhood, and a fair amount about 1920's housekeeping.  

Sonja helps us understand the economic state of the UK after WW1, women’s voting rights, early attempts at family planning, abortion law and practices, and whether there were laws about lesbians.   

Along the way, we find out some people (not female people, mind you) once believed that robust menstruation was a sign of good health, and we learn that “servants don’t organize themselves,” while someone dramatic dons a dress made entirely of jewels.

REFERENCES

We reference other IWAW episodes here:  S3E1 on Tristan & Iseult; S3E on Romeo & Juliet; and the reference to the “ritual death” is from our episode on Julie Ann Long’s The Perils of Pleasure. 

Sarah Waters has written several novels during her very successful career, and you can find out more about her at her website.

The biography that Sonja mentions is Vera Britain’s Testament of Youth, which is still in print, and if you want an overview of her life, this article from The Guardian offers a quick insight.

Marie Stopes’s 1918 work, Married Love, can be found at Project Gutenberg.

Here’s a great essay about the fear that lesbians were taking over Britain after World War 1:  "The Cult of the Clitoris": Sexual Panics and the First World War

Check out Maude Allen in her jewels-only dress as Salome.

Here’s a 2024 article from The Guardian, that hits the high points of the Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters's Trial, plus how even a hundred years later, Edith’s heirs are trying to clear her name.