10 British women who defied 1950s stereotypes
Not all women of the 1950s were pearl-clutching clones of TV's ubermom Donna Reed or first lady Mamie Eisenhower.
In Her Brilliant Career, Rachel Cooke, a journalist for London's Observer, celebrates 10 British women who defy the stereotype of the prim and perfect 1950s woman with a book that reveals the challenges, failures, triumphs and sex lives of those who came of age during World War II by defying society's expectations.
It is Cooke's first book, and she falls victim to a common weakness of becoming so besotted with her subjects and her copious research that she feels the need to share it all with the reader, in voluminous detail and footnotes that evoke the down-the-rabbit hole feeling you get when surfing the Internet: How did I get here?
In the profile of Margery Fish, author of a seminal gardening book, We Made a Garden, Cooke feels the need to reveal that her ailing husband began writing a daily "throat diary" to record "the number of times he brought up phlegm." Rachel, enough already!
Cooke's subjects are writers of movies, cookbooks and gardening tomes; an architect, an archaeologist, a race car driver, a judge and a journalist. They dodged sexism, pawing male co-workers and the shortages and deadly bombing attacks of World War II. A few had a happy so-called "traditional" home life, but most juggled lovers of both sexes with husbands, children (often shipped to boarding school) and work.
This is a British book that may confound non-Anglophiles with phrases like "taking silk" – becoming a senior lawyer -- that will have you hanging on Google for translations. But the stories of Queens Counsel Rose Heilbron (whose tough yet "ladylike" approach to the law resembles America's Supreme Court associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes and race car driver and burlesque theater owner Sheila van Damm particularly resonate.
The men and women, loves and losses that shaped them are a fascinating reminder of how the choices we make both imprison and free us.
Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties
By Rachel Cooke
Harper, 311 pp.
2 stars out of four