It has taken me four years to research and write Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s. After tracing three decades of the 20th century, I finally got inside my own life. in reality, he was only five years old when he turned 50, so memories are scant. But even at that age, the immaculately proportioned, impeccable models featured in my mother’s fashion prints certainly embodied my idea of feminine perfection.
so behind all the stories my book tells, of everyday lives, of hopes and fears, from factory girls to debutantes, immigrants to beauty queens, is the prevailing notion of women who always felt they fell short of The perfection. women whose reality never lived up to their aspirations. and whose actions and assumptions were governed by the idea that women have no independent identity outside of men.
You are reading: Books about 1950s housewives
here is a list of 10 books, some fact, some fiction, that flesh out the bones of that narrative.
1. the years of grace, edited by noel streatfeild
This insight into postwar female aspirations was published in 1950 as a manual for girls of “awkward age.” If you thought female body image was a contemporary issue, think again. “I want you to be charming in every way…” is followed by an array of recipes for perfection. Tips include how to have the perfect underwear and how to be as perfect as princess margaret. there is also a chapter on careers, though of course “the best career for any woman is, of course, to take care of her husband and her home.”
2. her brilliant career by rachel cooke
This book is fun and a revelation. We all recognize the cliché of the perfect 1950s housewife, baking in her frilly apron. the image prevailed and set thousands of women up for failure. Cooke successfully defies the stereotype by producing 10 riveting mini-biographies of extraordinary women who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to it. his subjects include an architect, a film director, an archaeologist, and a rally driver.
See Also: Gore Vidal – Book Series In Order
3. small island by andrea levy
This indelibly impressive novel excavates the roots of Britain’s post-war multicultural society. when i came to research the period, the immigrant women i spoke to told me “we thought england was the mother country”. on a small island, hortense joseph discovers, like so many of them, cold, fear and hostility. but there is another side of the story. Some Jamaican women I interviewed felt liberated from the constraints of their strict religious upbringing. On the one hand, arriving in the UK in the late 1950s was like being carried away “in a candy store”.
4. gender, work and education in britain in the 1950s by stephanie spencer
This became my go-to book for hard facts and analysis of women’s lives in the 1950s. Spencer’s research is admirable, her wide reading, her sources impeccable, her note sections positively inspiring and their reasoned conclusions. Spencer is a college academic, and this is not a book for the general reader; I read it so you don’t have to. It was also through Spencer that I learned of a series of books published in the 1950s to help teenage girls choose a career, with glorious titles like Joanna in Advertising or Social Work for Jill.
5. Last Bow: The End of Fiona Maccarthy’s Debutantes
fiona maccarthy was one of the debutantes, when in 1958 the final presentation of the palace took place. the last bow comes from a genre I love: a memoir rooted in the personal, but reaching beyond to illuminate an era. You can almost taste the coronation chicken, which, as she says, was the staple diet of upper-class entertainment in the 1950s. This is the story of a dying breed: a world of castellanas, ladies who retire to the drawing room. while their husbands pass through the port, of girls in ball gowns crying in the bathroom, of curtsy lessons and fork lunches. wonderful and revealing things.
6. a good day to hang by carol ann lee
The history of women in the 1950s would not be complete without telling the bitter story of nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, who in 1955 became the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Carol Ann Lee’s sympathetic unraveling of the evidence yields much new material and accounts for Ellis who would have spared her noose today. she was probably abused as a child, she was certainly a victim of snobbery, bullying and violence. Lee also points out that she was discriminated against for being a woman that she not only needed but wanted to pursue ambitions outside of the home.
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7. Hidden Lives, Family Memoirs of Margaret Forster
i love forster’s books and she is one of my role models as a writer. Unsentimental, lucid, and loving, the authenticity of this memoir and the social story told me more about the changes in the lives of 20th-century women than any general story. Forster’s teenage years coincided with the 1950s, and I drew vivid details from, say, laundry work, hire-purchase, and trying to get into college. hidden lives is also a celebration. “everything, for a woman, is better now, even if it’s not as good as it could be.
8. a shelagh delaney honey flavor
Delaney broke the mold for female playwrights with this sweet, funny and gritty play set in her native Salford. her heroine, jo, spoke with a new voice: strong, brave and persuasive. no one else at this time (1958), least of all a woman, would have considered writing a play about a single mother, whose pregnant teenage daughter has a friendship with a gay man and a relationship with a black sailor. a year ago the national theater revived a taste of honey. Jeanette Winterson fervently wrote in A Hero Show: “Shelagh Delaney is the beginning of what is possible.”
9. the town of marghanita laski
This wonderful Romeo and Juliet novel was published in 1952 and is an example of how social historians must turn to fiction from time to time for factual information about the past. Laski paints a painfully well-observed picture of middle-class pretensions. but, above all, he writes beautifully about love in the post-war transitional period, when, after a relative suspension of hierarchy and the brief liberation of women from domestic life “for as long as it lasts,” the counties of British origin sank into their old petty snobbery and the women withdrew into the home.
10. call the jenniferworth midwife
narrative is the driving force in my kind of social story. In the early stages of research for my book, I read Worth’s vivid memoirs on poverty and East End gynecology, and thought what a wonderful thread his “story” would make in my book. But the BBC beat me to it. never mind, jenny agutter, miranda hart and the girls have whetted our nostalgic appetite for all things 1950s, from stilettos to bombed-out sites, seamed stockings to cuffed weddings, not to mention postwar obstetrics. so I’m not complaining.
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