Secret Sparrow

There seems to be no end to the stories to be found in the history of WWI, even though it ended over a century ago. In Secret Sparrow, Jackie French has uncovered a largely forgotten cohort of women Morse code signallers who were recruited after many of the male Post Office employees had been killed early in the fighting. According to French, the service records of these women were destroyed after the war so that the government wouldn't have to pay them pensions, which sadly sounds  all too plausible! However, it seems their status was always ambiguous: they remained Post Office employees, despite wearing uniforms and having to obey Army orders.

Secret Sparrow is the story of Jean McLain, who recounts her wartime experience to young Arjun during a long night when they're stranded by a flash flood (this part of the story takes place in 1978). It's a cracking tale, full of action and peril -- Jean's transport ship is blown up, she is frequently under fire, eventually she's sent right to the front line and endures ten days of terror and excitement during a big forward push. There's even a bit of romance. There are a few moments of contrivance, but I'll forgive them in the service of the story (even 1978 seems a little early to be talking about Bletchley, but what would I know). I'm always up for a wartime tale and Secret Sparrow is a good one.

Promised the Moon

I borrowed Stephanie Nolen's 2002 Promised the Moon from my space race-obsessed younger daughter, and the title is a little misleading. Promised the Moon is the story of a group of American female pilots; but the first woman in space, by a country mile, was a Russian. Were these women 'in the space race' at all? It's arguable, because they didn't really even get close to going into space.

What happened was that the medical officer associated with the space program decided to see if women would be comparable to men in handling the rigours of space travel. This became an issue because NASA at the time needed to save every ounce of weight in the payload, because their first rockets were not that powerful. If a woman astronaut could replace a man, she'd be lighter. It was as simple as that. They tracked down an experienced (but still young) female pilot, and put her through the same tests that the male prospective astronauts had gone through, and she shone. In fact, her endurance and ability to deal with isolation were superior to the men. Plans to test a wider female cohort were put in place, and a dozen other women pilots went through the physical testing.

But then NASA pulled the plug. They didn't need any female astronauts after all; they had plenty of qualified blokes already; their rockets were more powerful now, so the weight factor no longer mattered. The women, who'd had their hopes raised, were cast aside.

Even though they didn't make it into space (except for Wally Funk, who flew on the New Shepard spacecraft in 2021 at the age of 82), these women were remarkable, battling a super-sexist industry to work as pilots. (Even in the 1970s, I don't remember encountering a single female pilot in all my father's years flying in PNG, and I well remember Debbie Wardley's fight to fly for Ansett in 1980.) But if the aviation world was sexist, the space industry was ten times more so. There was just no way that NASA was going to allow any little lady to steal thunder from their big strong brave hyper-masculine jet pilot astronauts. In many ways this is a sad story, but it's also a fascinating.
 

The Six

The Six by Loren Grush is a book I probably wouldn't have picked up if my space-race obsessed daughter hadn't urged it on me, but it was an entertaining and educational read. 'The Six' were the first cohort of female astronauts recruited to NASA. The first generation of fighter pilot astronauts were less than impressed with the idea of women competing for their spots in space flights, and the women faced not only push-back from within NASA's ranks but also a lot of patronising and sexist media attention, which must have been pretty tedious. 

The women were all very different personalities and at different life stages -- some single, some married with kids, some straight and at least one gay. They didn't necessarily have much in common but their shared ambition to go to space (even though the Soviets had beaten them to it). But strong friendships and fellowship did spring up and (spoiler) they were all devastated when one of the first recruits, Judy Reznik, was killed in the terrible Challenger explosion in 1986. Sally Ride, another member of the group and the first to actually go to space, was instrumental in the following investigation. It was a sad note to end an otherwise upbeat story about some amazing women.
 

Fixed It

Ten years ago Jane Gilmore, fed up with the reporting of men's violence against women, came up with a brilliantly simple and effective way of highlighting the defects in headlines. Her project, Fixed It, took off on Twitter and is still going strong, and I'm sure has led to at least some change in the way that reporters and editors choose to describe crimes against women and children. A typical example: POLICE CHARGE YOUNG MALE WITH ILLICIT ATTACK ON YOUNG MOTHER became MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED RAPE OF A WOMAN. As Gilmore points out, softening the crime of attempted rape to 'illicit attack' is misleading at best and at worst reduces serious crimes to the level of 'a schoolyard incident.'

