24. A Mum’s Book?

Chapter 24: A Mum’s Book? This chapter explores the uses of history in our contemporary lives and the meaning of Norah’s story for me, as a historian and a feminist, her grand-niece, and a mother of girls. It opens with my realisation that my daughters and I are the same age as Norah and Milly when Norah first began corresponding with Jim and then fell in love with Danny. The chapter develops as a conversation which circles my question: what could Norah’s mother have done to protect her? We discuss my daughters’ answer -- talk about sex and relationships – and why, in a working-class family in 1941, this wouldn’t happen. We then move beyond the question of the individual – Norah’s mother – to explore issues of sexual ethics in the context of #MeToo and discuss questions of sex and shame, grooming and predation, desire and danger, that Norah could not ask in the mid-twentieth century. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the different paths that feminists have taken over the decades in relation to women and sex: the balance needed between stressing our vulnerability, the extent of male violence, the risk and the threat and the need to live our lives as sexual subjects.