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Reading A Woman’s Place two things struck me almost from the start. First was the thought that this should be required reading for anyone new to Persephone Books.  Perhaps it should even be Persephone Book No: 0. A Woman’s Place provides the contextual, historical, social background to so many of the novels.  With a light and, largely, uncomplaining touch, Ruth Adam describes the changing patterns of women lives between 1910 and 1975, patterns determined for the most part by the forces of history, to which Persephone heroines must bend, or, at their peril, resist.

 

The second thought was that we are witnessing now, in the second decade of the twenty first century, yet another set-back in the slow progress towards sexual equality in the work place. And could those who fought for women to be given the vote possibly have imagined how slow it would be? For in late 2011 women are once more  among the early victims of an economic downturn. Rising unemployment, cuts to benefits and childcare services combine again as they did in the last century to drive women back into the home. No wonder then that this month (November 2011) the Fawcett Society is urging women to take to the streets in rubber gloves and full-skirted frocks to stage 1950s tea parties. Some will be wearing handcuffs with which to chain themselves to a kitchen sink. If Ruth Adam were to see us now she might smile wryly and comment ‘plus ça change’.

 

Until the First World War, a woman’s place, was in the home, not her own home, but that of her father, brother, husband, or (in the case of domestic servants, nurses or teachers) that of her employer. Women’s pay, and fewer than a quarter worked, did not stretch to rent.  When they waved off their men in 1914, they expected them back by Christmas.  But by the summer of 1915, with more and more men needed at the Front, it had become clear that women’s war effort was going to far exceed keeping the home fires burning.

 

 

They were urgently needed in factories and on farms, in offices, and on buses and trams, in hospitals, and, behind the lines, in France. Yet it would be another three years before any of them won the vote, thirteen for those who were under 30 and neither householders nor the wives of householders and then it would radically alter their lives. ‘A similar quick change of character’, writes Adam, ‘has been demanded of them every ten years or so of this century. Men are not required to be flexible in the same way.’

 

It is this buffeting to which women have been subjected that makes A Woman’s Place so moving, even painful to read.  In 1914 women did what was asked of them.  For four years they did the work of men.  Some were even paid the same as men. Equality seemed to be a possibility. But their expectations would be dashed, the promise of equal pay never materialised and rapid demobilisation at the end of the war put hundreds of thousands of women out of work. The wartime jobs vanished, and the returning soldiers reclaimed most of the others, and, if they were married, they wanted their wives back at home. Many single working class women returned to their pre-war positions: in domestic service, reluctantly and in smaller numbers; on the land, where they found their status improved thanks to the war-time work of the Land Girls; in factories, where thanks to the efforts of the munitions workers, conditions were better. Some improvement. Two steps forward and one back: they had hoped for so much more.

 

 

 

Some middle-class and professional women managed to hang on to their jobs, albeit at a lower salary than their male counterparts: in commerce, administration, shorthand-typing, and most especially nursing and teaching. Not well paid, these women were, nevertheless able to live independently. A new way of living was emerging. The number of unmarried, never to be married, women, already worryingly high before the war, had soared. Willingly or not, many women began to see careers as being for life, no longer a stop-gap between school and marriage. Events and the new economics of work had consigned the ‘old maid’ to history, and a card game.

 

In many ways, though far from heralding full equality, and certainly not for women of all classes, the 1920s was something of a golden age. The Bright Young Things may have had the best of it, but all women benefited from the changing fashions: shorter skirts, shorter hair, simpler hats, or none. ‘The new clothes made being fashionable a joyful experience, in a way it never had been before and never was again.’

 

 

 

 

A woman’s place is mirrored in her wardrobe, suggests Ruth Adam. The fashions didn’t last and nor did the brief upturn in women’s fortunes. The legislation clock could not be turned back: women had the vote, they could no longer be excluded from the professions (which did not mean that they were to be included in large numbers), divorce was a little easier and a little fairer.  But the clock could be stopped. The Depression brought with it renewed hostility against women in work.  They were to be put back in their boxes until they were needed again.  Another decade, another change of role, another set of clothes – longer skirts, fuller sleeves, platform shoes, and permed hair (think of Freda in They Knew Mr Knight).  A woman must be alluring. The magazines which had trumpeted freedom from domestic drudgery began to glorify it. Unmarried women were to find work where they could; the upside of unequal pay was that employers too them on as cheaper labour in the place of men.  The married woman’s place was in the home.

