Liberté, Égalité, Maternity

Glasgow Women's Library celebrates 'tips for girls'.

Throughout spring, Glasgow Women's Library are running a series of events around the theme of 'Tips For Girls', one of which I took part in on the 3rd of March.

I'd never been to Glasgow Women's Library before so I was really excited to see it and have a look at the collection. I did have a browse and saw lots of favourite titles on the shelves but in the end what really caught my eye was the collection of annuals and handbooks for women which the library had put together for the Tips for Girls season. The annuals included Jackie and Patches and there were lots of ones I remember from childhood, such as Judy. (Not that I was a Judy reader - I preferred Bunty!)

The handbooks for women all dated back to at least the 1950s and included tips on the right corset to wear in order to achieve a wasp waist.

Being a model 1950s housewife sounded exhausting (to the point of breathlessness) but on returning home from the event I dug out a book I had inherited from my grandmother and found things must have been even tougher in the 1930s and 40s.

The Motherhood Book is a tome about three inches thick and contains chapters instructing "mother" how to:

• prepare the nursery; 
• push the perambulator;
• make toys;
• take the children through their daily exercise regime;
• prepare every meal of the day (n.b. a special pudding for Daddy is essential at dinner). 

The section that most intrigued me, however, was the one on clothes. Everything had to be hand sewn or knitted. There is a pattern for "baby's woollen drawers".

With all this to attend to you'd think there wouldn't be much time for beauty tips but, no, you'd be wrong. Apart from knitting woolly drawers, making toys, brushing and combing pillows and watching your child do kangaroo hops, it is important to "restore the figure" through a disciplined exercise regime and to attend to the enemies of one's youthful looks. "Tired feet give a worn look to the face sooner than anything and a woman's age has often been told by her walk alone," say the authors. The antidote is to have plenty of foot baths, change your stockings twice a day and air your shoes at regular intervals. You are also advised to eat a good meal of mutton, green vegetables and plainly cooked potatoes followed by cooked fruit and custard in the middle of the day. In the afternoon, when baby is sleeping (ha!) you should slip off your frock and lie down under the eiderdown but only after tying a little pad of cotton-wool, dipped in boracic lotion, loosely over each eye.

Feeling tired yet? I haven't even scraped the surface of the routine this book recommends in order to be the model woman with child. I suspect if nothing else, doing all this would be a good aid to overcoming sleep deprivation - something which could only have been exacerbated by the fact that Mummy seems to have been expected to do everything and Daddy's only contribution was to eat his specially made chocolate pudding.

Anyway, this is a circuitous route to the matter in hand - Tips For Girls at the Glasgow Women's Library. The event was chaired by the library's Wendy Kirk and beside me on the panel was Emily Munro, Outreach Officer for the National Library of Scotland's Moving Film Archive. Emily screened a series of clips showing how women had been represented on film over the past 50 years or so. There was a delightful programme on how to dress, in which a plummy-voiced gentleman advised women on what would work to their best advantage if they were unfortunate enough to be plump and short. There was also footage of a beauty contest in Dunbar. Yes, swimsuits, high heels and sashes by the Forth, and not a goose pimple in sight. We also saw clips advising the 1970s teenager on how to talk to her parents about boys  and a public information film from the same era warning about the perils of drink by showing girls reacting badly to their boyfriends falling over at a school disco.

It all seemed to suggest more innocent times in which men knew best and women and girls had little on their minds but men and dressing (or undressing) to please them. The advice from (the fictional) Misty magazine (gamely read out by Wendy) went well with the clips and we had a good discussion about the ways in which things had, and hadn't, changed for women since the demise of the Jackie era. The conclusion? Probably that the medium has changed (the internet largely replacing magazines as the place girls turn to for advice) but that the message hasn't - much.

The middle-class woman might be liberated from having to look beautiful while knitting woolly drawers, preparing three meals a day, disinfecting the nursery and running the linen through the mangle but she now has to look beautiful while doing the present day equivalent of these things (buying pants from Marks and Spencer rather than knitting them would be one example) while holding down a full-time job. Or so the media (still) tells us!