What I'm thinking about ... ambitious women

Which was the first have-it-all generation of women? They were swinging half a century before the sixties, says Judith Mackrell

                  

• Judith Mackrell
• theguardian.com, Sunday 11 August 2013                

 

Free woman… Josephine Baker. Photograph: Keystone-France/Getty Images

 

Writing biography is always a juggling of perspectives, an attempt to show the daily random life of your subject while imposing the logic of history and argument. It's a battle between present tense reality and narrative hindsight. And the other day I was reminded of how conflicting their truths can be by a magazine article I picked up.

    

It was a report on how young professional woman are suffering a collective sense of anxiety about combining careers and motherhood. Farrah Storr explained that she and her generation had "witnessed the despairing, exhausting fall out" of those who'd tried. And far from being inspired by those "solid confident chest-swelling career girls of the 1980s and 1990s who were told they could have it all" she and her peers regarded them as a warning.

 

Having had my own children in the late 1980s, while simultaneously establishing myself as a writer, I suppose I'm one of the women who tried to have it all. Yet while I can remember years of deranged tiredness (as well as deranged fun) I don't recognise myself in Storr's argument. Her implication that my generation and I had been driven by an ambitious and acquisitive "life plan", that we'd been sold the idea of being superwomen doesn't fit with how it felt at the time. . What I remember, at least among the women I knew, was a naïve and hopeful muddling through.

Chest-swelling career girls we certainly weren't. Coming of age to a mix of hangover hippydom and new wave feminism, we certainly assumed that we were going to live differently from our parents. But the grim state of the British economy meant that few of us had confident professional plans. And while a good many of us ended up with jobs and children we loved, it felt like a situation which we'd both lucked into, and blundered into.
I had tried to hang on to that feeling of being 21 and embarking on life without a road map when I was writing my book about women in the 1920s. I wanted to write about the decade as a transforming era for women, bringing in new political, social and sexual freedoms. And I wanted to explore it through the stories of six women who were in different ways, emblematic of their generation's bid for emancipation.
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