Intriguing stories
AUTHOR and journalist Sarah Lonsdale has written for a wide variety of publications, including English papers the Observer, Financial and Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Daily Telegraph, and National Geographic.
She records the hard-won triumphs of these feisty women who had the courage to stand up for their beliefs. I had heard of only one or two of the women featured in these pages.
They asserted themselves in many ways, all the more admirable because many came from disadvantaged backgrounds, growing up in an often repressive society with few opportunities.
It is sobering to think that some hundred years later, in 2021, chauvinism and misogyny still exist.
The only woman whose name was familiar to me was Depression-era Australian Kylie Tennant.
She gathered material for her novels such as The Battlers and Ride on Stranger in outback Australia, exposing the hardship of farmers and also, the plight of families in city slums.
Most of these women were precocious from a very early age; eventually finding (or fighting) their way into the newsrooms of Fleet Street, and into homes, courts, prisons and police stations.
Only some were encouraged by parents and family; many others were held back in their endeavours, stifled by the male culture surrounding them.
Only the most spirited won through, as exemplified by star reporters Alison Settle, Claudia Parsons, Margaret Lane and mountaineer Dorothy Pilley who defied the odds by discarding frilled petticoats and long skirts and donned breeches and boots for a Swiss Alps climb; unheard of in those days.
Others were marginalised or derided as “lady novelists”.
Controversial and breaking with conventions in their era, these women’s stories are intriguing, and resonate today, when we still have a way to go in equality and respect.
Thoroughly researched through libraries, newspaper files, diaries, letters and interviews with friends and descendants, Lonsdale’s book affords a window into these courageous, often rebellious women who fought to have their voices heard. She brings them vividly to life.