Abstract
When Sheila Grant Duff, an Oxford graduate, applied to be a journalist at The Times in 1934, she was rejected by the editor, Geoffrey Dawson, on the grounds that “the conditions of work in this office are such as to make it awkward to accept women as foreign sub-editors, which we regard as an essential part of the training of young foreign correspondents”. But he asked her, if she was going to the continent, to send some “fashion notes” instead.
Grant Duff, 21, was fortunate to have a small private income so she could go to Paris independently. Working as a freelance, she travelled to the disputed Saar region on the Franco-German border, where she reported on the 1935 plebiscite for The Observer. She stayed on long after the other correspondents and described the situation there for the Manchester Guardian, warning the British public of Nazi brutality. Grant Duff was, by her own admission, an activist who wanted to “contribute something to prevent war”. And to that end she was fearless. Sarah Lonsdale, a senior lecturer in journalism at City University, describes this as “a new kind of female courage that went beyond correct behaviours”.
Much of Lonsdale’s fascinating book, rich in period detail, is about redefining female action to break with convention. By focusing on 13 so-called ordinary women (eschewing better-known names such as Virginia Woolf or Marie Stopes), she shows how these “transgressors” chipped away at patriarchal power and false barriers to make inroads into a variety of careers, from engineering to humanitarian activism and mountaineering. What they all had in common was writing: whether this was keeping diaries or writing private letters and poems, or writing articles for newspapers and periodicals, writing was for all the women not simply a way of articulating their experiences, it was axiomatic to creating a public version of themselves.
Writing was also, for many women of the period, a means of escape from living at home. Claudia Parsons, a young engineering student at Loughborough, was prompted to write a personal article for The Woman Engineer magazine because she worried its serious tone might put off other young women from entering such a male-dominated profession and discovering the pleasures of following one’s dream. But while writing for a newspaper was, in most cases, grudgingly accepted as an acceptable career, women who strayed into political comment writing or literature found it harder to be accepted.
Lonsdale’s chapter on Dorothy Pilley is especially riveting as it focuses on Pilley’s determination not only to climb mountains and propel herself to the extremes of physical strength then considered possible for a woman, but to do so without a man. “Manless climbing” was described by the pre-eminent climbing journal of the 20s, The Alpine Club Journal, as both foolish and insane. Or, according to Lonsdale, subversive. Yet Pilley and two friends launched the Pinnacle Club Journal, a “little” magazine for women climbers, specifically so that she could write about her experiences in the wild. She edited it for 20 years. Pilley not only had to tackle the extraordinary notion that the outdoors was a masculine public space, but also had to decide if she could be true to her own ambitions if she married the man who was pursuing her and to whom she was devoted. Fearing that marriage would mean “housework and 20 children”, she initially turned him down, yet eventually agreed after concluding that they could climb together without him overshadowing her.
It was rare for these pioneer women to become mothers and Lonsdale includes just two in this study. One is Alison Settle, editor of Vogue from 1926 to 1935 (whose picture is on the front cover). Settle became a single mother of two when her husband died tragically young and she found juggling home and professional life exhausting. At the end of World War Two, Settle briefly became a war reporter for The Observer and was then appointed editor of their “new page for women”.
Apart from determination and resourcefulness, one factor that many of the women had in common was that they were driven by the loss of a father, whether through death or abandonment. Edith Shackleton, who in 1923 became the first female parliamentary correspondent, was so marked by her father’s desertion of the family that she wrote many articles defending women’s right not to marry and urging young women not to accept the first proposal that came their way. On the other hand, Lonsdale points out that an influential father could be a help, as was the case with the journalist Emilie Peacocke, whose father was editor of the Northern Echo.
There is so much of interest in this book, from revelations of the female support networks that helped some women to occasional female rivalry. It will clearly be a valuable resource for anyone who wants to understand how women who wanted to defy social expectations and lead fulfilling lives in the early part of the 20th century used writing as a weapon.
