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Books About the CS: A World of Women
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Author:  JB [ Thu Jun 24, 2010 6:13 pm ]
Post subject:  Books About the CS: A World of Women
Sorry this is a little late. My copy of the book fell down between the sofa and the book case, and I had to wait until someone could rescue it!

A World of Women by Rosemary Auchmuty was first published by The Women’s Press in 1999 and reissued by Bettany Press in 2008. It’s the sequel to A World of Girls, which we discussed earlier in the year and is sub-titled “Growing Up in the Girls’ School Story.” The book examines books by EBD, Elsie Oxenham and Dorita Fairlea Bruce. Enid Blyton, who featured in the earlier book, is omitted as her books don’t show her characters grow up (her oldest heroines are the sixth formers at Malory Towers).

As in her earlier book, Auchmuty treats a theme in each chapter of the book and considers each author in relation to this theme. The themes in this book are: Young and Free, Love and Marriage, Old Maids, Community, Careers and Old Maids.

Quote:
Serious lessons are to be gleaned from school stories; serious role models and ways of behaving are presented, for the genre is intrinsically educative.


Do you agree with this? As a younger reader, did you see adults as role models or did you share Joey Bettany’s dislike of growing up? If so, when did you start to view older characters as role models?

Quote:
Considering the tenor of the times and the tone of contemporaneous literature (the romantic novel for example), school stories offer a remarkable variety of independent, self-directed role models of single and married women supported by and supporting women friends in clubs, at home and at work, and mentoring younger women at school or in girls’ organisations such as Guides, Guildry or Camp Fire.


Is this your experience of the books? If you weren’t a contemporary reader of the series, how do female role models compare to those in more modern fiction?

The following questions are asked on the back of the Women’s Press edition and are covered in the book. They seemed a good start point for discussion.

To what extent do these heroines fulfil their potential as active and independent young women?

Why do even their unmarried creators so often marry them off?

Do they settle for domesticity and submission to men?

Or is there more going on in these seemingly unchallenging novels than meets the eye?”

Please discuss these and any other thoughts about this book.
Author:  Fiona Mc [ Fri Jun 25, 2010 12:02 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
I do think the heroines do lead active and fulfilling lives. Yes you do get some who marry early and not do much, but you also get a lot that don't or who still do things after they get married. This was very much what I saw in real life, though I tended to see most in real life settle down and not do much once they were married so was never in a hurry to get married as there was so much of what I wanted to do.

I could certainly sympathise with Joey on the whole not get married thing especially as it was fairly common for people to do that, when I young as it seemed to be for her.

I do think the roles for men and women were very clearly defined in the days of EBD. I remember talking to someone in her 80's who said she thought the hardest thing about being a women in my generation was there were so many choices. She liked the definition of the roles. So yes I do think some settle for domesticity but then they like that role. I would be hard put to see Frieda or Marie or Gisela doing anything else. From the little I see of their relationships with their husbands I don't know if I would say they were submissive but I do think they listen to them, so much more and so much better than what Joey Maynard does with Jack. I think because Frieda, Marie and Gisela seem to have a mutual respect with their husbands, there isn't any of the dosing behind their back that Jack does with Joey. Joey doesn't listen to common sense and if Jack tells her to rest from a medical point of view, and Joey doesn't and then that adversely impacts on the family, I would feel like dosing her too!

I don't think autors marry off their characters more than what happens in real life. Yes there are a certain amount of it but then that's normal and I would have been disappointed if everyone remained single. I was a little disappointed about Julie Lucy not finishing her degree but who knows what she thought about giving it up. She may have been more than happy to, but I wished EBD had of shown us the thought process behind someone not going on with a career they loved, rather than just annouce they were getting married.
Author:  Alison H [ Fri Jun 25, 2010 6:50 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
By the law of averages, most of the characters in the books were going to end up getting married because most of the population does but, as Fiona said, I wish EBD had shown us the process of Daisy and Julie deciding to give up their careers.

In some ways, I think it was easier for women to be single in the society of the CS. Yes, they might have had problems getting mortgages and that sort of thing, but people accepted that someone might be single because they were a dedicated nurse or teacher or even domestic servant (even if that wasn't the reason at all), whereas these days people tend to think there's something strange about you if you aren't married or in a long-term relationship (no offence intended to anyone - I will always be single because no-one will ever want me so I really don't mean to insult anyone else). In some ways there was more pressure to get married because independent women could be viewed with suspicion, but in other ways it was easier. I hope that makes sense.

