11. Feminism, selfhood and social research: professional women’s organizations in 1960s Britain

Helen McCarthy

In the early to mid-1960s, professional women’s organizations in Britain were gripped by a peculiar kind of survey fever. During these years, bodies including the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF), the Association of Headmistresses and Association of Assistant Mistresses, and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Great Britain and Northern Ireland conducted substantial pieces of social research. In most cases, this took the form of a postal questionnaire designed to elicit factual information about educational achievements, employment histories, income and domestic circumstances with a view to building an authoritative picture of how the graduate or ‘trained’ woman was positioned within the post-war labour market. In addition, the surveys explored the role of attitudes, ambitions and orientations in shaping career choices and outcomes, paying particular attention to how women felt about engaging in paid work after marriage and maternity. These surveys were published and disseminated in various ways – through books, pamphlets, policy briefings, conferences and seminars – and to audiences stretching from gatherings of professional women to employers, university careers advisers and government policy- makers. The data they contained helped professional women’s organizations formulate demands for wider employment and training opportunities, better career development and more favourable tax policies for their members, including married women looking to return to the workplace after having children.

This chapter anatomizes this social survey ‘moment’ among graduate and professional women by exploring the contexts which produced it and by evaluating its social, cultural and political consequences. The flurry of surveys in the 1960s reflected longer-term demographic and socio-economic trends which transformed the typical female life cycle in the post-war decades and made regular paid work after marriage an increasingly common experience and aspiration across social classes. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, this survey fever was also the product of an encounter with social science, or, more precisely, with an emerging sociology of women which placed the problem of understanding women’s subjective feelings about paid work, family and identity centre stage. Pioneered by individual researchers such as Viola Klein, Judith Hubback and Pearl Jephcott, the pursuit of sociological knowledge about paid work and feminine selfhood was embraced by professional women’s organizations and stood at the heart of the public advocacy which they carried out on behalf of their members.

Social research thus became the intellectual ally of a particular kind of liberal, middle-class feminist politics centred on notions of professional commitment, personal achievement and emotional self-management. This process had two key elements which were to prove consequential in the longer term. First, social surveys produced new forms of evidence which these organizations could deploy when lobbying government and employers or appealing to a wider public. ‘Research’ gained a far greater prominence in public debates about women’s professional careers in the later twentieth century than it had in earlier decades. Second, social research established a dynamic of reflexivity within the construction of women’s professional identities which would endure. These surveys purported to describe the realities of women’s work and family lives, but the image they reflected prized personal characteristics such as determination, courage and ambition, alongside the capacity to organize, delegate and manage and discipline the feminine self. While some women found this celebration of individual agency empowering, it stemmed from and prioritized the particular interests of a group of relatively privileged middle-class women. This had the effect of downplaying issues of wider significance for working women, notably childcare, and created ideological distance between long-established professional women’s organizations and the radical strategies advocated by second-wave feminists in the 1970s. Despite the political challenge presented by Women’s Liberation, the feminized professional identities established in the post-war decades remained culturally pervasive into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

I

The landscape of bodies organizing and representing the interests of professional women was broad and varied in 1960s Britain. There were organizations dating back to the Victorian and Edwardian women’s movement, such as the Association of Headmistresses (1874) and the British Federation of University Women (1907), both founded when access to higher education, training and professional employment was an object of sustained feminist agitation. Others, like the Medical Women’s Federation (1917), the Women’s Engineering Society (1919), the British Federation of Business and Professional Women (1933) and the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (1938), were founded during or after the First World War, reflecting women’s small but growing presence across a widening range of occupational fields.¹ These advances were enabled in part by the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which eradicated formal barriers preventing women’s entry to occupations including law, architecture, accountancy and the administrative grades of the home civil service.² Professional women’s organizations established a track record in mobilizing women and campaigning for their rights, often joining wider coalitions led by feminist societies such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and the Six Point Group around causes including equal pay and abolition of the marriage bar.³ Such associations provided a collective voice for their members but also a sense of professional community and a forum for sociability through annual conferences, monthly journals and local branch meetings.⁴ This mix of activities continued to characterize the post-war work of these and newer bodies, whose memberships grew as more women entered higher-level white-collar occupations, particularly those ‘caring’ professions associated with the expanding welfare state, most notably teaching, medicine and social work.⁵

