Take Five: Me and Nancy Drew
by Mary McHugh
I like to walk early in the morning when it’s still quiet, before the day has started on its noisy way. The other day as I was walking down the hill in a shady, peaceful part of my suburban neighborhood, I heard the sound of a car coming up the road toward me. And there, driving a little yellow roadster, was Nancy Drew. She looked exactly like the favorite heroine of my childhood - a pretty but strong face, sunglasses, blond hair blowing in the breeze, and a determined look, as if she were on her way to solve a crime. I smiled all the way down the hill.
I had gobbled up the Nancy Drew books as fast as the conglomerate of writers called Carolyn Keene could grind them out when I was a little girl. I remembered Nancy and her best friends, Bess and George, her boyfriend Ned and her perfect father, Carson Drew. I loved Nancy because she was so feisty and independent and didn’t let anything get in her way. She was calm, level-headed, always cool in a crisis. She was well-mannered and considerate, but she was so smart she could always figure out who committed the crime before the police did.
After I saw Nancy Drew on my walk, I re-read one of her books, “The Secret in the Old Attic,” published in 1944, and I still liked her. Even if she did “blush to the roots of her hair” when Ned Nickerson looked intently at her, he didn’t even appear in the book until the last few pages when he rescued her from a deadly tarantula. Until then, she handled bushy-haired intruders, survived a poison gas attack, rescued a seven-year-old girl who would have to live in poverty for the rest of her life if Nancy didn’t solve the mystery of the secret in the attic.
Nancy could do anything, and keep her sense of humor through it all. I think I loved those books so much because there were very few strong, independent women to look to for inspiration in the thirties when I was a little girl. There were Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, and that was about it. I was a budding feminist, but there wasn’t much encouragement for me in those days, I can tell you. When I told my father I wanted to grow up to be an engineer like him, he laughed and said, “Girls can’t be engineers!” “Why not?” I asked. “Because men couldn’t swear in the office,” he said.
Nothing much had changed by the time I graduated from college in 1950. I worked for Life magazine looking up statistics for the advertising department, and when I told the woman in the personnel department I wanted to be a writer, she laughed and said, “All our writers are men. If you had worked for a newspaper for a couple of years, you might be able to get a job as a researcher.” I accepted all this (why?) until Betty Friedan wrote that book and I realized that things didn’t have to be this way. I was raising two little girls by then, and while I loved being their mother, I knew there was something else out there.
I started writing for magazines, and in 1973 I got a contract to write one of the first feminist books for Praeger Publishers. I’m embarrassed to tell you it was called “The Woman Thing,” because that’s what the sales department said it should be called. My book was a look at the changes in society since “The Feminine Mystique” came out in 1963, covering everything from art to business. It actually was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review (“does an admirable job of condensing and highlighting advancing opportunities for women today”), but I was so naive that I thought most books were reviewed in The Times. My editor gently enlightened me: “Mary, your book got reviewed because one of the editors on the Book Review is sleeping with one of the p.r. women at the publisher’s.” So much for changing the world.
Even so, I would gladly have reverted to those sexist times when my book came out last year. I would have given my soul to be reviewed in The New York Times. It seems odd even to be writing about feminism in the year 2000. My daughter listens politely when I talk about the bad old days, but she doesn’t really care, and my impression now is that it’s a ho-hum topic for younger women. But Nancy Drew still draws a crowd. Young girls in my 11-year-old grandson’s class read those books. Nancy may be overshadowed by Harry Potter for the moment (I love him, too), but our Nancy will always be there, forging ahead, showing the way, fearlessly leading us into new adventures.Were you a Nancy Drew fan? Did she have an effect on your life? Please write Senior Women and tell me about it.
Nancy's 'Official' Site - there's one version for adults and one for children.
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