This book is a few years old now but it feels particularly timely with the current spotlight on men's violence. Gilmore's focus is on the way media chooses to report this topic, but this book also gives a useful summary of men's violence against women and other gender issues in sport, politics, pop culture and the legal system. Fixed It shows the power of a simple idea -- that red pen correction of offensive and inaccurate headlines has become iconic. In a way it makes depressing reading because we clearly still have a long way to go, but it's encouraging to note that change is occuring. Although when I hear about the growing influence that misogynists like Andrew Tate have over young men and boys, I do despair. One step forward, two steps back? Let's hope not.
 

Going Gray (sic)

In some ways this is a very trivial issue; yet it's deeply personal, particularly for women, and Anne Kreamer found that whenever she raised it, the subject elicited lively responses and strong opinions. I borrowed Going Gray on a whim and read half of it on the tram on the way home from the city. It's not a demanding read, but it is a surprisingly interesting one.

Grey hair strikes early in my family. My mother was completely grey by her mid-thirties. Combined with my father's unusually youthful looks (which were a curse to him in a macho-dominated industry), people often thought she was her husband's mother. I was also totally grey by forty (quite white now), and my poor teenage daughter is already finding grey hairs. I don't think my mother ever dyed her hair (I must ask her), and while I had streaks which eased me over the transition, I never seriously considered returning to my original mousy-brown colour, though before I went grey I was an enthusiastic home dyer. Part of the reason was laziness, and partly I actually preferred the streaky depth of my going-greys to my boring brown.

Kreamer had been dyeing her hair brunette for years until she had an epiphany after seeing herself in a photo, realising that her helmet of dark hair wasn't really making her look younger. However the period of transition to grey was more difficult and disturbing to her sense of self than she'd expected. Does grey hair really signal over-the-hill, un-sexy, let-herself-go?

It was interesting to read Going Gray (2007) after the pandemic, when many women (including one good friend of mine, who'd been conscientiously blackening her roots for years) took the opportunity of forced seclusion to make a clean break. I'm not sure when the fashion for young women to dye their hair silver took hold, and I'm not sure if it's still a thing, but it definitely was for a while. I feel as if at least some of the stigma around grey hair has faded. But it's easy for me -- I'm not in a job where I'm competing against younger, hotter women (well, not much anyway!), or in a professional environment where greyness might render me invisible. Anne Kreamer certainly looked great after going grey, more confident and comfortable in her skin, and that was unexpectedly borne out in experiments with online dating and employment recruitment. I personally think grey, silver, salt-and-pepper and white hair looks amazing -- as long as it's smartly cut. Straggling greys don't really do it for me, but otherwise I say, bring it on!
 

The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales

The story behind The Second Virago Book of Fairy Tales is a sad one. The first Virago Book of Fairy Tales, edited by Angela Carter, was received with such acclaim that a second volume was commissioned. Tragically, Angela Carter died before this book was finished, though her notes on many of the stories are published here, and she chose each tale for the compilation.

This is an eclectic collection of folk tales, some evidently quite ancient, some so recent they are hardly more than single page jokes. There are stories from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas featured here and almost the only thing they have in common is that they all centre women. There are cunning witches, resourceful maidens, downtrodden and vengeful wives.

I'm not sure if I enjoy fairy tales and myths as much as I think I should. Perhaps it's the distillation of story down to almost pure plot -- characters are barely sketched, and if they have any distinguishing personality traits, they are boiled down to a single adjective: 'clever,' 'kind' or 'jealous.' I'm not sorry to have read this collection but I don't think I'll be hunting down volume 1.
 

There's A Good Girl

 

I had a feeling I'd read Marianne Grabrucker's There's A Good Girl before and parts of it were definitely familiar, but it must have been thirty years ago, and having had two daughters in the interim, it certainly bore a revist. Subtitled Gender Stereotypes in the First Three Years of Life: A Diary, this memoir really covers about two years of Grabrucker's daughter's life, from the time she starts speaking until she starts pre-school and Grabrucker returns to full time work after Anneli turns three.

Although the diary was mostly written in 1983/4, and some observations have dated, it's horrifying to see how many still feel relevant forty years later. Perhaps Anneli's grandmothers might not be so keen to encourage her to play with dolls (or perhaps they would!), and perhaps the mothers of the little boys that Anneli plays with might not stress so hard the need for boys to not cry; and parents of both sexes might be less relaxed about the violence that the little boys mete out on the girls, and might not insist that the children have to 'work out their squabbles for themselves.'

In daily entries, Grabrucker observes and records the hundred little nudges that small children experience, pushing them toward inflexible gender roles: the advertising billboards that show naked women and powerful men; the fathers who fix things around the house; the urge to dress up little girls and tell them how pretty they look; the little boys who get away with snatching toys and how the girls are told to 'hold on more tightly next time.' Even for progressive, feminist German parents in the 1980s, who are convinced that they're bringing up boys and girls the same, and who are well aware of stereotypes, time and again they fall into the trap.