Alongside swelling demand for female labour in these sectors, demographic changes were reshaping the context for professional women’s organizations by the 1960s. Much public debate and sociological comment fixed upon a set of interlinked trends which appeared to be transforming the typical female life cycle. Earlier marriage and smaller, more compressed families, greater longevity and improved health presented new possibilities for the ‘middle years’ of a woman’s life. As the social policy expert Richard Titmuss wrote in 1952:

With an expectation of another thirty-five to forty years of life at the age of forty, with the responsibilities of child upbringing nearly fulfilled, with so many more alternative ways of spending money, with new opportunities and outlets in the field of leisure, the question of the rights of women to an emotionally satisfying and independent life appears in a new guise.⁶

These developments framed new understandings of the meaning of paid work for women and were brought to further prominence by widely read sociological studies such as Viola Klein and Alva Myrdal’s Women’s Two Roles (1956), Judith Hubback’s Wives Who Went to College (1957) and Pearl Jephcott’s Married Women Working (1962). These social researchers helped to solidify in the public mind the idea that women’s needs and aspirations, both material and psychic, were undergoing a process of profound change rooted in irreversible social, economic and cultural transformations evident in all ‘modern’ societies. Central to their analysis was the ‘dual role’, an emerging pattern of paid and unpaid work phased over the life course. Women now typically worked beyond marriage and up to the birth of their first child, returning to employment in their late thirties or forties, often on a part-time basis and following a prolonged period of full-time childrearing.⁷

This pattern was evident among working-class wives seeking part-time jobs in the 1950s, such as those interviewed by Ferdynand Zweig or by Pearl Jephcott in her ground-breaking study of the Peek Freans biscuit factory in Bermondsey.⁸ The idea of the dual role was, however, taken up with greatest enthusiasm by professional women’s organizations because of the solution it appeared to offer to the ‘dilemma’ of continuing a career after marriage and motherhood. It had not proven wholly impossible for married women to practise certain professions in earlier decades, especially if self-employed or freelance, as in the case of GPs, journalists and small business-owners, and especially when helped by live-in servants and boarding schools.⁹ Yet the imposition of marriage bars across the public and private sectors forced most women to choose between career and family before the Second World War. The prospect of women being enabled to return to paid work as an ‘ordinary’ feature of the female life course was therefore a new and exciting development for bodies such as the Medical Women’s Federation or the British Federation of University Women. The dual role provided an answer to critics who decried the ‘wasted’ investment of training women in medicine, architecture or social work and who supported the use of formal or informal quotas to limit women’s presence on university or vocational courses.¹⁰ It promised, furthermore, to expunge once and for all the still-resonant stereotype of the spinster bluestocking who sacrificed the pleasures of ‘normal’ family life to pursue intellectually satisfying work. As Myrdal and Klein argued, their favoured two-stage model demonstrated ‘that it is possible for women to envisage the idea of work outside the home as a career for life without any feeling of self-denial or resignation, and to plan for it as a positive gain’.¹¹

This was the context in which professional women’s organizations turned to research to inform and invigorate their campaigning work. Earlier advocates of women’s professional employment had made use of empirical data, such as the economist and factory inspector Clara Collet, who published a series of pioneering essays on this subject in Educated Working Women: Essays on the Economic Position of Women Workers in the Middle Classes in 1902. The Fabian Women’s Group compiled a volume of informative chapters by leading professional women in Women Workers in Seven Professions (1914), while numerous guides and surveys appeared between the wars tracking progress and noting ongoing obstacles to women’s career mobility.¹² In addition, women’s societies produced briefings and memoranda for parliamentary inquiries and royal commissions which touched on questions related to women in the professions. In 1929–30, for example, the Association of Headmistresses, the Council of Women Civil Servants, and the London and National Society for Women’s Service (among others) provided expert evidence to the Royal Commission on the Civil Service, pressing for wider opportunities for women in government employment.¹³ These submissions tended to draw upon the knowledge of individual officers who collated ‘exemplary’ cases of pioneering career women rather than producing statistically rigorous analysis rooted in large bodies of data. Interestingly, this latter approach was far more common among observers of women’s manual labour, which was extensively investigated from the 1880s by social investigators, factory inspectors and such bodies as the Women’s Industrial Council and the Fabian Women’s Group.¹⁴

