The Story of Women in the 1950s (book review)

[ismnotwasm]

Sounds interesting

Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s
Virginia Nicholson
Viking/Penguin 526pp £16.99
Exactly who were the ‘perfect wives’ of the 1950s? Were they the drably dressed women still queuing for food up to a decade after the Second World War had ended? Or were they sprightly looking females in frilly pinnies, manically waving a feather duster and serving up ‘delicious’ meals to their husbands?

Following her probes into the lives of women after the First World War and their roles in the Second, Virginia Nicholson moves forward into a decade that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves. Sandwiched between the privations and sacrifices of the 1940s and the affluent excesses of the ‘swinging sixties’, the fifties have long been regarded as a dull decade, when Britain was struggling to rebuild a devastated and shabby country and ‘face the future’, in the words of the Labour Party’s 1945 election slogan. For many women they were years of frustration at wartime gains lost, whereas others nursed a profound desire to return to the certainties of their pre-war lives. But for both the future was to prove circumscribed.

Women might have had the vote on the same terms as men since 1929, but for most that was pretty well the limit of their equality: working women were paid much less than men and despite the responsibilities and sheer hard graft many had endured in wartime, were still regarded as submissive and inferior beings. Educational opportunities were limited. The 1944 Education Act was supposed to give everyone ‘parity of esteem’, but that is not how it worked out. Many teachers and parents had narrow expectations for girls whose destiny was to be marriage, a home and a family, with work just an interim measure between leaving school and walking down the aisle, rather than a career. Just 1.2 per cent of women went to university in the 1950s.

In many cases, a woman’s lot seems to have hardly improved by marriage. Imagining wives to be fulfilled by having an easy-to-clean Formica worktop and a twin-tub washing machine, husbands could be harsh taskmasters, most regarding running the home and parenting solely as a woman’s responsibility, expecting meals ready when they returned from work, making all the household decisions of consequence and largely continuing to inhabit a separate sphere of pubs and football.
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[CTyankee]

1. As a young girl in the 50s I experienced this, altho my parents had as much

expectations for me as my brother for a college education. The sad reality was that this expectation really impeded women's intellectual advancement. What a hard slog that was! When the male Ivy League schools finally opened enrollment to women it was a big deal. The 7 Sisters women's colleges, founded to counter the male Ivies that denied them entry to their undergraduate college, were pressured to do the same. My daughter went to one, Mt. Holyoke, that refused to not be a woman's school. I think Smith College does as well. Women, it seems, thrive better in an all woman college experience than in a co-ed one. But my daughter's 3 daughters want nothing to do with their mom's alma mater. Sad but I get it...

[AuntPatsy]

2. Interesting article, I have heard many stories from my grandmother