 

It would take another war to release them once more. Now the fashionable woman was wearing khaki (Vera in Saplings), or factory overalls. Like the First World War, the Second altered the lives of women in ways that could not be reversed. The Education Act, providing free schooling, and university grants for all brought an end to the cruel dilemma of parents agonising over the value of paying to educate a daughter who might give up a career for marriage. Had she chosen nursing, or teaching, or the civil service, she would until the late 1940s have in fact been compelled to do so. Thanks to Beveridge, Family Allowance would be paid directly to mothers, and their health and that of their children cared for under a National Health Service. Pre-natal homes, instituted to provide a safe environment away from bomb-threatened cities (Tell It to a Stranger) raised standards of maternal and infant care.  Lessons learned as a result of the social mix enforced by the evacuation of the mothers and children (The Wartime Stories of Molly Panter Downes), for good or ill, would not be forgotten.

The aftermath of the Second World War like that of the First, brought with it a new period of underemployment for women – 2 million left their jobs – and a new look, the New Look.  Tight-waisted, full skirted, calf-length dresses, were as far removed as could be from the austere utility clothes.  Back in the home the woman was ‘all woman’ once more. In 1947 only 18% of women were in full employment. Live in staff were rare, live in British staff rarer still. No young working-class girl would choose domestic service – the wives in Penelope Mortimer’s Daddy’s Gone a’Hunting worry about their foreign cooks. For the first time middle-class and educated women were caring not only for their own houses, but for their own children.  And that too was subject to fashion, dictated, until the 1970s largely by men, Truby-King, Bowlby, Spock.

By the time she died in 1977, Ruth Adam had witnessed some quite remarkable changes in women’s lives, the most radical either resulting from, or being hastened by, two world wars and a major economic crisis. She saw skirts go up again in the sexually liberated sixties, down again in the seventies when the ethnic look expressed the earth mother side of even the highest academic achievers. She saw the number of women in work rise rapidly to well over 50% and she saw their average pay climb slowly to a little over 55% of that of the average man.

 

A Woman’s Place is clear and richly informative and sharp it illuminates not only the past but our own lives.  The last thirty years have not been as marked by the fits and starts that characterised the previous seventy.  We have been spared the seismic changes of two world wars and a depression.  Nearly 70% of mothers work, only slightly fewer than those with no dependents. But the disparity in average pay for men and women has not disappeared. There are fewer women in parliament than under the last government. Women were admitted to legal training in 1919. In 2011twelve judges sit in the Supreme Court: one is a woman.  Where are we now? Where do we want to be? And what do the fashionistas say we should be wearing in 2011?  Long skirts and teeteringly high heels ….  Still we don’t have to follow them.  That’s progress, of a sort.

 

 

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

 

My favourite has to be the one chosen for the flyleaf of A Woman’s Place, the closing paragraphs:

‘This demand for women to change their colour, like chameleons, to fit the background of their period was one of the penalties of the speed at which their emancipation had been accomplished. Major changes in their state had taken place within the span of each generation, so that every twentieth-century mother, in turn was amazed at the difference between her daughter’s life and her own.

‘A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ‘feminine’ and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse; three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.’

 

… and questions

 

so many and yet they all come down to two:

What do women want?

Can they have it?

 

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

 

Every other Persephone Book in the list.

 

 

What other bloggers have said about this book:

There are some absolutely fascinating tidbits in this book, stuff I never knew. Because the book was originally published in the 1970s, it tends to be a bit feminist at times, but I thought for the most part that this was a very smart book, not preachy or pedantic. Sometimes her tone is sarcastic and dry, but never bitter. I enjoyed what Ruth Adam had to say about superfluous women spinsters like me and widows who really didn’t have much of a place in early 20^thcentury England. It’s interesting to see how things have changed, or not, in the hundred years since! agirlwalksintoabookstore

for more blogs on this and other Persephone Books go to the link on the home page.-

 

Half way through They Knew Mr Knight Dorothy Whipple offers a description of what constitutes , to borrow Winnicot’s term, a ‘good enough’ family. ‘The growing children were dependent on their parents; their parents were bound to each other by affection and interests which were perhaps made mutual by lack of money.  Thomas could not afford a car, a club or golf; he therefore spent his spare time with his family. It is 1928 and for almost a decade, ‘the Blakes had been, like a happy country without history.  They had lived in the Grove, holding together’.