This is a slim book but it packs a punch far more powerful than its size suggests. Well worth reading, or re-reading, even now.

Lessons in Chemistry

 

I'd seen a lot of rave reviews of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, so my expectations were high when I finally seized it from the reservations shelf at the library. Even one of my friends, a bio-medicine academic, told me that she loved it and thought it was all too accurate.

Well, I liked it but I didn't fall in love -- this book's message is far from subtle and it ticks every single box of male discrimination, pig-headedness, harassment and abuse. I take my hat off to Garmus for managing to write a comedy about sexual discrimination (the book is pretty funny) -- no mean feat! But as I read, I found myself wincing at its obviousness in parts. Once I decided to treat it as a fairy tale, I relaxed and enjoyed it much more. It also seemed to be inspired somewhat by the story of Julia Child, as our heroine ends up hosting an improbably successful cooking show in the early days of television. There were some wildly unlikely plot turns, some people adore the character of the super-intelligent dog, and I must admit I did enjoy the idea of a TV cook becoming a feminist inspiration and a huge success because she takes women's intelligence seriously.

I think I'll give it three stars out of five -- maybe the sciencey flavour of the story just didn't push my buttons!

The Gaps

 

Reading Leanne Hall's superb young adult novel, The Gaps, was a multi-layered experience for me. Set in a girls' private school, Balmoral, The Gaps explores the effect of the abduction of one of the students, Yin Marshall, on two of her classmates, popular Natalia (who used to be Yin's best friend) and newcomer Chloe.

The Gaps is sensitive and nuanced, tracing the ripples of Yin's abduction on the school community, the survivor guilt, the pain of uncertainty, the prurient horror, and the trauma of loss. Hall is especially good at sketching in the wider social background through which these teenage girls move -- the white noise of stranger danger, unsolicited male attention, body policing, social media pressure, advertising. Chloe and Natalia are two very different characters but their responses to Yin's disappearance are truthful and powerful. 

The extra layers for me came from the fact that Leanne Hall and I went to the same school (a few years apart), and the geography of 'Balmoral' was intimately familiar to me -- the quadrangle, the walkways, the bathrooms near the science labs, the Great Hall. (In fact, my house was called Balmoral...) And our school did experience a tragic abduction some years after my time. Even though I'd left the school and didn't know anyone involved, I did feel a particular stab of horror and protectiveness around that event  just because we'd worn the same school uniform. 

Maybe that awareness gave The Gaps an added depth for me, but even without that shared background, this is a very accomplished, layered and heartfelt novel, perfectly pitched and perfectly timed. Highly recommended.

Stravinsky's Lunch

I have read Drusilla's Modjeska's Stravinsky's Lunch before, but not for many years. I wrote above (below, actually!) about the anecdote which sparked her thinking around this subject, at a dinner with Helen Garner and other friends, mostly writers. Stravinsky's Lunch is a biography of two Australian women artists, but it is also a mediation on the clashes between the demands of any creative practice, love, family and the world that women artists experience particularly acutely. (Rachel Power's The Divided Heart is another excellent book on this topic.)

Naturally this is a subject close to my own heart, as I try daily to juggle writing with the multiple needs of family, domestic responsibilities and self-care. The two artists Modjeska writes about, Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington Smith, took very different approaches to the compromises and conflicts they both endured for their art. Bowen left Australia to pursue her artistic studies, but ended up sacrificing her own work for many years after falling in love with the much older writer, Ford Madox Ford, who was supportive of her work (up to a point) but took it for granted that his writing should come first, barely conscious that a quiet house, regular food, and the pleasures of domestic comfort (including children) require work by someone (not him). Eventually they separated and she enjoyed late success as a war artist, but she died relatively young and under-appreciated.

Grace Cossington Smith never married, and in fact, never left her parents' home. Her middle class family supported her financially through the ups and down of artistic recognition, though again she didn't receive the accolades she deserved until late in her long life. Cossington Smith doggedly followed her instincts, painting mostly in isolation and suffering the derision of male critics, and eventually amassed an incredible body of work. But again, her independence was bought at a cost -- in this case, her sister Madge, who kept house and cared for their ageing parents, and then for Grace herself. Modjeska is careful to acknowledge Madge's presence and sacrifice which made Grace's achievements possible.

