Shirley Conran: ‘Maths is a feminist issue’

When I arrive to meet Shirley Conran at Bibendum, a west London restaurant (her choice), the author of Lace, a feminist bonkbuster novel that took the world by storm in the 1980s, reaches beneath the table to hand me a parcel. I take it with some trepidation. At least two previous interviewers, I have learned from my research, were presented with white lace shorts. But my parcel, it turns out, contains only compendious details of Maths Action, a campaign launched by Conran that is trying to persuade schoolgirls that maths is essential if a woman is to get by in life.

Though girls are as likely as boys to get at least a grade C in GCSE maths, they are less likely to get As and A*s for maths and only half as likely to take the subject to A-level. This disparity has bothered educationists for more than 40 years. Why does Conran think she can make a difference? “You have to get them enthused by maths before puberty,” she says. “And you have to improve maths books. I went to a bookshop and found that maths books were hopeless. Even the fun ones wouldn’t appeal to girls because they’re full of creepy-crawly things like spiders and caterpillars.”

After consulting dozens of maths teachers – “I’ve paid them hundreds of thousands of pounds,” Conran says grandly – she has produced a four-step maths course, downloadable as free ebooks from Apple iTunes and specifically aimed at girls, called Money Stuff. She argues that girls have to be convinced that maths will give them power and control. “Maths,” she argues, “is a feminist issue.” Her pitch is unashamedly materialistic. “I asked lots of women if they want to be rich,” she tells me. “None of them said yes; they just wanted enough for a kitchen extension. I was irritated that their ambitions were so low.”

In 1975, in her book Superwoman, an inspiration to a generation of young women, Conran wrote: “Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom.” Now in Money Stuff, she says: “Life’s too short to be short of money.”

She originally intended to write a conventional book but, after her elder son bought her an iPad, she decided ebooks were the ideal format because they allow interactivity and “an iPad looks like the old school slate”.

And this is maths as you’ve never seen it before. Everywhere there are chocolates, cats, shoes and items of underwear mingling with the equations. The ebooks have pictures of Beyoncé, Adele, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Moss plus dozens of girls shopping, jumping, climbing, sailing, sunbathing and modelling. “Models need maths,” the course declares.

The message is that maths is the gateway to a glamorous and active lifestyle. “When you know your numbers,” says one of the ebooks, “you will have more money to spend on … music and sport, films and frivolity, fashion and flowers, pretty underwear, cafes and chocolates … fun in the sun holidays!!!” The course follows the GCSE syllabus, but relates it to real life, as Conran sees it.

Calculus and trigonometry, however, are out because, an introduction explains, “you don’t need them to buy an ice-cream, work in the average business or check your investment portfolio”.

When Conran proposed her maths course for girls and successfully sought support (but not funding) from the Department for Education, many experts on maths education pooh-poohed the idea. “One of them said: ‘I suppose it will be printed on pink paper’,” she recalls.

What explains girls’ resistance to maths? Conran blames religion and the medical profession, and quotes an anthropological study, commissioned by Maths Action [pdf] and published in September, in support. Written by Samantha Callan, of the Centre for Social Justice, it argues that “mathematics was seen as a study of the divinely ordained rules governing the universe” and that the taboo against women becoming mathematicians followed naturally from that against their becoming priests.

Nevertheless, during the medieval and Tudor periods, women commonly took an active role in managing and deploying the family’s economic resources. Only with the rise of capitalism did business become separated from the domestic sphere so that, although women often managed the household finances, money-making and ultimate control of resources became the male domain. By Victorian times, the middle classes considered it vulgar to discuss money in the home, and a woman’s ignorance of such matters was regarded as a mark of good breeding. The medical profession argued that too much thought about maths and money could upset a woman’s delicate constitution, disrupting her menstrual cycle and, as Conran pithily puts it, “shrivelling her womb”.