By the time professional women became of comparable interest, new methods and perspectives had transformed what Mike Savage has eloquently described as a pre-war tradition of ‘gentlemanly’ social science into a professionalized and ‘de-moralized’ sociology.¹⁵ This was reflected in the MWF’s use of the questionnaire in the mid-1940s, when it launched its first major survey of women doctors amid mounting fears that women’s medical training was being neglected under plans for the new National Health Service.¹⁶ The federation carried out another survey in 1954, partly prompted by the publication of Hubback’s ‘Graduate Wives’ report (the forerunner to her Wives Who Went to College, which was also based on questionnaires), and planned a further piece of work in 1962, although this was postponed after it was learned that a national survey of women medics was already underway at the Medical Practitioners’ Union, led by Patricia Elliott.¹⁷ In the end, both surveys were published in 1966, with respective sample sizes of 9,075 and 8,209, representing nearly three quarters of all practising female doctors in Britain.¹⁸ These were followed by numerous smaller surveys dealing with women’s careers in particular specialties, medical schools or regions, some of which were published in the profession’s leading journals, the Lancet and the British Medical Journal.¹⁹ The BFUW launched its Graduate Women at Work project around the same time, collecting questionnaire replies from around 1,500 women and a sample of diaries kept by 91 graduate mothers working full- or part-time in a range of occupations over a period of two weeks.

Numerous other investigations were conducted by professional women’s organizations across the decade, in most cases, as above, collecting data through postal questionnaires. They included a survey of married women in teaching carried out by the Association of Headmistresses and the Association of Assistant Mistresses; the National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs’ study of the employment and training needs of older women; and smaller-scale enquiries into women in social work, architecture and veterinary medicine.²⁰ The Women’s Information and Study Centre (WISC), a body founded in 1962 to help married women resume careers after bringing up their families, published Working Wonders: the Success Story of Wives Engaged in Professional Work Part-Time (1969), based on questionnaire responses from 250 women across a range of fields. Meanwhile, in 1965, an Inter-Professional Working Party (IPWP), set up by the MWF with representatives from multiple occupations, distributed a survey through its affiliated organizations asking respondents about their employment patterns, domestic arrangements and expenditure on childcare, housekeeping, personal grooming and work-related travel.²¹ Set alongside the studies produced by Hubback, Klein and others, the wealth of information generated by and about professional women in the 1960s was extraordinarily rich. Never before had the professional working woman been so closely probed or thoroughly documented, a phenomenon which was not limited to Britain.²² So overwhelming, in fact, was the proliferation of surveys on medics that one university dean wrote to the MWF in 1974 calling for better coordination of effort, noting that ‘people do get rather irritated by receiving a lot of questionnaires’.²³

As well as the sheer quantity and scale of these post-war enquiries, professional women’s organizations departed from earlier modes of evidence- gathering in their embrace of formal social-scientific expertise. The BFUW appointed Viola Klein as an expert adviser on their Graduate Women at Work project, signaling how seriously the federation regarded the academic integrity of the research. What was needed, as a circular of 1963 put it, was ‘actual facts collected from as wide an area as possible and presented clearly and authoritatively’. The questionnaire, members were informed, had been compiled ‘with the advice of psychologists and statisticians’ and was piloted in a north-eastern town before being rolled out nationwide.²⁴ Klein was given the task of analysing the ninety-one diaries collected from successful working mothers and contributed a chapter to the final publication. In the mid-1960s, Klein advised the Inter-Professional Working Party whose members subsequently decided ‘to write to all social science and sociology departments of Universities to see if they would or could co-operate’ with its planned investigations.²⁵ The MWF was similarly anxious to ensure the robustness of its research, hesitating before agreeing to collaborate on the survey underway at the Medical Practitioners’ Union, due to doubts about Elliot’s qualifications and the fact that the questionnaire had been ‘designed without consulting a sociologist or indeed the MWF itself’.²⁶ They devised their own questionnaire with help from John Brotherston, then head of the Department of Public Health at Edinburgh University, and sent it to the statistician Roy Allen at the London School of Economics for scrutiny, noting the need for ‘proper statistical recording’ of the data it aimed to produce.²⁷