 

 

 

The easy mutuality of the couple’s life finds outward expression in their garden:   ‘… Thomas liked to cut down, root out, dig and mend fences, while Celia liked to plan, plan, tend, tie up and tidy.’  A family excursion into the countryside was bliss, then Celia ‘walked in contentment. They were all together, all well all happy’. But there is a shadow over this little Garden of Eden in the Midlands, which will break up the family.

The fine fault lines are evident from the start.  Thomas takes a warm pride in providing for his wife, Celia, and children, Freda, Douglas and Ruth, but providing for his extended family, his mother, sisters and feckless brother Edward is burdensome, and stretches his patience and finances to the limit. He dreams of retaking control of the family engineering business, lost by his father through incompetence, possibly compounded by a weakness for drink, but the harsh reality is that even his subordinate position there is not secure. Meanwhile, good as she is at ‘dusting, carrying shopping baskets, keeping accounts, sewing, soothing, smoothing for her family’, Celia nurses another self, not walled in by the preoccupations of house, husband and children, the self that, in another life, might have waved a Suffragette banner or written a novel, the self that might have made a home fit for the elegant furniture from her childhood. She admits to herself that loving Thomas and the children is ‘almost enough’, almost, but not quite.   Seventeen year old Freda yearns to float free of her modest middle class family. There is little focus to her ambition other than to have her hair permanently waved and live out her fantasy of a life of luxury and glamour, and to avoid, at all costs, becoming a teacher.

 

Douglas, a budding scientist, and Ruth, the nascent novelist, observant and amused by life, are well-grounded survivors, whose plans for the future are in tune with their talents. It is the dreamers, Thomas and Celia, who are the most vulnerable, the most susceptible to the dangerous charm of Mr Knight, the larger than life financier, whose chance entry into the life of the Blake family will first raise them up beyond their wildest fantasies, then dash them down, and come close to destroying them.

In her Afterword, Terence Handley MacMath likens Mr Knight to Satan; in the current Persephone Biannually (Autumn-Winter 2011-2012), Adèle Geras states unequivocally that ‘Mr Knight is in fact the Devil’. Someone once described to me how it felt to be in a room with a well-known fraudster, who must remain nameless. ‘It was’, he said ‘like being in the presence of pure evil’.  And, against the fiery background of the iron furnace, Laurence Knight appears to Thomas, in his dream, as the devil.  But the dream fades, fear gives way to amusement and Thomas begins to look for a way to capitalise on his fortuitous encounter. With his millions, Knight is not the devil, but the answer to prayer.  The Blake fortunes are about to be changed. Like countless others Thomas falls for the Devil’s charm.

 

 

 

 

Murdle, Melmotte, Hatry, Madoff,and more,  literature and life provide no shortage of examples of seductive swindlers, and Knight can charm.  Even Celia is not immune to this at first, admitting as she dances with him, that his face though ‘coarse and strong was not without attraction’.  Only later when she has watched him stand by, amused, as her son Douglas has his heart broken, does she see him in his true colours, ‘he’s a gross, sensual grabber. I think he’s revolting.’

 

Thomas dismisses Celia’s opinion. ‘Celia judged Knight by womanish standards, a man judged a man differently’. Knight makes Thomas feel special.  He gives him back his self esteem.  Above all, he takes him back into the world of men, a world of cigars, and clubs, and golf, and money.  Family outings and weekend gardening together become things of the past. The schism is marked, when the Blakes make their first significant move up the housing ladder, to the ironically named ‘Fairholme’, by the acquisition of fashionable twin beds  condemned incidentally by Marie Stopes as the invention of the devil’.

 

 

Celia must make her life among the women.  As Thomas is able to provide more and more for his family so Celia’s role is reduced.  One by one the domestic tasks that gave meaning to her life are taken over by a growing body of servants, and the family scatters: thanks to Mr Knight Douglas can go away to boarding school, and Ruth to a pensionnat, while Freda provides company for Mrs Knight, lonely, bored, and, thanks to the little trays that punctuate her days and provide her principal comfort, overweight. When her modest kitchen was her own, Celia could offer warmth and a hot drink to visiting tradesman, and food to the needy; but the kitchen at Fairholme is Cook’s domain, and she must pursue another form of charity, so ‘she sat on committees and undertook to sell tickets for innumerable affairs.’  As Thomas was emasculated by the loss of the family business, so the family’s newly acquired wealth diminishes Celia’s role.  She falls ‘into the prosperous woman’s habit of “passing the time”‘. Only her garden keeps her in touch with her self.

