OVERVIEW: What should women do?

[feather_ghyll]

Over the summer, I've found myself reading a lot of books that are concerned with the employment of women, in the loosest sense of the phrase, maybe 'occupation' is closer to it, and some of them were girls rather than women...

Sue Barton - Staff Nurse: Helen Dore Boylston
Requiem for a Wren: Neville Shute
Miss Buncle Married: D. E. Stevenson
Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: Winifred Watson
The Third Miss Symons: F.M. Mayor
North for Treasure: Dorothy Carter

It's not surprising that this theme is present in Sue Barton - Staff Nurse , which fits into the career girl genre of books about a girl learning a trade, although it's at the tail end of a series rather than being the more common stand-alone, and to be clear, it was written and set in the 1950s -- do you have an image of the beaming housewife with a frilly white apron covering her full skirt in the chrome wonderland of her kitchen? Good.

Sue is getting antsy about playing the housewifely mother and wants to get back to work, and use her training and energy. Her doctor husband, who she met on the job, is against it. Nurse Sue has her fourth child. She also has a housekeeper. The writer gives to the hubby TB and sends him to a faraway San. Nurse Sue is 'forced' back to work. loves it so much and it does so much good for her that hubby yields - or finally lets the decision to work be hers. (Result = both work too much in demanding jobs?) I hadn't read any Sue Bartons before and found this an engaging enough read - Sue's world is a series of soluble problems, medical, professional and personal, which is quite soothing to read.

I read Requiem for a Wren because it had been recommended as a good portrait of Wrens' lives during the Second World War. I think you can use the word tragedy for the story that is told here, and it presents a view of the importance of the war to the young people who fought it that I hadn't seen before, or maybe not worked through so fully. The eponymous Wren, Joan left school and immediately found her vocation in the Wrens. The stresses and losses of the war broke her down, barring her from returning to the work she loved, and peace and her circumstances left her drifting, unable to find a position other than that of companion to family members. The narrator paints her suicide as noble, for his own reasons, but it comes across as a waste of a life.

Having read the prequel and sequel, I was surprised by how twee I found Miss Buncle Married. Barbara wrote two books before her marriage, barely fictionalised books about the people she knew, which meant she had to leave her village, but fortunately she an got on so well with her publisher that they married. In this book, they move to the country, where a new community offers itself up for the writer in Barbara. She writes a book about the people she's met, but chooses not to sacrifice her happiness in her new home by publishing it - not a decision she's pushed into by her husband, who would be happy to publish the book, because he thinks it would sell well, and, as he travels into London daily to work, the location of their home means less to him, but he respects her decision. That choice leads the way for the final denouement of impending motherhood, and a very silly few pages about how getting married and now having a baby has made Barbara a real woman, a wise woman…

There's not a hint of war looming, although it was written in 1936. The recent movie adaptation of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, which was weitten and is set in 1938, is saturated by it. It's not emphasised so much in the book, although maybe the frivolous tone of the book is itself a reaction to the pre-war buildup. And that book fits into this theme of women's occupation, in that the titular heroine, again caught up in the dilemma of the single woman of the respectable class of what to do to pay for her next meal, and plumping for beind a nursery governess, despite it never working out, is desperately looking for work to support herself. The story is something of a fairy tale, in the book, she finds a position as a housekeeper for Delysia and Nick, with a potential lover/husband in Joe; in the film, she just has Joe (as he's played by Ciaran Hinds, there's no 'just' about it).

To go back to the shadow of war, and this had extra resonance having read Requiem, but in Miss Buncle there is, however, an interesting element in that Arthur Abbot is clearly judging his twentysomething nephew, Sam, and seeing the lack of character-forming experience that he received fighting in the First World War in his foibles. As is shown in the sequel, The Two Mrs Abbots, Sam is going to get plenty of experience of war to mature him even further.

The Third Miss Symonds, which is a great novella, written in 1913, shows the epitome of a wasted life before the chances and world wars of the twentieth century. Henrietta is someone in the middle of a well-off family that expects its daughters to wed. It doesn't quite know what to do with a failure in this regard. Henrietta was born in a time when only trail-blazing women went to university and, because of her class, it was seen that there was no need for training for anything. No crisis affected the family, or her country, and for the brief period that she did take up the household reins, her personality and upbringing conspired against her making a success of it. And what abilities and potential she had were worn down by life, as is forensically depicted in this book.

Going back in time (although I didn't read the books in that order), it's been a thought-provoking journey to see how these women have and have not been occupied over the years. Granted the different authors had different motivations from sheer entertainment to instruction to art. I've used the words tragedy and wasted lives, knowing that all of these characters belonged to the middle class and, Miss Pettigrew aside, have never faced penury, but still, especially in the better-written depictions (Mayor, Watson and Shute's) there's a lot of sympathy for them, and a relief in books like Dorothy Carter's North for Treasure. from the early sixties, where the heroine runs a flying school and gets respect for her flying ability