A career for Rachel?

I’ve read a lot of careers books in the last few years, but I’m beginning to wonder whether any of them have been as influential as ‘A Career for Kathy’ (Golden Pleasure Books, 1966) which was in my Christmas stocking when I was seven.

I suddenly recalled this book the other day when talking with a friend about my working life. It popped into my thoughts out of nowhere, as I reflected on my early views of and engagement with the world of work.

I remember loving that book, but I had never before thought that the word ‘career’ in its title was so significant. I don’t mean in the trite way of ‘Isn’t it funny that I’ve become a career coach all these years later? Haha!’ I mean that it exposed something of work and how it operates, which was otherwise hidden to me at that point. And I was excited by it.

My father worked mainly at home, as a freelance lettering designer, and my mother didn’t go out to work. We also lived quite an isolated life in a small village outside a small rural town. And so my view of work was limited and skewed. I heard that other fathers went out to work, clean cut, clean shaven and wearing suits – what did they do?! My father had long hair and a beard and worked in cords at a drawing board in his study at the top of the house, listening to jazz. He was not to be disturbed. We knew, roughly, what he did, but we didn’t know that it wasn’t usual. My mother looked after the house and us, sighed and had headaches – all too usual, sadly.

But Nurse Kathy opened my eyes to another world, where women had a career (before marrying the ‘love interest’, of course), where you wore a uniform, you got trained, you got qualified – you became something – you followed a path, and you achieved what you set out to do.

Our working lives and our attitude towards them are affected by myriad things, some of which are more obvious than others, even when we take the time to reflect. In the general course of things, we may not see where these influences come from, or the weight that they carry – not necessarily in relation to what we chose or choose to do, but to how we feel about what we did, what we wish we had done, or what we could or should do now. Of course, there was a time that I wanted to be a nurse like Kathy. Fortunately for everyone, that time soon passed.

Oh, Nurse Kathy, I have to report that my career has been the very opposite of yours! Yet your story must have had sufficient resonance for me to have held on to it for the intervening 57 years, together with its sequel, ‘Junior Nurse’ (1967).

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Now here’s a question for you:

What did you read or see when you were young that shaped what you thought work looked like, and what you thought would excite you?

Image: Detail from front cover illustration of ‘A Career for Kathy’ (Golden Pleasure Books, 1966)