I have long known that women had a hard time getting and keeping a job, in both the United States and Great Britain, in the early twentieth century. My grandmother’s cousin used to talk about how, when she accepted a teaching position in the Boston school system, she had to sign a contract stating that she could be fired if a man applied for her position. One of my great-aunts in Scotland refused to marry rather than give up her position, again in teaching. My father’s older sister broke her engagement so that she could continue to work and take care of her parents in their old age.
But even with that family history, I had not realized, until I read Madeline Martin’s new novel, The Booklover’s Library—the subject of my latest New Books Network interview—how strict the regulations against working mothers really were. Read on, then listen to the interview, to find out more.
As ever, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.
This book has one of the most dramatic openings I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a lot of novels. It’s 1931 in Nottingham, England, and seventeen-year-old Emma, ensconced in her father’s bookshop, is engrossed in her favorite novel, Jane Austen’s Emma, when she realizes the building around her has caught fire. With her father’s help, she stumbles into the street, only to watch him collapse and die as the bookstore implodes. In just a few pages, Emma has lost her sole family member, her home, and her source of income.
By the time we meet her again, eight years later, she has married, too young and unhappily, lost her husband to a car crash, and is struggling to support herself and their seven-year-old daughter, Olivia, on her widow’s pension. In 1930s Britain, companies were legally barred from hiring married women or widows with children, so although Emma has barely passed twenty-five and would gladly work, she can’t apply for a job because of the marriage ban. But nor can she pay the rent, no matter how hard she squeezes every shilling. When a chance encounter leads to an opportunity for work at a lending library, Emma takes the plunge and identifies herself as Miss Taylor. Fortunately for her, the person hiring is also a woman, so even when the truth comes out during that first interview, the manager agrees to cover for her.
End of story, one might think, but readers who’ve done the math will already have realized that Emma’s problems have just begun. Three weeks after she starts her training, Hitler invades Poland, and Britain declares war. Nottingham, although not London, has enough factories to make it a likely target, and the city puts pressure on all parents to evacuate their children to the countryside. It’s Emma’s struggles to balance her own need to earn money to support her daughter while ensuring the survival of both her child and herself that make up the bulk of the book.
So much fiction has been written about World War II that it’s hard to find a new angle on the conflict. But this heartwarming novel succeeds not only in making readers root for Emma and Olivia and their friends but also in offering a more complex picture of the changes in women’s status during and after the war. The marriage bans, by the way, remained in place until 1975.
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