Joining the Dots: A Woman In Her Time
“A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffle coat stood shivering in the vaulted Victorian booking hall of Temple Meads station in Bristol looking uncertainly around her. It was 1st January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and I had run away from home.”Over the next ten years, the world changed around young Juliet Gardiner – as it did for most women in Britain. It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous for Britain’s history – politically, economically, socially and culturally.As one of Britain’s best-known social historians, Juliet Gardiner writes here about the span of women’s lives from her birth during the Second World War to the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Using episodes from her own life as starting points to illuminate the broader history in society at large, she explores changing ideas towards birth and adoption, the importance of education for girls, The opportunities offered by university, to expectations of work and motherhood, not to mention her generation’s yearning for freedom.Everyone has his or her history and at the same time is part of history as this book so perceptively and beautifully demonstrates. As a work of living history, both lyrical and personal, Joining the Dots is an accessible and empowering story of how one mid-twentieth-century woman grew into a world so different from the one into which she was born. It is a story of bed-sits, sexual choice, motherhood and marriage, feminism, family planning and professional ambition.
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William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2017
Copyright © Juliet Gardiner 2017
Cover photograph by Dave Taylor
Cover design by Jack Smyth
Extract from ‘Having a Baby’ from Collected Poems by Allan Ahlberg (Puffin, 2008). Copyright © Allan Ahlberg, 2008. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Random House UK.
‘Diana’ Words and Music by Paul Anka © 1957, reproduced by permission from Pamco Music Inc/EMI Music Publishing Ltd, London W1F 9LD.
Juliet Gardiner asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780007489190
Ebook Edition © August 2017 ISBN: 9780007489183
Version: 2018-05-17
For Rudi and Sammy
Contents
A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffel coat and bottle-green stockings stood shivering in the vaulted booking hall of Bristol Temple Meads station looking uncertainly around her. It was 1 January 1960 and the woman was me. I was sixteen years old, and, using the money I had earned from delivering letters for the Post Office during the holidays (£8 5s.) and writing ‘amusing’ anecdotes to the letters page of Woman’s Realm, plus a Christmas present of a £2 postal order, I had run away from home.
It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous in changing Britain’s history, politically, economically, socially and culturally. Although of course I could not have foreseen that, nevertheless it seemed a suitably significant date on which to start a new life; to leave behind the pebble-dashed house in the home counties, turn my back on the minor girls’ public school and be a grown-up at last: independent, poised to achieve the freedom for which I had yearned for so long.
It was not, predictably, that simple. Progress over the next few years would be bumpy, interrupted, contradictory, frustrating. Dependencies transferred rather than jettisoned. But the world changed around me, as it did for most women in Britain – and that is the story I want to tell. It is not only or entirely my story; not a straightforward chronological account of women’s history, nor a history, disquisition, celebration or critique of feminism. Rather it is a series of reflections or meditations on some of the expectations and experiences that I, like many other women in Britain, had, or could have had, during the middle years of the twentieth century.
I am a historian, and I was there, and that is what this book is about. It has no claims to be comprehensive: some important aspects of the period will be left out, or touched on only briefly; others might seem peripheral or wilfully quirky, but to me they are emblematic of various aspects of women’s lives and the perception of these lives both by the women themselves and by society more generally – the education they received, the work they did; the frustrations they felt, cheek by jowl with the knowledge of widening horizons, the legislative, economic, social and intimate transformations of their lives.
It is essentially my story, the optic is mine, but to put it pretentiously, on many occasions my life could hardly fail to grind up against the arc of history, and when it did, I hope recounting that conjunction will ring true.
Chapter One
Although this new era started in 1960, my life began on 24 June 1943, just before the end of the Second World War.
I was a war baby born on Midsummer’s Day. The previous week the RAF had mounted a major bombing raid on Düsseldorf, part of the sustained Allied attack on the Ruhr, Germany’s industrial heartland. Nevertheless, the end of the war in Europe was still almost two years distant, though the tide had begun to turn. At El Alamein, Montgomery’s Eighth Army had secured Britain’s first military victory, defeating Rommel’s Afrika Korps in November 1942. The surrender of all German troops in North Africa followed in May 1943. Alamein had led Churchill, desperate for a morale-raising British success, to venture, ‘This is not the end, it is not the beginning of the end, it is, perhaps the end of the beginning.’ His optimism seemed justified. By the summer of 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic was at last going the Allied way as well, with the ‘killer packs’ of German U-boats succeeding in sinking fewer Allied ships.
