Apparently, according to the BBC World Service, the shortage of marriageable men at the end of the First World War meant that women turned to the arts and politics to fulfil themselves. What women were these? Certainly, the arts or politics were hardly an option for working class girls and women. But this is the BBC. History is nearly always focused on what the bourgeois and upper-middle classes were up to. In a 10 minute item, there was one mention of working class women. There as also one mention of lesbians, another supposed outcome of the shortage of men to marry. The item was also flawed because it suggested that the war had deprived something like three-quarters of a million women of men to marry. The problem with that many of the dead were already married and left widows and tiny children behind. It is doubtful if those widows had time to dabble in the arts or politics. Survival in the rural and urban slums of Britain used up most of their energy. The widow's pension was pitiable, unless the dead man had been an officer. There was no doubt some surge in the number of women who could devote themselves to politics and the arts in the 1920s and 30s. But they were a tiny minority drawn from the already privileged; not the widespread social phenomenon suggested by the BBC. The BBC every day becomes more and more of a live broadcast of Chelsea dinner party.