Before self-help books, there are how to books. Perhaps they’re more prevalent for girls. In thinking of books I’ve read that have impacted me, or shaped the way I think, it includes books that are intended to help girls work out how to be…women?
I should probably note here that I don’t have a sister. Nor did my mother. Nor did her mother. And part of how we learn about what it is to be female is through examples in our immediate family. We will learn from our mothers, true, but sometimes we also want someone else along side.
I think some of the earlier ‘how to’ books for girls were much more about preparing you for marriage (the expectation): how to keep house, how to sew, how to remove stains of various kinds.
They could well have been Mrs Beaton, but for a few things thrown in for a younger age group – I think this included signalling in semaphore. Sadly, at this point, I think of the Monty Python sketch of Heathcliff and Cathy, signalling their hopeless devotion through semaphore, and have to conclude that I don’t take it very seriously.
But still. I read the older book – or dipped in, at points. So I think this is also the one with how to sew French knots – which admittedly helped at the making a decorative pin cushion in primary school stage. (Step 1: make a felt pin cushion. Step 2: sew whatever else – you now have your trusty pin cushion to assist you.)
Later, in my teens, I came across another one called Girl Talk. This one was a bit more updated – how to look after your skin, yes, but also how to get a part time job. What to do about mean girls – what to do about unwanted attention from men.
Teenage magazines did some of this too – and sleepovers at friends’ houses were also part of where those ‘how is life meant to work?’ discussions happened. But the magazines were generally borrowed, and the sleepovers didn’t happen so often. So the book got read in the meantime.
I remember the cover, the attempt to show a range of styles of dress, haircut, etc among a group of girls, huddling together and reading the book. Yes, it was one of those books that has people reading the book – and on the front cover of the book is a picture of people reading the book…and so on.
Whatever the books, the magazines, even the friends, told you – at some point, you had to work it out for yourself. What worked on the page was not necessarily what came up in real life – particularly when it comes to opening lines at parties…
And actually, what came up in real life for me, for my peers at school, included things that were way outside what the book included at the time. Parental illness. The complications of old age for grandparents. The impact of parents’ jobs, the economic climate, the societal shift towards greater consumerism.
These days, I suspect so much of that is covered in fiction – and covered way earlier, too. Yes, there was Judy Blume for teens in the 80s – but the Jacqueline Wilson books of the last decade or more cover a much wider range of home lives, and complications for the characters.
There will always be a need to find reassurance, answers – or at least, someone going through something like us. In our teens, wanting to show our mastery of life – yet, equally, at sea with a host of changes – we need a second opinion. A neutral observer.
Who knows how that second opinion will be offered in the future. But whether or not we have sisters, friends, confidantes – we will need sources of advice for our time, even if that advice seems strange later, at a distance.
For we would far rather have that advice than not. And we will cling to it until we realise how much we make our own ways through – and equally, how much we need advice, not just in our teens, but right through life.