Apparently we’re going to a demo. I’ve seen pictures of demos in the newspapers of course – people marching down the street, holding banners and bits of cardboard with signs on them… But this demo sounded like it was just for women. I didn’t get it.

Jan Packard starts a diary because she is bored, then suddenly finds there is such a lot happening around her. Everyone seems to be changing and doing things she never expected. Her mum is attending consciousness raising meetings, her best friend has gone boy crazy, she discovers her older brother was a draft dodger during the Vietnam war, and there is protest and politics everywhere. It’s the 70s.

I picked this book up hoping to get a Mondayitis from it but instead I feel there are much bigger issues which I can’t deal with using Mondayitis. So many changes stem from the 1960s and 1970s and this book illustrates some of them beautifully.

The Vietnam War was highly debated and there was one major difference between the return of the soldiers from the Vietnam War and both World Wars; the soldiers from both World Wars were welcomed back and feted, after the Vietnam War the soldiers were barely welcome in the country. They didn’t have a parade down the middle of any street and in many cases were villified just for doing what they’d been told and going to fight. Many of them ended up with long-standing ill health from the chemicals sprayed to defoliate the countryside (these chemicals caused many problems for the Vietnamese and the areas that were sprayed but this isn’t dealt with in the book). Some ended up with PTSD which was not recognised nor dealt with for years.

Women received the short end of the stick on so many counts. Things were starting to change, in 1961 The Pill was introduced to Australia finally giving women the luxury of planning pregnancies. We’d been able to vote for 60 or 70 years depending on which state you lived in and whether you owned property, but if you happened to teach things were challenging when you got married as you suddenly lost all your tenure and other rights; you were expected to stop teaching and look after your new husband. That probably explains why some of my female teachers in the 1960s and and early ’70s weren’t married. If you happened to work and were married the wife was expected to do all the housework and look after the husband and the kids.

Both of these issues were looked at from the point of view of a pre-teen whose mum was a teacher until she married. Jan’s mum also decided to get a job during this book and the ramifications within the family of this are examined.

I read this book a week and a half ago and it’s fresh enough in my mind that I’ve written all of this only opening it once to check if Jan’s mother was a teacher before she married.

This book can be found in the junior section of the library and while it’s aimed at pre-teen I feel it’s good enough to be a good starting point for many discussions on so many levels. If you’re looking at any of the following issues in class or discussion groups then I do recommend it at any level, even year 12 or adult classes:

• Vietnam War: conscription, draft dodgers, returnees and their health
• Women’s Issues coming to the forefront
• Mothers returning to work and the ramifications within the family
• Keeping secrets, what does it do to the family when they’re exposed
• Blurting out whatever’s on your mind, sometimes it’s a good thing
• Opening up Pandora’s Box