I Meant to be a Lawyer: A Family Memoir

Janet Cohen actually meant to be a barrister and to swank around impounding oil tankers like her mentors at Cambridge, but her plans did not survive the first contact with the twin enemies of a male dominated society and the need to fit her life around love and marriage. This is the story, familiar she hopes, to many capable women, of the zig-zags necessary to find and keep a successful career and a loving husband and family. She tells it like it was, the often desperate and only partially successful efforts to keep a career and a marriage and later a family all going at once. This is a story of a long and unusual working life starting with scenario writing for the US Department of Defence in the Vietnam war and moving through a career in the civil service to a merchant bank and multiple non- executive directorships, including a spell at the Ministry of Defence and a long run as at the London Stock Exchange Group, to the House of Lords as Labour Peer and the people she met on the way from Tiny Rowland to Margaret Thatcher and John Major to (Lord) George Robertson. Her career story is interspersed with a deeply personal account of her family of origin, a long and loving marriage and the difficulties and pleasures of rearing three lively talented children all of whom refused to go anywhere near any career favoured by either of their parents.