Writing about the Resilience of Women by Juliet Greenwood

Juliet Greenwood

The thing that really struck me most when researching the First World War for my first novel with Orion, The Ferryman’s Daughter, was the extraordinary reliance of women, both in war and in peace. 

So often women are seen as victims of war, just as they are of poverty and discrimination. Things are beginning to change, but all too often women’s stories are overlooked or untold, or soon forgotten as unworthy of being ‘history’ and so vanish. That void is filled by the old tale of women suffering in silence, or being the ones left behind, life on hold until their men return. 

Of course, the truth is that women never have time to simply wait. Whether it’s refugees from Syria, villagers living under occupation in both world wars, or the civilians in rural Cornwall trying to keep life going through the trauma and uncertainty of WW1, it’s women who are at the heart of survival.

It’s women who make sure families are fed with whatever meagre ingredients are available, who try and keep a family together and a sense of some kind of life. Women are the great survivors, doggedly protecting those they love whatever life throws at them. 

In WW1, women didn’t just take over the work of men, they also carried on as they had always done. Middle class women (who didn’t need pay in order to survive) continued to run charity hospitals, soup kitchens and women’s refuges, being the volunteer social care workers in the days before the welfare state.

Their working class sisters continued working all hours, supplementing, or earning, the family’s income between the backbreaking work of cleaning, washing and cooking without any modern appliances. These are things that keep individual families, but also all of human societies, running – but still tend to happen unnoticed, unless, as in the case of war (or, indeed, a global pandemic), our dependence on this ‘mundane’, ill-paid or unpaid ‘women’s work’ comes, however briefly, into sharp focus.

It was this resilience that I loved about Hester, my heroine of The Ferryman’s Daughter. Like so many women, she takes whatever is thrown at her, picks herself up, shakes herself down and finds a way through. Hester’s determination to earn her own money as the only way of escaping dependency on her self-absorbed father choosing to have an extra pint at the local rather than make sure there is enough for the rent, arose largely from my own family history.

In the 1920s, my working class grandmother had been left in destitution with three small children when my grandfather went to Australia to find gold, eventually returning penniless. No wonder my grandmother was determined her daughters would always be able to earn enough money to support themselves and their children without relying on a man’s earning power! 

In The Ferryman’s Daughter, Hester is, like so many women, forever being dragged back from achieving her ambition by the need to keep her family safe. Ambition is supposed to be ruthless, strength is often seen as the ability to not let anything stand in your way. What is usually omitted from this picture is that ambitious and successful men inevitably have someone in the background (usually a mother or a wife) to take care of the messy side of life, make it all okay, and provide a comfortable home to come back to.

Where women are at their most resilient is dealing with this messiness while pursuing their own ambitions, making sure that no one else pays the price for their dreams. In following Hester’s journey to becoming a professional cook and starting her own cafe, I found that a far more interesting, and nuanced, story than more straightforwardly ‘heroic’ tales of ambition fulfilled. 

This resilience of women, combined with a stubborn determination never to give in, was something I’d previously come across when researching the suffrage movement for The White Camellia. It was a revelation to realise (why, oh why, is it not drummed into us all at school?) just how long (starting fifty years or so before the suffragettes) and so determinedly, in the face of such opposition and danger, women fought for so many of the rights we now take for granted. Far more than simply the right to vote.

All these battles were fought against impossible odds and implacable opposition from the most powerful politicians in the land (all male, naturally). Every time the women were defeated, they brushed themselves down, picked themselves up and carried on, wearing down (and resourcefully outwitting) the opposition, bit by bit. 

So here’s to the resilience of women. And the hope that, whenever the story of the current pandemic is told, the mothers, the grandmothers, the nurses and the careworkers, are remembered, and their resilience in the face of the difficult, the heartbreaking and the terrible is also loudly celebrated. It’s the best gift we can all give to our daughters and granddaughters.

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Juliet Greenwood has always been a bookworm and a storyteller, writing her first novel (a sweeping historical epic) at the age of ten. She is fascinated both by her Celtic heritage and the history of the women in her family, with her great-grandmother having supported her family by nail making in Lye, in the Black Country, near Birmingham in the UK, and her grandmother by working as a cook in a large country house.

Before being published by Orion, Juliet wrote three historical novels for Honno, the Welsh Women’s Press, reaching #4 and #5 in the UK kindle store.

Juliet lives in a traditional quarryman’s cottage between the mountains and the sea in beautiful Snowdonia, in Wales in the UK, and is to be found dog walking in all weathers, always with a camera to hand…

Social media links: 

Juliet’s Blog: https://julietgreenwoodauthor.wordpress.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/juliet.greenwood

Twitter https://twitter.com/julietgreenwood

Instagram: https://twitter.com/julietgreenwood

The Ferryman’s Daughter:

Can Hester help her family escape desperate poverty and fulfil her dreams?

1908: Hester always loved her mother best, her father had always been a hard man to like, spending more time (and money) in the local than with his family. After her mother’s sudden death, followed by an injury forcing her father to give up his job as the ferryman, Hester is placed in the position of care-giver for her young brother and sister.

As the years pass Hester must row the ferry night and day to keep them all from starvation, while her hopes of working in a kitchen and one day becoming a cook, slip further and further away.

But just how far is Hester willing to go to make her dream a reality? And as the threat of war comes ever closer to the Cornish coast, will it bring opportunities or despair for Hester and her family?

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B083N19BTF/

US: https://www.amazon.com/Ferrymans-Daughter-gripping-saga-tragedy

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing