A Woman’s Work by Victoria Purman

Title: A Woman’s Work

Author: Victoria Purman

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 5^th April 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 368

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: The astonishingly rich prize of the 1956 Australian Women’s Weekly cookery competition offers two women the possibility of a new kind of future, in this compassionate look at the extraordinary lives of ordinary women – our mothers and grandmothers – in a beautifully realised post-war Australia.

It’s 1956, and while Melbourne is in a frenzy gearing up for the Olympics, the women of Australia are cooking up a storm for their chance to win the equivalent of a year’s salary in the extraordinary Australian Women’s Weekly cookery contest.

For two women, in particular, the prize could be life changing. For war widow and single mum Ivy Quinn, a win would mean more time to spend with her twelve-year-old son, Raymond. Mother of five Kathleen O’Grady has no time for cooking competitions, but the prize could offer her a different kind of life for herself and her children, and the chance to control her own future.

As winter turns to spring both women begin to question their lives. For Kathleen, the grinding domesticity of her work as a wife and mother no longer seems enough, while Ivy begins to realise she has the courage to make a difference for other women and tell the truth about the ghosts from her past.

But is it the competition prize that would give them a new way of seeing the world – a chance to free themselves from society’s expectation and change their own futures – or is it the creativity and confidence it brings?

~*~

In 1956, two women are living very different yet intersecting lives in Melbourne on the cusp of the Olympics. Ivy is a single mother to Raymond, and she is raising him alone. She works as a medical secretary, with an older doctor who is her family in Melbourne. Ivy has always told people that her husband, and Raymond’s father died in World War II – yet it feels like there is more to it. And Kathleen, mother to five children between the ages of two and ten, Barbara, Robert, Jimmy, Mary, and Little Michael, and married. Her husband is traditional, and every day is the same. Same routine, same meals. Same everything. But Ivy and Kathleen’s lives are about to change as The Women’s Weekly launches a cooking competition. Amidst a post-war world where women are finding that they want independence that comes into direct competition with what society and the people around them expect – get married, have babies, and stay at home to take care of those babies and your husband, Ivy and Kathleen work against this, discovering new ways of being women in a world filled with prejudice and certain expectations that are starting to change.

A Woman’s Work looks at the post-war period of the 1950s, where women were grappling with the changes and effects of the war, and attitudes about a woman’s place, racism, sexism, and assumptions about single mothers, despite so many women being widowed due to the war. As a single mother, Ivy faced a lot of judgement from those who didn’t know her. And Kathleen, who was struggling with five kids and a routine that felt oppressive to her, smothering her as she longs to try something new. Yet because her husband, Peter, doesn’t like it when she tries anything that isn’t Australian like rice or Italian dishes and uses derogatory language to describe it, she feels as though there will never be any changes. Until her mother gets her involved in the competition and Kathleen finds a new confidence as she explores who she is and what she loves. Ivy and her son work together, with a new doctor, Harry, to cook and form a friendship. For both women, the competition presents them with a chance to use the skills that society stereotypically applies to women to alter their own destinies. In turn, I found that this highlighted that everyone in the novel was given a chance to change, to start to modernise their views, and to evolve. Peter, Kathleen’s husband, had some important growth as he learnt he could do more than expect what he had been taught was right, and Ivy showed that she was accepting of people no matter who they were.

The presence of what we would see now as outdated, derogatory, or harmful views and languages worked to set the scene and time, as Victoria pointed out in her author’s note. It was unsettling but gave the book a sense of authenticity as it explored why people had certain views and approaches to things and how the women in the novel changed their fates, took control of their lives without the need for the men around them – fathers and husbands – telling them whether it was okay or not. It also grappled with ideas of morality towards the end – issues that persisted through the following decades and in some ways still do today. Issues that were legal or illegal back then are usually just a question of morality today, and I think including these in the novel helped show how far we have come whilst also representing a range of experiences and ideas about what a family can be. Where Kathleen had what we might have once called the typical, average, and conventional family – mum, dad, and kids, Ivy and Raymond had what back in the 1950s would have been seen as an unconventional family: Ivy, a single mum to Raymond, who was taken in by Doctor Watkins and his wife who were like grandparents to Raymond and then when she became friends with new doctor Harry, he was simply that – a friend who could help Raymond navigate the world.

I liked that Victoria’s book was more focused on the women and their lives, and friendship, and that it can show that everyone in every time is different. That yes, whilst there were some who were the image of what we know from popular culture, others would not have been like that. I think not having a romance as such in this book helped strengthen the ideas that Victoria was working with and using in her story. There was love – familial love, and friendship love, and that worked so powerfully. I enjoy books that explore different relationships and the spotlight it shines on these equally important relationships. Books that do this are reassuring and I loved that these women – Ivy and Kathleen – were able to maintain who they were, to grow and change, and to start to navigate a world that was about to change in so many ways. I think this novel got the balance of new ideas and changes with the traditions that the characters had grown up with. It worked well and communicated its ideas effectively, and celebrated cooking at the same time, showing that it is for anyone and new things can be scary, but trying them is okay.