II

These studies of professional women are absent from the major histories of post-war British social science, despite offering compelling evidence of what Mike Savage has called ‘the creeping rise of the social science apparatus’, together with its power to frame and interpret social change.²⁸ The efforts of professional women’s organizations to collect authoritative data about a well-defined social group – in this case graduate and professional women – lend support but also add a new inflection to Savage’s account. Whereas earlier generations of social investigators drew their conclusions through processes of visual inspection and moral evaluation, post-war sociologists became increasingly interested in how their subjects understood the world and their place in it. This shift towards capturing subjectivity was especially marked in studies of women’s relationship to family and work, as evidenced by the work of Hubback, Jephcott and Klein, who placed as much emphasis on women’s feelings and orientations as they did on demographic shifts and changing labour market structures. This interest in subjective experience also characterized the approach adopted by professional women’s organizations. In exploring the situation of graduate and professional women, their surveys not only collected rich data on education, family size and employment status but also probed women’s preferences and desires, their attitudes and ambitions, and their hopes and fears concerning paid work.²⁹

Figure 11.1. Viola Klein, 1965. Photograph by W. M. Mills. Papers of Viola Klein, MS.1215 14/5, University of Reading Special Collections.

This becomes apparent in the shared themes which emerge from the surveys, foremost among which was the importance of professional commitment and an ethic of service in sustaining women’s careers over the full female life course. The MWF repeatedly stressed this point in the conclusions they drew from survey data across the decades. Getting married women back to work, the MWF wrote in 1955, ‘depends on the women themselves; they alone can build up the reputation for devotion to medical duty and reliability which it demands’.³⁰ Elliott and Jefferys made a similar point at the end of the 1966 MPU survey, noting that, while government and employers could smooth their path, ‘ultimate responsibility rests with the women themselves. In accepting one of the limited opportunities for training for a profession whose skills are greatly in demand, they incur an obligation to the community which they must do their utmost to discharge.’³¹ A strong sense of vocation was found to be equally prominent among the BFUW’s survey participants. Of the ninety-one diarists, Klein found that most were ‘keenly interested in their job, were convinced that it is important not only for themselves but also for the community, and were on the whole rather proud of themselves’.³²

Related to this theme of commitment was the capacity to manage one’s ‘double life’ (as Klein put it), both in terms of the practical logistics of running a job and a home and as regards the emotional labour required to maintain domestic harmony and achieve mental equilibrium. Klein admired the schoolteacher and mother of three who oversaw a ‘team-spirit effort’ in her household, which involved the supervision of a daily domestic worker and the delegation of specific tasks to husband, children and mother-in-law. Of a forty-three-year-old lawyer who moved her stepmother in so she could help with the care of her teenage daughter, Klein wrote: ‘The whole of her record gives an impression of quiet, unfussing competence.’³³ Pat Williams struck a similar chord in her survey of professional part-timers: these women, she noted, ‘want a multifaceted life … the picture built up in the questionnaires is of extremely busy, often humorous, adaptable women, fast on their feet, somehow dovetailing the many different demands on them, and happy with their way of life’.³⁴ The authors of the MWF’s 1966 survey argued that young women considering medicine as a career should be encouraged to seek this kind of contentment and balance. Aspiring female medics, they advised, must ‘take a sensible look at their circumstances and plan to make these compatible with their professional ambitions’.³⁵ This echoed the position adopted by Judith Hubback, who suggested in Wives Who Went to College that it was for each woman ‘to face the difficulties involved in combining marriage, motherhood and individualism and to work out her own solution in terms of her own circumstances, character and endowment’.³⁶

This assumption, that it was ultimately for women to work out their own strategies for a balanced and fulfilling life, stood at the heart of the model of professional identity constructed in these texts. All drew on survey data to call for measures to support women’s careers, but the success of such reforms relied in the final analysis on the courage and determination of women themselves. The National Federation of Business and Professional Women’s Clubs captured this spirit in the preface to its report on the older married returner, advising that ‘the various ways of entry into a fuller, vital life are here for the reading, here for action, which, if taken, will lead to a rewarding enjoyment’.³⁷ Later in the report it argued that ‘refresher’ courses aimed at married women were important not so much for imparting skills as for supplying ‘a moral booster’ to restore the confidence of the professionally trained housewife who feels she has ‘become a cabbage’.³⁸