Conran herself started life with firmly negative attitudes towards maths. The oldest of six children whose father, a violent alcoholic, made a fortune from dry cleaning, she went to St Paul’s girls’ school, one of London’s top fee-charging schools. Aged 12, she faked stomach pain to get out of a maths lesson and landed herself with two months in hospital and a lost appendix (“I didn’t dare tell my mother the truth”). Only when Lace, subsequently turned into an American TV mini-series, made her a multimillionaire – rated the 84th richest woman in Britain in 1994 – did she fully grasp the importance of maths as a tool for control. “I had this fortune and I couldn’t understand how I was losing so much money,” she says. “I was at the mercy of the financial services industry.”

But by then, she was already accustomed to fending for herself and was aware that the poorer you are, the more important it is to manage money properly. Though her father sent her to finishing school in Switzerland – where, alongside cooking, sewing, dancing, French and Spanish, she was taught what to do if her knickers fell down in public – he drew the line at art school and cut off her funding. She paid her own way through Chelsea School of Art (now part of the University of the Arts London) by modelling, selling paintings, waitressing in a coffee bar and doing PR for a jewellery firm. The coffee bar was owned by Terence Conran, who later founded Habitat, the most iconic retail launch of the 1960s. She married him in 1955 and went to work for him at Conran Fabrics. Suspecting him of infidelity with his secretary while she was pregnant with their second child, she hired a private detective. They divorced in 1962 and she left her job with just two weeks’ money.

She soon found other work, becoming a design consultant at the Daily Mail. She then moved to the Observer’s women’s pages – “you could write what you liked in those because nobody on the staff read them” – before returning to the Mail as women’s editor and launching its Femail section. In 1970, however, after being in hospital with viral pneumonia, she contracted a chronic condition that was labelled years later as ME. As she frequently reminds you, she suffers from ME and a variety of allergies to this day. She spends, she reckons, about three months a year in bed in the dark.

Sceptics may (and indeed did) say that, as a single woman who combined raising two young sons with full-time work in an era when such things were almost unheard of, she simply tried to do too much. If so, her response was magnificent. Heavily in debt, feeling chronically ill and tired, living in a tiny flat, she turned her own hard-won experiences into a book – not, as it might have been 40 years later, a misery memoir but a practical, cheerful and beautifully written guide to coping with seemingly impossible demands. It is hard now to believe that Superwoman – which was borrowed, if not owned, by just about every middle-class woman under 40 – was once thought to have struck a blow for feminism. The chapter headings included How to be a Housemaid and How to be a Laundrymaid. It contained no hint that anything should be expected of men. But its core message was that there was nothing wrong with women cutting a few corners. If they saw housework as the background to their lives not as the centrepiece, and ignored “the milk and honey standards of the impossible TV housewife”, women could cope with anything. At the time, nothing else like it existed.

Next came Lace, blazing a trail for the following decade. It began as a sex manual for teenage girls but turned into a novel that, more or less, fulfilled the same function, releasing women from Victorian inhibitions about sexual gratification just as she had once released them from outdated notions about domesticity. “When I wrote it,” she observed in an introduction to the novel’s republication in 2012, in which the publisher at last allowed her to use the word masturbation, “the average man thought the clitoris was a Greek hotel”.

Now, aged 83, she has come up with the maths campaign, a third attempt to release women from ancient taboos. It’s probably her most ambitious. I am not entirely sure, judging from the contents of Money Stuff, that she is quite abreast of modern thinking on gender stereotypes. Moreover, though she advised the Department for Education on getting girls into Stem subjects for some years, her knowledge of this country and its state schools must be scant: after the success of Lace, she lived in New York and the south of France for 20 years and, having herself been educated privately, she sent her sons to fee-charging Bryanston in Dorset (paid for by her ex-husband).

But she is brilliant at creating glamour and buzz – Money Stuff was launched at an Aston Martin showroom in Park Lane, London, with sponsorship from Moët and Tiffany – she is awesomely well connected, and her writing, judging from the ebooks, is as witty and fluent as ever. My money is on a third Conran triumph.