If it’s understood that children are expected, by around eight, to have discovered the reality of Father Christmas (Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny apostasy may kick in earlier), and to be capable of hearing the goldfish didn’t go to meet the other goldfish in heaven, at what point – a celebrity historian having made the case for this additional myth – should parents reveal that female pilots never flew Spitfires in Second World War dogfights?
Too early and you rob these innocents of the pleasure of imagining the women swooping – like Father Christmas’s sled, only deadlier – above a moonless Channel. Too late and, given the ever more complex invention required to sustain the fiction, the children may come to mistrust parents or carers, which is not to dispute the value of their disappointment as a valuable introduction to historiography. Some of us had to wait until we read EH Carr: “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.”
For now, this latest child-rearing dilemma is probably limited to parents emulating Dan Snow, history graduate and battlefield expert. Interviewed for a parenting podcast on how he encourages “a love and interest of history in his children”, Snow explained why concerned parents might sometimes feel – not unlike some Turkish, Chinese, or Holocaust-denying historians – that the past, unembellished, is unworthy of present needs. In his case, a Snow daughter had asked, during a visit to an air museum, why all the Spitfire pilots were male. A useful moment – best get it over with – to mention that opportunities for girls have not always been unlimited? But the historian was reluctant, he says, to expose his daughter to the grim “realities of pre-20th-century gender relations”.
It may say more about mainstream feminism than it does about Snow that the equal right to participate in a combat with a life expectancy of four weeks has rarely been an important part of the debate. No wonder it leaves parents who do hanker after martial sacrifice struggling with the facts. Or as Snow puts it: “Having [then] to explain to her why all the pictures of women are of them in ballgowns or in formal dress looking quite wooden and all the pictures of men are of them rampaging around having a great time, being heroic and climbing mountains, shooting things, being soldiers. That is something I struggled with.”
Maybe the “night witches”, as the Germans called Russia’s female pilots, operated too far away to help. As for British non-combatants: if women were critical to the war effort, the contributions they were permitted behind front lines, whether in factories or on farms, raising children or working at Bletchley, are perhaps difficult to valorise, even when photographed, from a rampaging point of view.
Even the women recruited, after they were judged less conspicuous, by the Special Operations Executive, may therefore appear, from this perspective, less than ideally exuberant. Look, for instance, at Vera Leigh, a former fashion designer, and Diana Rowden, reportedly “a very good shot”, when photographed in uniform a few years before their deaths in a concentration camp. And Violette Szabo: heroic, yes, and executed for it in 1945 – but did she ever rampage?
His personal struggle over, Snow found some photographs, online, of women in Spitfires and told his daughter they were Second World War combatants, rather than auxiliaries. “Now at some stage,” he said, “she’s going to learn that I lied to her and she’s going to find out that women weren’t allowed to do active front-line service so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”
Even minus a rampaging or shooting element, there is something nearly heroic – aside from its possible implications for his judgment as @thehistoryguy – about the scale of Snow’s ambition, in finessing the evidence of hegemonic masculinity. Any parent planning to follow suit should bear in mind that, for consistency’s sake, the work of inspirational gender reimagining ought to begin well before the Trojan War (the women were inside the horse), take in the Roman Empire (try Trajan’s Column), and only becomes more challenging after the battle of Hastings. Though an absence of female fighters in the Bayeux tapestry could, I suppose, be attributed to their modesty, when they came to record the battle in the fancy needlework at which they also excelled.
Later, stress women’s castle-defending in the English Civil War, assert that witches were a small but valued part of the community and emphasise that nowhere, in The Charge of the Light Brigade, does Tennyson explicitly state that no women rode – as, you gather, Snow totally would – into the jaws of Death. Similarly, hidden inside those First World War trenches were many young women, “having a great time”, longing to get blown to pieces. No need to complicate things, by inventing shell-shocked women, or ones shot for desertion, as were 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers.
More challenging, surely, pending the big patriarchy reveal, will be protecting the kids from contemporaneous discouragement. “What did that BBC man say about the tennis player, Daddy?” “Who is Carrie Gracie, Daddy?” “Daddy, are women allowed in the Bank of England?” Forget, for now, the Spitfire pilot gender imbalance: what about the one at easyJet?
Perhaps, like the man who successfully shuts out post-unification Germany in the film Good Bye, Lenin!, parents really can sustain, for a time, the pretence that political exclusion, Disney princesses, religious laws, the Presidents Club, gender pay gaps and men such as John Inverdale do not exist. Though there might be some difficulty, even within Snow’s peerlessly equal opportunities household, in concealing society’s continued preference for, say, mountaineering and other muscular, male-dominated heroics above endurance in drudgery, and the quieter victories over marginalisation. There being, it emerges, no more eager advocate of the Invictus world view than the history guy himself.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
