theguardian: by Katharine Whitehorn –
The 1950s are often talked about as if they held nothing much for women but typing, cooking and looking after children, when in fact they were an era of enormous progress for career women – British women anyway. This excellent book should go far towards setting the record straight, making it clear that although, in America, the wartime poster girl Rosie the Riveter was shoved firmly back into the kitchen from which she needed liberating by Betty Friedan, in Europe the picture was very different. Not perhaps for all women, but at least for a whole generation reaping the benefit of more and longer education. When Elaine Dundy, actress and novelist, arrived from America in 1949 she wrote of a “place where young people, besieged for six years of war, could finally see that they had a future” – which came to fruition in the 50s. Rachel Cooke, mostly renowned for her penetrating interviews, here looks back at a time when women’s lives were undergoing amazing changes and completely demolishes any notion that the 50s were a just a dull and domestic time for women.
