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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
You are all welcome! I have listened to some of them and of course they are from an Australian perspective, but with various contributors. An interestingly lively discussion on the competence or otherwise of the generals in Lions Led by Donkeys.
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I'm looking forward to this one. I'm aware of revisionist history in this regard, but I can't imagine I'll be convinced!
I've just read a novel that didn't make the cut for my selections,
The War-Workers by E.M. Delafield (of
Provincial Lady fame). I didn't think it was literary enough for this club and it isn't, but it's interesting in the context of Vera's experiences, especially as it was a contemporary tale (written in 1917).
The protagonist is an upper-class, 30-ish woman who runs the local supply depot. Her aged father has a stroke, but Charmian thinks her work is more important than coming back home, where her able mother and a full-time nurse can care for her father. The local doctor makes this pronouncement:
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"It's not the work you want to get back to, young lady; it's the excitement, and the official position, and the right it gives you to interfere with people who knew how to run a hospital and everything connected with it some twenty years or so before you came into the world. That's what you want. I can't tell you, as a matter of medical opinion, that it will bring on a second stroke, if you vex and disappoint your good father by monkeying about in a becoming uniform and a bit of gold braid on an office stool while he desires you to stay at home; but I can and I do tell you that you're playing as heartless a trick as any I ever saw, making patriotism the excuse for bullying a lot of women who work themselves to death for you because you're of a better class, and have more personality than themselves, and pretending to yourself that it's the work you're after, when it's just because you want to get somewhere where you'll be in the limelight all the time."
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So there's what Vera was up against when her mother had her breakdown. The POV of the story, as written by a woman, is that Charmian makes the wrong choices and that women should be more womanly, a view that the women who work under Charmian share. The scales fall from their eyes and they see her for the selfish, power-grabber she is. Alas.