I do think that the books are meant to teach us lessons - bad behaviour is punished, character faults are expected to be corrected and rules are meant to be followed. If bad behaviour isn't punished by the school, it will be punished by fate!
Author:  Lesley [ Fri Jun 25, 2010 9:06 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
Personally I don't feel that it's more difficult to remain single now. In the time of the CS the only reasons that people would accept were those of vocation - so if you were a nun, a teacher, a nurse then you could be single - but if you were single because actually you preferred it and wanted to be completely selfish and just look after you and not anyone else then it was viewed with suspicion.

EBD shows both sides of the coin - but as stated in the book what she also shows is that, with the exception of Joey, those who marry are pretty much lost to the CS. The role models for those wishing to remain single as a life choice not because they were left on the shelf are the school teachers.
Author:  Cosimo's Jackal [ Fri Jun 25, 2010 10:16 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
I think the CS novels are hugely interesting for what they say about ideas of what it is to be a woman in the first half of the 20thc, and their contradictions - and the changes we see in expectations of girls and women over the course of the series - are part of that.

I think EBD herself had both a relatively radical streak - all in favour of female education, solidarity and achievement, strong, unmarried female role models, of girls being encouraged to be physically free and athletic, not 'young misses' in constricting clothes, to present marriages as teasing unions of equals - and a much more conservative, even reactionary one, which runs counter to the first one.

This is the streak that sees the need to 'reward' her favourite characters with alpha males in a very traditional way, to fetishise female physical weakness within marriage (the wife-patient and doctor-husband dynamic), to depict it as natural and uncontroversial that ambitious, high-achieving women will abandon their careers for marriage without a thought, to be intermittently obsessed with female beauty as important, to - at times - seem to view women in terms of their capacity to reproduce!

Sometimes - interetestingly - EBD seems to be aware of her own contradictions, as when she has Joey (who is able to largely remain 'herself' within marriage because her career is able to be practised, invisibly, within the home - it need not, like Madge's be given up, and as a result she's Josephine M Bettany as well as/far more than Frau Doktor Maynard) see Madge as having been diminished by her marriage into Jem's dutiful, titled sidekick.

And I think the way in which EBD writes about the 'first and second wave' of Tyrol CS girls who marry immediately after school - Gisela, Frieda, Marie - compared to girls like Joey, Mary Burnett, Grizel, Simone, is very interesting. There's a kind of dutiful sweetness to those domestic scenes involving Gisela and her husband and baby, but it's clear that EBD grasps that Gisela's story has essentially ended and disappeared into martial happy-ever-after, and that she's after something different with her spikier, less conventional British girls (and Simone!)
Author:  Alison H [ Tue Jun 29, 2010 6:52 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
Joey says something in one of the Swiss books about Madge having "a very full life" being on committees, doing charity work, being chairwoman of the local WI, etc, and I think it's a big shame that we don't see more of that sort of thing in the books. We don't even see it during the War. The impression given in the books is that, with the odd exception, once a woman gets married her life becomes one of domesticity, whereas a lot of middle and upper-class women would've been doing this very important voluntary work - there's been some stuff in the British press recently about how there's now a shortage of people to do this sort of thing because people like Madge (they didn't say "like Madge", obviously :lol: ) now tend to have full time jobs and just don't have the time.

Enid Sothern makes a remark about it being wicked for girls whose fathers can support them to take jobs which could otherwise go to girls who really needed the money, and, although that idea was probably dying out by the time of the Swiss books, it was certainly quite common in the 1930s when there was mass unemployment and a lot of people were struggling for financial survival, but people like those who'd been to the CS would often have been involved in voluntary work, and the only time it seems to be mentioned is that one brief comment about Madge.
Author:  keren [ Wed Jun 30, 2010 12:17 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
Has anyone read a book called "Sexual Politics" by Kate Millet?

I am reading it in bits and pieces, and EBDs verying points of view seem to reflect different attitudes that were around

On the one hand, a movement that women could vote, be educated, on the other the view that it was women's nature to be at home and nuture children

Home and hearth.
In WWI women would have been more at work, in the 30s they were sent home again. Even though she tries to take the girls out of their homes, give them education etc, it would have been very hard to resist the thinking and views that it would have been "natural" for them to want to have a family.

For her times, I think she was very ambitious and tried her best to encourage the readers.

If anyone has read this book and can give me their opinion, etc, I would be happy
Author:  Jenefer [ Wed Jun 30, 2010 5:31 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Books About the CS: A World of Women
I read Sexual Politics in the 1970s along with other feminist literature so cannot remember exactly what was in the book.

A common theme in those books was that after the 2 World Wars, the women who had been working to help the war effort were encouraged to give up their jobs for the returning soldiers and become homemakers. This ignores the fact that so many men had been killed in the war so lot of women remained single and needed to work.
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