Women's Wild Oats: Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards

In the opening essay the narrator captures the fevered atmosphere of London on the Armistice day of 1918. As the city erupts into a spontaneous carnival, women dominate the revelry, shouting, dancing, and even lighting cigarettes with a daring that seems to signal a new freedom. This vivid tableau becomes the springboard for a broader inquiry into how the end of the war reshaped everyday conduct.

The collection then moves beyond the street scene to probe the uneasy moral questions the upheaval raised. Drawing on personal observation, social history and sharp commentary, the author asks what the “wild oats” of that night reveal about gender expectations, public behavior, and the lingering anxieties of a society emerging from conflict. Readers are invited to consider how those early twentieth‑century shifts still echo in contemporary debates about women's agency and the standards that govern us.