In summary, these surveys articulated a feminist politics rooted in the values of personal achievement, commitment and self-knowledge. This was reflected in the kinds of issues that their authors championed publicly. Professional women’s organizations were highly vocal on the need for part-time training and flexible hours, a demand voiced repeatedly by their married members, but were strikingly silent on nursery or after-school provision, both areas of historic underinvestment by governments and employers. The problem of childcare, these organizations assumed, would be resolved privately by their mostly middle-class members. Elliott and Jefferys reported that respondents to the MPU survey ‘tended to agree that the most satisfactory form of care was that which could be provided in the home itself’, meaning that ‘the solution lies in the personal arrangements which the individual mother makes’. While noting that a minority had in fact expressed a preference for hospital-based crèches or nursery schools, the authors argued nonetheless for measures to tackle ‘the continuing shortage of people willing to undertake child-minding and domestic work in other people’s homes’.³⁹ The survey of professional ‘woman power’ which Viola Klein carried out in 1963 with the assistance of the BFUW similarly found that few graduate mothers made use of nurseries or stated a preference for collective forms of day-care. Most of those with pre-schoolers who were working outside the home used nannies, au pairs, housekeepers or co-resident grandmothers.⁴⁰ This undoubtedly reflected the social stigma that local authority nurseries carried in this period, being widely regarded as a residual welfare service for unmarried mothers or other ‘problem’ families.⁴¹ But it also indicated the ideological dominance of the dual-role model in these decades. This contained two presuppositions: first, that most mothers would return to careers once their children were at school and therefore had little need of day-care; and, second, that the small minority pursuing continuous careers would have sufficient income to employ help at home. This goes some way towards explaining why maternity rights, including paid maternity leave, did not feature among the demands made by professional women’s organizations before the 1970s.⁴²

One issue which these organizations did care about was tax, an issue of concern more broadly for the professional middle classes in the era of post-war social democracy. Bodies such as the Middle Class Alliance began lobbying Conservative governments for tax cuts from the mid-1950s, but professional women brought a distinctly feminist perspective to the debate a decade later.⁴³ The Inter-Professional Working Party set up by the MWF campaigned against joint taxation of married couples and lobbied for tax relief for those employing domestic help, arguing that such reforms were necessary to encourage highly qualified women back into the workplace.⁴⁴ Through the course of 1965–6, its members wrote to the Chancellor, met with Treasury officials and rallied supportive MPs, later setting up a dedicated pressure group, the Women’s Taxation Action Group (WOTAG), to carry the campaign forward. Advocates of reform stressed the demoralizing effect of seeing a large proportion of one’s salary absorbed by income tax and the cost of employing nannies or housekeepers, which was increased by the Selective Employment Tax (SET) introduced by the Labour government in 1966. However committed a woman might be to her profession, the IPWP wrote, ‘if she cannot earn a sum which, after taxation and the payment of her domestic bills, brings some appreciable financial benefit to the family unit, she will, in all probability, remain at home’.⁴⁵ WOTAG’s cause attracted some positive press commentary, including a piece in the Guardian by Jill Tweedie, who gave an example of a barrister so incensed by the prevailing tax laws that she was considering divorcing her husband and living with him unmarried so as to avoid paying what she regarded as a penalty for marriage.⁴⁶ The Economist also provided WOTAG with some welcome publicity for its campaign in December 1969.⁴⁷

WOTAG’s demands, however, received less sympathy in government. The chief financial secretary to the Treasury told an IPWP deputation that he was unpersuaded by their claims about financial disincentives. ‘He wondered for how many women taxation rather than their dedication to their families, etc. was the determining factor’, and suggested that the situation for high-earning dual-career couples was not as bad as the IPWP implied.⁴⁸ This position was echoed by the Labour chancellor Roy Jenkins when the issue reached his desk in 1969, prompted by a communication from the Association of Anaesthetists urging support for WOTAG’s proposals as a means of tackling labour shortages in medicine. In his reply, Jenkins defended the principle of progressive taxation and observed that only the tiny minority of couples with an income in excess of £5,000 paid significantly more under joint assessment.⁴⁹ This latter point was correct. As Viola Klein observed in her earlier reflections on this subject, the raising of the ‘surtax’ threshold from £2,000 to £5,000, together with personal allowances, meant that married women who earned were not in fact dramatically worse off than single women.⁵⁰ Klein did, however, note that the rules around housekeeper and child-minder allowances penalized working wives: a husband with a disabled wife could claim £75 in tax relief if he employed a housekeeper to replace her, as could divorced or widowed wives in employment, but dual-income married couples could not. Klein also pointed out that the added costs of personal grooming, work clothes and running a second car were serious considerations for professionally qualified mothers contemplating a return to work.⁵¹ These details apart, WOTAG’s broader target was the injustice of treating a woman’s earnings as an extension of her husband’s income, an issue that was only partly rectified by the introduction of optional separate assessment in 1971.⁵² As Tweedie wrote:

