The Paula Principle

Melissa Benn

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Aspirations and ambitions

In Winifred Holtby's South Riding, published in 1936,  Lydia Holly is the eldest daughter of a large and poor family living in a converted railway carriage.  She is 'an untidy fat loutish girl in a torn overall' - but she shows evident signs of cleverness, and her mother sees this.  "Her mother  was a fighter; her mother had insisted  that she take the second chance of a scholarship to Kiplington High School.  When she was eleven she had  won a place at Kiplington, but her parents had needed her to escort her small sisters to the village school, so she had missed her chance.  Now Daisy was old enough to…
Read More

Telling Daughters, and high profile examples of the Peter Principle

Melissa Benn's new book What Should We Tell Our Daughters? dives into a heady mix of issues: body image, pornography and sex, self-esteem, motherhood, ambition and quite a few others.   The book has a lot of forthright argument, but is not as prescriptive as the title might suggest. One of the  book's many good and encouraging features is the way it expresses the ambivalences which parents feel - - about what lessons they should try to pass on to the next generation of young women to help them fulfil themselves in different ways.   It speaks more directly to mothers, but fathers are very much there in the picture.  (Declaration of interest: Melissa and…
Read More

Aspirations and ambitions

In Winifred Holtby's South Riding, published in 1936,  Lydia Holly is the eldest daughter of a large and poor family living in a converted railway carriage.  She is 'an untidy fat loutish girl in a torn overall' - but she shows evident signs of cleverness, and her mother sees this.  "Her mother  was a fighter; her mother had insisted  that she take the second chance of a scholarship to Kiplington High School.  When she was eleven she had  won a place at Kiplington, but her parents had needed her to escort her small sisters to the village school, so she had missed her chance.  Now Daisy was old enough to…
Read More