"Once, when I asked my patently bright parent why she didn’t go into further education, she shrugged and said she wasn’t clever enough." File photo / Getty Images
OPINION:
There are certain women of my mother’s generation who sweetly still write their shopping lists in shorthand. It is a tribute to the interminable hours of drilling in Pitman’s phonetic squiggles three-quarters of a century ago.
If you were a girl born in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s, there is a strong chance you left school at 15 and headed to the local tech or secretarial college to train to be a copy typist, as my mum did.
Once, when I asked my patently bright parent why she didn’t go into further education, she shrugged and said she wasn’t clever enough. Only the “brainboxes” at her girls’ grammar school in Wales went to university. Just three of them in her year, I think.
Among the rest, who had got through the very difficult 11-plus (the pass mark was said to be weighted against girls because too many of them did well compared with the boys who are less mature at that age), there were surely many more than three who could have managed a degree.
But, back then, options for girls were extremely limited, with any resources in the family reserved for their brothers. It was more than that, though. Two hundred years after Jane Austen sardonically cautioned against the perils of girls reading, too much education was still seen as blighting a young woman’s prospects.
As 17-year-old Cicely McCulloch’s father said to her bluntly in the late 1950s, “There’s no point in your having a career, because you’re perfectly bedworthy and will get married.”
Julia Wigan (born 1960) recalls her father giving her and her two sisters Latin lessons “so we would have something to think about whilst doing the washing up”. Thanks, Dad!
Those are just two of the hilarious yet sad and unsettling quotes found in Jobs for the Girls, the terrific new book from Ysenda Maxtone Graham. It is the third in Maxtone Graham’s “lost worlds” trilogy, following on from the vicissitudes of girls’ boarding schools and British summer holidays that put the sand into sandwiches (not to be confused with grit in the oyster).
What struck me, as I devoured the recollections of 200-plus women, is how recently all this thwarting of female lives went on. The author, who graduated from Cambridge not long after me, tried to get into publishing, but while her male contemporaries swanned into editorial assistant roles, Ysenda had to “get a toe in the door”, starting as the lowest of the low.
There was a quandary. If you learnt to type, girls were told, you would “never be without a job”, but would you ever progress to a job where you wouldn’t be typing?
Maxtone Graham points out that the passport to decent employment was maths O-level, but that was “off the menu” both at the poorest state schools and the poshest academies for young gentlewomen where learning to be a good hostess and keeping your man happy were the important subjects.
Girls at St Mary’s School, Wantage, had to write a list of their most valued attributes in a husband. “Grouse moor,” quipped one bright spark who was clearly up to rather more than a cordon-bleu course catering for a lifetime of dinner parties.
At my comprehensive in the 1970s, while the boys did carpentry and metalwork, all the girls did domestic science: among other skills, we were taught to cook for an invalid (mushy beige food), a talent I have yet to find an opportunity to exercise, although there’s still time. Any invalids out there, my cheesy cod bake is all yours.
Marriage was still the perceived destination for girls, so very few got the necessary basics to enter a profession. Many who could – and should – have become doctors ended up nursing instead where they were roared at by dragons. (Older women were allowed to be “dragons” and “office treasures” but never managing directors.)
The dress codes for nurses were terrifying. Patricia Heath told Maxtone Graham about a friend who was on night duty, desperately trying to resuscitate a man who’d had a cardiac arrest. “Night Sister Brown came back from her tea break and was horrified. ‘Nurse,’ she hissed, ‘You’ve got your cardigan on!’”
(A bitter irony here. Because so many clever girls, who would today be doctors, went into nursing, the standard of nursing was far higher then than now. Women’s gain was the patients’ loss.)
Even by the 1970s, our career horizons were remarkably limited. My teenage girl gang all announced our intention to become air hostesses, probably because we thought we’d marry a handsome pilot.
(To be fair, one Carole Goldsmith worked as a secretary before joining British Airways as a flight attendant and ended up marrying the exceedingly handsome Michael Middleton. Carole is now mother to our future Queen, so the career plan worked out for at least one smart girl.)
Or there was always the typing pool. Rows and rows of women making nine carbon copies of everything, supervised by a strict upright female in front. Shorthand typists were given one single slot per mid-morning and mid-afternoon to go to the “lav”.
If they missed their slot, bad luck. One theme that comes through strongly in this book is the punitive attitude the dragons had towards aspirational girls who were restrained on a tight leash and taught not to get ideas above their station.
It rang a bell. When I was a Littlewoods Saturday girl, our resident dragon would not allow us to sit down all day and even leaning against the till or a clothes rack got you a telling off. Looking back, an element of generational envy must have entered into it. Maxtone Graham points out that mothers were often against daughters working. “You shouldn’t really have a job,” one mother told her offspring, “you’d be taking a job from a man.”
The outrageous workplace sexism which crops up throughout Jobs for the Girls would be jaw-dropping to the MeToo generation, but was looked upon as something you simply had to put up with. Helen, who was sexually assaulted by one of her law firm’s clients, says, “It would never have occurred to me to report it. The recrimination would most likely have been for me, not him.”
Thank goodness that no longer applies today, although Maxtone Graham is far too subtle and curious a writer to issue some blanket condemnation of previous eras. Guys on the factory floor, she notes, often behaved much more like gentlemen towards their female colleagues than the better-educated male bosses upstairs.
Work was more fun too. Flirting, nursing a crush, loitering in the stairwell, paying compliments, falling in love, doing armed combat with the Gestetner machine, all made for a more enjoyable environment than the screen-based, soulless, politically correct joylessness of today’s office. (No wonder so many now prefer to work from home.)
Readers of Jobs for the Girls will all have their own memories, their own stories to tell. (Please do send me yours, and I will share them.) Its author says wistfully that a lack of self-confidence “seeped into girls”. Like my mother, they assumed they weren’t clever enough, yet too many spent their working lives correcting the grammar and spelling of male bosses who were superior to them only in title.
This book made me appreciate how very lucky I was, being born just after the time when girls were condescended to and viewed as unworthy of higher education. Filling in my application form for Cambridge, I remember my pen hovering over Mother’s Occupation.
How did the word “secretary” do justice to the incredibly capable and devoted woman who had read to me, and sung to me, and somehow let me imbibe the complete Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook, so I qualified, against all odds, to read English at one of the best universities in the world when she didn’t have a chance to stay on at school after 16?
I will be giving Jobs for the Girls to my mum (for nostalgia) and my daughter (as a scarcely believable cautionary tale). And to my son, too, who may one day have a daughter of his own who learns Latin – and not just as something to think about over the washing up.
How poignant and powerful is this secret history as it tells us her story.
Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age, by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Little Brown Book Group)
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