A Smart Suit and White Gloves

This recent publication from Girls Gone By was a Christmas present to myself. Kay Whalley has put together a brilliant, funny and fascinating survey of career books for girls, mostly from the three decades after World War II, when job opportunities were opening up for women -- but not too far!

Teaching, nursing and secretarial jobs were the most popular options (though it's quite difficult to make secretarial jobs sound dramatically interesting), but these books were always careful to show that, whichever career path a girl chose, there would be plenty of eligible young men around, and it was taken for granted that the 'career' might occupy a few years after school or university, it would almost certainly come to an abrupt end after marriage. Home-making and child-rearing was assumed to be a woman's real life's work; a girl might train to be a nurse, but there was no point trying to be a doctor like her brother might.

There are excursions into more obscure areas, like floristry, television production (a new field) or even electronics, and some of these books really strike a blow for female independence. However, Whalley often fumes at the inherent sexism of some authors. She makes it clear how valuable these books are as social documents, providing details of everyday life and expectations that retrospective history books might miss. Whalley's plot summaries made me laugh out loud; we can usually tell who the heroine's future husband will be because he has a strong jaw and picks up her dropped books in a corridor. Fathers usually don't approve of spending money on training or educating their daughters; mothers might be more quietly supportive.

I can see myself collecting some of these titles for myself. A Smart Suit and White Gloves might have been a dangerous purchase!