Getting Educated: An Uncertain Memoir

                                                                         by  Maggie West

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A thorough education wasn't always available for young women, particularly those from dysfunctional, abusive families. Getting Educated describes one woman's determination to learn, despite the odds stacked against her. It is an enlightening and at times horrifying insight into growing up in the 1940s and 50s.

Maggie West was born in Perth, Western Australia. Her childhood during the 1940s was spent in many different Catholic boarding schools around Australia, moving at the whim of a highly unpredictable and depressive mother, who would probably now be diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. Living on and off with her mother, Maggie had to suffer too the unwelcome attentions of an abusive step-father. Leaving school and home with only the patchiest education , she tried nursing and was then an airline 'hostess'. Married in her early 20s, she had a large family.  She started her education again as a mature aged student at university, earning a teaching degree in the 1970s, along the way losing a husband who could not accept that his demure and obedient wife had a brain which needed exercising.

 

Twenty years on, Maggie returned to university, finally achieving a doctorate in literary history in 2000. She has lived from time to time in all Australian states, as well as the Northern Territory, teaching in schools and universities. Now living in northern New South Wales, she teaches literature to American university students who visit their campus there. She has published several of her own short stories, reviews and articles. Her interests are writing,reading and music. Now a grandmother, she lives an idyllic life of semi-retirement, with her husband, three golden retrievers, a cat and a large garden that needs more of her time and attention than she can presently devote to it.

 

Cover This is a classic tale of a woman in the latter half of the twentieth century, who endured an horrific childhood, but was able at last to achieve the education she wanted, helped by the feminist revolution which rocked western societies from the 1970s.

 

 

Y ou can order a copy of Maggie's story through good bookshops. Or you can purchase it directly for $A24.95 plus p&p, through the website of her publisher, Zeus Publications,  www.zeus-publications.com/getting_educated.htm  , or contact them directly:

 

           Zeus Publications,

           PO Box 2554,

           Burleigh MDC,

           Queensland 4220,

           Australia

           Ph:   (07) 5575 5141   International: +61 7 5575 5141

           Fax: (07) 5575 5142   International: +61 7 5575 5142

           Email: marketing@zeus-publications.com

 

Getting Educated: An Uncertain Memoir
by Maggie West
ISBN: 1-9210-0558-0      © Maggie West 2005

 

What Quendryth Young, Writing Fellow of the Federation of Australian Writers 1998, has to say about the book:

In the opening pages, Maggie West introduces herself to us as the burdensome infant of a beautiful mother. From that point on, her story is compelling reading.

Throughout the narrative, the author, an avid reader from childhood, parallels her perceptions, her thought processes and eventually some of her choices, with a sequence of female heroines, with philosophers and with writers from within the feminist movement. "Janet Frame writes of memory as a whirlwind". [Maggie] attempts "to do what Adrienne Rich has called 'diving into the wreck'," but heeds the warning of Isabel Allende " that 'minotaurs lie in wait in the labyrinth of memory'."

The story begins in Perth during the early years of the war, and moves across every state of Australia . From images of soot in the eye from steam trains, Italian gardeners and wind-up gramophones, the reader follows through the years of a strict Catholic schooling and the constant upheavals of a dysfunctional family. This leads to marriage and six children, with the pain of losing one of them and a subsequent divorce, followed by two further marriages.

The outstanding feature of this memoir is its honesty. She makes no justifications for her actions, but gives her perception of the factors that are important to her as a person. Some of the heart-wrenching decisions she is asked to make are inevitable. The reader is drawn again and again to ponder "there, but for the Grace of God . . ."

It is as a wife and mother of five that Maggie West decides to become educated. This means a return to study through undergraduate years at University, with interest in history, literature and music. Success leads to an Honours degree and eventually a Doctorate. She suffers guilt from the impossibility of performing all the roles expected of her and finds that, even in those post-femininist years, "women, it seemed had little loyalty towards each other; they understood well where power within society lay". She quotes from Jerry Rogers: "The centrality of men was important in the patriarchal society of Australia and women learned this from the cradle".But the writer finds "with knowledge that I gleaned from my studies, with the acceptance I had received from my various teachers, I discovered that I did have some value, that I was not wholly lacking in worth".

This is an important book, with insight into the current place of women in Australian society. Its social comment is pertinent to the role of education today. "For the first time I had passed the mark which was some sort of great divide: there were those females who had to be looked after by others, usually males, and those who could look after themselves and their dependants. At last, I believed I had graduated to the latter category" .

The delightful cover shows Maggie West as a toddler, striding towards the camera, disregarding what is behind her. A personality trait that persists.