At the heart of WOTAG the principle of equality lies more deeply than finance. Professional women, they feel, have a right to deal with their own financial affairs yet, as things stand, all details of their finances and any investments must be channelled through their husbands; thus he is always aware of his wife’s finances though he need not account to her for his.⁵³

III

The strength of feeling among professional women’s organizations on taxation and their corresponding lack of interest in childcare policy was symptomatic of the class privilege enjoyed by their members. Bodies such as the BFUW and the MWF spoke of ‘graduate’, ‘educated’ or ‘professional’ women as a group defined by their intellectual training and expertise rather than by their social status. Yet in the 1950s and 1960s it was mostly middle-class girls who stayed on to take A-levels and secured places at university or teacher training colleges. If they married, as most did in those decades, their husbands were usually employed in professional or executive-level occupations and earned comfortable salaries. Professional women’s organizations thus assumed that their members inhabited a middle-class world and would apply its culturally specific calculus of decision-making when it came to paid work, factoring in private school fees, the cost of housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and au pairs, and the household’s overall tax liability. The politics of personal achievement and commitment promoted by these organizations can in this sense be understood as an ‘ideology of class’, situated within and produced by the material circumstances and cultural norms of the post-war professional middle classes.⁵⁴

This position would begin to change in the 1970s, when the expansion of polytechnics and growing opportunities in public sector employment enabled more women from working-class or less secure lower-middle-class backgrounds to enter professional work.⁵⁵ The Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) also issued a challenge to the liberal feminist politics practised by bodies such as the BFUW or the MWF. These organizations found common ground in calling for equal pay and equal opportunities in the workplace, but there were significant cultural, intellectual and generational differences between them. The president of the British Federation of Business and Professional Women told their annual conference in 1970 that their association could ‘show that women can have confidence without emotionalism, realism without revolution and femininity without feminism’, a comment evidently aimed at the more radical political methods favoured by second-wave activists.⁵⁶ Issues such as sexual autonomy, reproductive rights, domestic violence and pornography featured prominently within the WLM but were at odds with the career-focused agenda of professional women’s organizations, as were the socialist and trade-unionist commitments held by many feminist activists in Britain.⁵⁷ There were differences, too, in how the WLM used research, viewing it as a means of challenging patriarchal power directly and largely eschewing the postal questionnaire for more innovative ethnographic fieldwork on the shop floor or in women’s homes.⁵⁸ While the post-war social surveys made the crucial first move towards recovering women’s subjectivity, it was only from the 1970s that feminist researchers explicitly connected the articulation of women’s experience to the development of collective strategies of resistance.⁵⁹

And yet the burgeoning feminist academy of the 1970s and 1980s did not displace the older traditions of research into women’s lives pioneered by professional women’s organizations. More work is needed to explore the legacy of the 1960s surveys in full, but their brand of empirical investigation into professional women’s lives was replicated in a wider range of settings over the years, including business schools, think-tanks, employer organizations and research units within government.⁶⁰ It might be possible to see the 1960s surveys as anticipating the field of women in management research, which took shape in the 1980s and placed questions relating to women’s professional ambition and career mobility centre stage.⁶¹ One could push the argument even further and suggest that these 1960s texts help us to trace the genealogy of popular discourses around women and professional work that have become dominant in the early twenty-first century. The high-achieving career-woman who successfully juggles family and job through sheer willpower and force of character is a familiar stereotype in contemporary popular culture, best exemplified in texts like Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 self-help book, Lean In.⁶² Yet Viola Klein was writing about this figure in the Guardian as early as 1964:

‘How on earth does she manage?’ we ask ourselves each time we hear of yet another woman whose achievements in her profession are matched by a full and happy family life … Apart from the essential prerequisites of good health and ample energy, the secret of their success seems to be largely a matter of organization … It would appear that what makes these women ‘tick’ is, first of all, their determination to make a success of their dual role. Where they are prompted by a sense of vocation, by a feeling of duty to fill a vacancy in one of the shortage occupations, or by a psychological need to get out of their homes for part of the day – whatever their motives, they are equally attached to their job and resolved to make it work.⁶³