Katharine Whitehorn
The Revolution’s Near
Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s
By Virginia Nicholson
Viking 526pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
The Fifties are too often spoken of as though they were just a damp patch between the battlefields of the Forties and the fairground of the Sixties. In fact, they were far more interesting than that in many ways, as this admirable book about women in the Fifties makes clear. The only thing I would quarrel with is the title. To be a perfect wife and have an ideal home may have been all that the women’s magazines suggested a girl should aspire to, but in practice she might find her way to being any number of things, from air hostess to lawyer to redcoat at Butlin’s – which may sound negligible but was a high-powered job.
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