I couldn't watch much of Bletchley Cir. I can't watch a lot of the more realistic 50s and 60s period tv shows because of how trapped the women are. Even if some characters break out of it, I just find it so claustrophobic to view.
I was reading today about a Chemist, who in fact won the Nobel Prize (in 1963), but who worked for years attached to her husband's lab because no one would hire her. Eventually she was given her own lab and office, but not paid. Only in 1960 was she actually given a lab, a title, and a salary.
There's an article in the Times today about an old woman, a legitimate artist, meaning she had training and talent, whose life -- raising step-children and nursing a sick husband -- caused her to put her work on the back burner for decades. Now for the last thirteen years, she has been on fire. She filled a New Jersey suburban house with art work. She has had only a little luck getting things into galleries, but an appraiser said, "'She’s no amateur housewife painter. Her style is very confident and quite good, but she never had the contacts to promote her into the prominent galleries.'" She probably missed her moment to have some kind of modest but meaningful success, the opportunity to be relevant. I don't know.
Anyway, the Masters and Johnson show on Showtime, Mad Men, all those -- even though there are powerful women breaking through barriers, just seeing how claustrophobic it was is not my idea of entertainment. And with Bletchley, you get the dreary world of Post-War England too. Just too much. I felt like I couldn't breathe.
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