Wintergreen by Margaret Weise

Author:Margaret Weise
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women, childbirth, contraception, violence, hardship, early Australia
Publisher: Margaret Weise
Published: 2015-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six—Charlotte and Daisy

In England during 1933 women were continuing to rebel against the double standard of the patriarchal society. One of the famous blue-stockinged Pankhursts, Sylvia, made a purposeful decision to have a baby out of wedlock as a statement on women’s rights to control their bodies. Unwed on purpose rather than by accident, Sylvia flaunted her lack of ownership and her right to the freedom to make her own choices.

Family planning clinics were being established and birth control methods were more openly discussed between women—with their peers if not their daughters.

In Australian society no woman would have brought the wrath of its members down upon her head by making such an extreme decision as openly admitting to try to control her own fertility, let alone to choose to have a child out of wedlock. Women continued to marry in haste, either to the father or someone else who made himself available, obtain an abortion or have their babies adopted. Rarely was a woman brave enough to keep her child and front up to the world. Those who did often spent years teetering on the brink of insanity until the child grew up or relatives or the State took the child ‘for its own good.’

Enter Charlotte Reen into the world of choices, at sweet sixteen a similar age to our other heroines. Sixteen and seventeen were the age when a girl could make or break her life, making huge decisions that did not seem momentous at the time. An impulsive or unfortunate girl could affect her life for good or ill in a heartbeat, the consequences staying with her until her dying day. From the onset of fecundity, girls formed life-changing choices relating to sexual intercourse and childbearing although they did not always recognize the impact of split-second choices in their lives.

We recall Charlotte as Greta’s baby girl born from her impoverished act with a stranger, conceived in stealth to help buy Greta’s first daughter, Alexandra, (known as Alexis) a winter coat and shoes during the First World War. Charlotte was never told the story of her conception and birth, believing she was an afterthought, as her mother said evasively, a late addition to the family. If her brother Thomas and sister Alexis realized the timing was out of synchronicity— and neither was stupid—they never mentioned it to Charlotte or to each other.

Charlotte grew to maturity, if one can be called mature at sixteen, as a child adored. Other residents tolerated the circumstances surrounding her birth as an irony of Fate, an incident to be overlooked during the horrors inflicted upon ordinary Australians by the slaughter taking place on the other side of the planet.

Strange things happen in war years, things that had to be ignored for the survival of precious youngsters, few of whom had been born during the hard years when most of the beardless youths and eligible young men had gone away. To speak openly of the curiosity of various births would be to destroy precious young lives before they had begun.

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