Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Looking back in time – right now, I’m taking my usual morning walk going to school. It’s the middle of the year and I don’t feel as jittery as I did on my first day at school. I can walk past the ‘large’ assembly room with ease now, and apparently so do the other boys. What was crowded with 30-40 parents and children on the first day of school, now only has a handful of distressed parent-child pairs. 

I was never quite sure that I was one of the boys who cried during my first day at school, although my mother claims I did; but I disagree. If I did, it’s probably due to one of the liberated women in school.

Mrs. Cockfoster

One point that makes me doubt my own belief is Tom Cockfoster’s mother. My mother explained that Mrs. Cockfoster was a ‘professional’ woman. Of course, at the time I didn’t know what that meant. In retrospect, I realise this meant that she had a job. During the 1950s, few middle class women had jobs – most women were, like my mother, housewives.

In other words, in my child’s mind, Mrs Cockfoster was like some kind of strange and alien being. She had short hair and wore office-type clothes. She smoked cigarettes. This seemed to give her face a wizened look, despite being in her early thirties. In other words, on the first day of school, her ‘unfeminine’ and ‘masculine’ appearance frightened me.

If I’m being honest, even now as I walked across our assembly hall, part of me still fears that Mrs Cockfoster would suddenly appear out of thin air. I expected to see her masculine and wizened face surrounded by smoke. To be completely honest, part of me also agrees with my mother. Maybe, I was indeed the one who, after giving Mrs. Cockfoster one look, just suddenly burst out crying because I thought she was frighteningly ugly. I apologize for nothing. My physical childish reactions have the right to be whatever they want to be.

Professional and Liberated Women

In retrospect, one might ironically comment that I was prescient. I was ‘scared’ of the man-like new professional women that emerged after the Second World War. After all, children were taught that mothers were loving, soft and ‘feminine’, not ‘hard-nosed’, and having the audacity to have short hair styles, wear suits, and smoke cigarettes!

Yet again I can’t resist walking down a ‘blind alley’ – that is, another digression. Why did ‘liberated’ women want to imitate men and attempt to commit suicide in slow-film motion? Without making deeper research, I think this can partly be blamed on advertising. Advertising agencies managed to get women hooked on cigarettes by associating feminism and fashion with smoking, calling cigarettes ‘torches of freedom’.

103  https://countercurrents.org/2018/05/from-bernays-to-trump-hooked-on-misery/ and: https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/02/27/torches-of-freedom-women-and-smoking-propaganda/ Read: 16 April 2022.