Recommendsday: Girl’s Own career books

Yes, this is a thing. Seriously it is and I’ve read an increasing number of them and they start to form into patterns. Yes it’s slightly niche and I’m not expecting many of you to go out and buy these, but I have thoughts to share.

Firstly, lets be clear – my beloved Drina books are not career books. Yes, across the series Drina trains as a ballet dancer – which then becomes her career, but ballerina is not a realistic career for most young women. These are books that were written to give young women ideas of what they might want to do when they left school and what the training and actual job might entail. But the author of the Drina books did write some career books – Jean Estoril aka Mabel Esther Allan wrote Judith Teaches, which is one of a slew of books about becoming a teacher. What makes it interesting is that Judith becomes a teacher at a secondary modern – rather than a grammar school – and that gives a window onto mid twentieth century English society. It’s been reprinted recently, so worth a look if you can get a cheap copy.

Another popular job to get the career novel treatment is nursing – the Cherry Ames and Sue Barton series are the ones you’re most likely to have heard of, and I’ve read a couple of each of those, but I’ve also read Jean Tours a Hospital which is I mentioned in Quick Reviews last summer and is definitely emphatically not a great work of literature, but it is a fascinating look at nursing in the 50s and the attitudes around it.

There are a few with journalist heroines too – which is fun for me given my day job! There’s the Sally Baxter: Girl reporter series but also few weeks back I read A Press Story which has a plucky school leaver securing her first trainee job at the (very) local paper and you follow her as she learns the ropes.

Then there are some with more exotic jobs – I read June Grey: Fashion Student a couple of months back – which follows the titular June as she completes her course at fashion and design college and undertakes some work experience with a view to getting a job. Haute couture designers a plenty – and she gets a love interest (of course). In fact in most of these there is a romantic subplot as well – just to make sure that they all know that if they get a job it’s not going to stop them getting married. June’s is a fellow designer, a year or two ahead of her in career terms but also with some connections to the business which are revealed late on so we know that June won’t be struggling for cash when she bags her bloke.

I think the first career book that I read – way back when I was about 8 or 9 years old – was my mum’s copy of Shirley Flight: Air Hostess, which I blame for my crushing disappointment on my first ever plane flight when I discovered that the cabin crew no longer cooked a four course meal for the passengers in the plane’s galley during the flight. Luckily my disillusionment was assuaged by the fact that my sister and I were taken into the flight deck (I think my dad had told the crew it was our first flight – thanks dad!) and we got to see the Alps poking through the clouds below us. Anyway, at the time I had no idea that this was part of a series but as a grown up I’ve picked up most of the others for cheap at various points. They have all the issues that you might expect when it comes to books written in the 50s and and dealing with far flung parts of the world, so if you do ever pick one up, make it that first one or one of the North American or European set ones to avoid the worst of that.

And finally my most recent discovery is that we also had evangelical career books – last week I read Linda Learns to Type where our heroine wants to be a private secretary to an important man and so throws herself into her secretarial classes at her secondary modern. Linda’s sister passed the eleven plus and goes to grammar school – and Linda is jealous of that, but her sister has also Found God and by the end of the book Linda does too – and a nice boy too, who isn’t the first one you meet in the book for once, because that one doesn’t like Linda’s new interest in the chapel youth group. Linda’s job is at a chocolate factory – most of the chocolate manufacturers in the UK seem to have been Quakers so that scans – and there’s plenty of detail about all the secretarial work that needed doing in the pre-computer era.

Through all of this my guide is Kay Clifford’s Career Novels for Girls – the copy I have is my friends (as to be fair is Press Story!) but I also heard Kay talk at Book Conference a few years back. It’s an encyclopaedic guide to the genre, but written with a sense of humour and an eye to the truly outdated madness that some of these are peddling. But then there’s some really bonkers stuff in a lot of Girls Own books – not for nothing do my sister and I have a running joke about people being sung out of comas after all.

Happy Reading!