If any woman is to be envied, it is Carrie, the barmaid.  Making her own living she can shape her own life, and in the process make a man of Thomas’s brother Edward.  She is capable and kind, and generously unforgiving of her snobbish in-laws.  In all the change and collapse and ultimate, partial, regeneration of the family, if not its fortunes, Carrie is the one whose path, thanks to commitment, hard work and love, moves steadily upwards.  As Knight is evil, so Carrie is good.

They Knew Mr Knight is a strongly moral, even Christian novel. When, at the end, Celia rejoices that her life, which has been so disturbed, is suddenly sorted out, and things ‘put into their right proportion’, it is God she thanks.

The religious message is perhaps, like the clear social and sexual demarcations, of its period, but the moral tale of the consequences of need, greed and the chance encounter is the stuff of folk tales, told by Dorothy Whipple with a light touch and sharp humour, aphoristic wit, and an eye at times almost cinematographic.

While charting its break-up, Dorothy Whipple paints a rivetingly complete picture of a1930s household: the houses, the servants (even a modest semi had a live-in maid), the gardens, the food, the clothes, down to the undergarments that Freda sews for herself from the best crèpe-de-chine, a lost world where a second subscription at Boots’ lending library is a privilege of the rich.

 

Quotes ….. do share your favourites

 

‘She missed the simple, busy life she had lived in the Grove. She missed her kitchen and her cooking, and she was cut off from the back door, which opened, it had always seemed to her, on another aspect of life altogether. She could no longer comfort the coal man with a hot drink on a cold day, or advise the window-cleaner about the placing of his children at work, or ask the vegetable woman in to get warm or rest a little.’

‘“Oh, these beautiful girls!’ she thought. ‘Why do they come into young men’s lives? They only go out again and the young men are spoiled for what’s left. The ordinary is what most of us have to put up with.  Poor women, we can’t all be beautiful, any more than all men can be beautiful.  Women put up with all sorts of men, but men run after beauty.”’

 

‘Poor mothers they are pretty helpless.  They dose the stomach for the heart and try to staunch the wounds of love with decoctions of egg.’

 

‘Mrs Knight did not move easily; her corsets would not let her. The physical endurance of stout, restricted women is not sufficiently realised or admired.’

 

… gradually Mr Knight had undermined Thomas’s fundamental honesty by persuading him, casually, that the dishonesties

 

 

… and questions

 

Blogger ‘greenroadbook’ (see below) suggests that with more financial acumen Celia might have been able to warn Thomas against further entanglement in Knight’s schemes. But was it in her character to advise? At what point might she have intervened? Would he have listened?

Blogger  ‘danitorres’ considers the characters to be well-defined. ‘greenroadbooks’ would disagree in the case of Mr Knight. My feeling is that such men, even in the flesh, do not seem quite real. Any thoughts?

If you have enjoyed this book, you might also enjoy:

 

Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 3)

The Priory  by Dorothy Whipple (Persephone Book No 40)

The New House by Lettice Cooper (Persephone Book No 47)

Princes in the Land  by Joanna Cannan (Persephone Book No 63)

What other bloggers have said about this book:

Dorothy Whipple once again turns a shrewd eye on the foibles and shortcomings of her characters and once again they fall from grace, learn from their mistakes and find a sense of redemption by story’s end (well, some of them anyway–the ones you care most about).Her cast of characters are always well defined and developed no matter what mistakes they may make. With every new Whipple novel I read I seem to find a new favorite, so compulsively readable are her stories.  They are never mere entertainments, though entertaining they are, but show a surprising depth and weight. danitorres

The characters are all brilliantly drawn. With the exception of Mr Knight, there is no obviously good or evil character, everyone has their moments. Even Freda, the eldest daughter, comes across as flawed rather than unpleasant. I felt terribly sorry for her when she rushes into a less-than-satisfactory marriage. Whipple makes it clear that one of the reasons of the tragedy is Celia’s detachment from the outside world. She knows nothing of finance or office, “a man’s world”. Hence she can neither warn Thomas, nor realise when he’s falling in over his head. Nor can she financially support the family when their new world comes crashing around them. This is a lesson on why female empowerment is so important. greenroadbooks

 

for more blogs on this and other Persephone Books go to the link on the home page.