Next month it will be 100 years since women got the vote – and what a roller-coaster century it has been. With 2018 hailed as the year of women and Oprah Winfrey’s rousing Golden Globes speech still ringing in our ears, let’s take a deep dive into the Observer Magazine women’s issue half a century ago today.
Celebrating the 50th anniversary of women getting the vote, the 28 January 1968 cover featured a perfectly coiffed mother and daughter, sporting matching red ensembles. Questionable collars aside, that image of maternal domesticity served as a rather misleading backdrop for some quite radical journalism, told almost exclusively from a female perspective.
The magazine particularly grappled with the then unusual phenomenon of working mothers. As part of a series of interviews with pioneering career women, Carolyn Vadasz, ballet dancer and granddaughter of suffragette Mabel Elliott, muses: ‘A mother trying to combine career and marriage is like backing an outsider both ways – the chances of success are very small.’
Cathy Come Home actor Carol White offers a more pragmatic case for having a job: ‘My husband suggested I did the odd bit of acting again when I started to get a bit depressed at home. Women can become very bogged down with the kids. It’s much nicer for a man to come home to a wife who’s got something to talk about.’
Perhaps the most rousing interview is with Barbara Castle, renowned for her quick temper and no-nonsense approach. ‘I get very cross when people ask what it is like being a woman in the cabinet. If I’ve made the point once, I’ve made it a hundred times… I’ve never been a man, so I don’t know if it feels any different being a man in the cabinet. I just suspect that whatever you are, you don’t go around thinking about your sex all the time when you happen to be very, very busy.’