Annabel Crabb's The Wife Drought makes the same point -- any individual who wants to combine a demanding career (in any field) and a fulfilling personal life (family, children, love) needs a WIFE to do the endless, tedious, draining, time-devouring work behind the scenes. Or a Madge, or a faithful servant, or a partner who is willing to sacrifice a bit of their own time or success or leisure to share the load. Only some us are lucky enough to score one of those.

Dumplin'

Julie Murphy's 2015 bestseller Dumplin' was the YA selection for the Convent book group this month, with the theme of Body Positivity. By a fortunate coincidence, the movie of Dumplin' is also currently available on Netflix, so I was able to gulp them both down together this weekend.

I can see why Dumplin' has been such a huge hit. Willowdean Dickson is an appealing heroine, both bold and insecure, as she says herself, unashamed of her big body but at the same time beset by images of skinny 'perfection', particularly from her mother, who runs the annual small-town beauty pageant. With Dolly Parton as her inspiration, Will's own doubts are her biggest enemy as she tries to sort out her first boyfriend relationship, and untangle her first serious row with her best friend. Oh, and did I mention, in a moment of madness, she has actually entered the beauty pageant?

I loved the gang of 'misfit' girls who also claim their space in the pageant, and become new friends for Will. I loved sweet Bo, who fancies Will just the way she is, and poor Mitch, who also fancies Will but whom she doesn't fancy back. Overhanging the book is the memory of Will's aunt Lucy, who allowed her weight to dictate how she lived her life (interestingly, this is not the image of Lucy we see in the film version, and poor Mitch also hits the cutting-room floor, as the film focuses much more intently on the pageant and the friendships between the girls, rather than the romance angle. A good decision, I think.)

I must admit, I spent most of my time reading with my phone in my hand, checking out cultural references that mystified me. Dumplin' is set in Texas and it might as well be Timbuktu as far as I'm concerned. Chicken-fried steak? Trunk-or-treat? The whole bewildering pageant scene? Sadie Hawkins? 'Steamer' I eventually figured out was for clothes, not food (maybe the whole dumpling vibe threw me off there). The fact that all these sixteen year old kids, none of them well off, own their own cars? Ambrosia?? Homecoming mums? Not mothers returning home, I can tell you that much, but I'm still not 100% sure exactly what they are. Something to do with chrysanthemums? I think.

The New Doctor

For literally my entire lifetime (longer actually), the part of the Doctor in Doctor Who has been played by a man. To be honest, I was quite happy with that arrangement, particularly when the man was Peter Davison or David Tennant. At first I was resistant to the idea of the Doctor being played by a woman. Dare I say, some aspects of the Doctor's character seemed inherently male -- the self-righteousness, the messiah complex, the evident need for emotional companionship while simultaneously denying that need, the inability to say I love you...

But hey, it's 2017, and I'm learning to move past these gender stereotypes. But I still wasn't sure about the Doctor becoming female. Gradually the show began to hint that such a thing was not just possible, but inevitable -- a line of dialogue here and there, the regeneration of the Master into Missy. I won't say I warmed to the idea, but I was prepared for it.

But as soon as the announcement was made that the luminous Jodie Whittaker was to take the role, I was in. She's wonderful, amazing, an incredible actor. She was fabulous in Broadchurch, and I can't wait to see what she'll bring to the Doctor. Yes, it's a big shake-up, but this is Doctor Who! It's always been about challenging expectations, expanding horizons, questioning assumptions. That's the whole point of the show!

She's here, and I can't believe I ever doubted her.

Fight Like A Girl

Clementine Ford is a welcome, in-your-face presence in mainstream media through her Daily Life articles and her lively Facebook and Twitter activity. Now Fight Like A Girl has collected her thoughts and observations on a variety of feminist issues in one volume. She's angry, and so she should be, and so should we all: at sexual violence, inequality, the silencing of women's stories, at the routine abuse of women, like Ford herself, who dare to speak up and speak out.

Ford quotes some of the obscene comments that her opinions have attracted. At first it's shocking, disgusting; you can't quite believe that there are men in the world who actually think this way and feel justified in saying it openly (albeit anonymously, behind the shield of a keyboard). But after a while, it becomes absurd and laughable. Come on, guys! Seriously? I agree with Ford that ridicule can be a powerful weapon, as effective as the Ridikulus charm against a Boggart.

Clementine Ford is unapologetically, entertainingly ranty, and the energy of her anger and her humour is bracing. At times I found myself wanting some slightly deeper analysis, and perhaps a clearer pathway for change. This is not academic feminism as I encountered it at university, and it's all the more accessible for that. I'll be lending this book to my fifteen year old daughter; it's a good place to start, but it's only the first step on the journey.