Ahead of International Women’s Day on 8 March, the historian picks the best writing about an era when females were not expected to have an independent identity outside men

It has taken me four years to research and write Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes – the Story of Women in the 1950s. After tracking three decades of the 20th century, at last I’ve arrived within my own lifetime. Actually, I was only five years old when the 50s ended, so the memories are scanty. But even at that age the flawless, impossibly-proportioned models featured in my mother’s copies of Vogue undoubtedly embodied my idea of female perfection.

So underpinning all the stories that 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 that they fell short of perfection. Women whose reality never matched up to their aspirations. And whose actions and assumptions were governed by the idea that women have no independent identity outside men.

Here is a list of 10 books – some fact, some fiction – which put flesh on the bones of that narrative.

1. The Years of Grace, edited by Noel Streatfeild

This eye-opener on postwar female aspirations was published in 1950 as a manual for “awkward age” girls. If you thought female body image was a contemporary problem, think again. “I want you to be lovely in every way …” is followed by a roll-out of prescriptions for perfection. Advice includes how to have perfect underwear, and how to be as perfect as Princess Margaret. There’s a chapter on careers too, though naturally, “the best career for every woman is, of course, taking care of her husband and home”.

2. Her Brilliant Career by Rachel Cooke

This book is fun – and a revelation. We all recognise the cliche of the perfect 1950s housewife, batch-baking in her frilly apron. The image was prevalent, and it set up thousands of women for failure. Cooke successfully challenges the stereotype by producing 10 fascinating mini-biogs of extraordinary women who couldn’t or wouldn’t conform to it. Her subjects include an architect, a film director, an archaeologist and a rally driver.

3. Small Island by Andrea Levy

This indelibly impressive novel excavates the roots of Britain’s postwar multicultural society. When I came to research the period, immigrant women I spoke to told me “we thought England was the Mother Country”. In Small Island, Hortense Joseph discovers, like so many of them, cold, fear and hostility. But there is another side to the story. Some Jamaican women I interviewed felt released from the restraints of their strict religious upbringing. For one, arrival in the UK in the late ‘50s felt like being let loose “in a candy shop”.

4. Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s by Stephanie Spencer

This became my go-to book for authoritative facts and analysis of life for women in the 1950s. Spencer’s research is admirable, her reading wide, her sources impeccable, her notes sections positively inspiring, and her conclusions reasoned. Spencer is a university academic, and this isn’t a book for the general reader – I read it so you don’t have to. It was also through Spencer that I found out about the existence 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 Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes by Fiona MacCarthy



Fiona MacCarthy was one of the debs, when in 1958, the final Palace Presentation took place. Last Curtsey comes from a genre I love – a memoir rooted in the personal, but that reaches beyond to illuminate an era. You can almost taste the Coronation chicken, which, as she says, was the staple diet of upper-class entertaining in the 50s. This is the story of a dying breed – a world of chatelaines, ladies retiring to the drawing room while their husbands passed the port, of girls in ballgowns crying in the lavatory, of curtseying lessons and fork lunches. Wonderful, revealing stuff.

6. A Fine Day for a Hanging by Carol Ann Lee

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ruth Ellis. Photograph: Popperfoto

The story of women in the 1950s would not be complete without telling the bitter tale of the nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis, who in 1955 became the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Carol Ann Lee’s sympathetic disentangling of the evidence produces much new material and gives an account of Ellis that today would have spared her the noose. Probably abused as a child, she was certainly on the receiving end of snobbery, bullying, violence. Lee also points out that she was discriminated against for being a woman who not only needed but wanted to pursue ambitions outside the home.

7. Hidden Lives, A Family Memoir by 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 social history rolled into one told me more about the changes in 20th-century women’s lives than any general history ever could. Forster’s teenage years coincided with the 1950s, and I mined her vivid details of, for example, laundry work, hire-purchase, and trying to get into a university. Hidden Lives is also a celebration. “Everything, for a woman, is better now, even if it is not as good as it could be.

8. A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

Delaney broke the mould for women playwrights with this tender, funny, gritty play set in her native Salford. Her heroine, Jo, spoke with a new voice: strong, brave and persuasive. Nobody else at this time (1958) – let alone 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 Theatre revived A Taste of Honey. Jeanette Winterson wrote fervently in the programme of a hero: “Shelagh Delaney is the start of the possible”.

9. The Village by Marghanita Laski

This wonderful Romeo-and-Juliet novel was published in 1952, and is an example of how social historians should turn to fiction from time to time, to get true insights into the past. Laski paints a painfully well-observed picture of middle-class pretensions. But above all she writes beautifully about love in the period of postwar transition, when – after a relative suspension of hierarchy, and women’s brief release from domesticity “for the duration” – home counties Britain subsided into its former petty snobberies, and women retreated into the home.

10. Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth



Narrative is the driving force in my type of social history. In the early stages of research for my book I read Worth’s vivid memoir of East End poverty-and-gynaecology, and thought what a wonderful strand her “‘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 stiletto heels to bombsites, seamed stockings to slap-up weddings – not to mention postwar obstetrics. So I’m not complaining.

• Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes – the Story of Women in the 1950s by Virginia Nicholson is published by Viking and is available from the Guardian bookshop for £13.59