Virginia Nicholson has now reached the decade of her own childhood in her intimate tour of 20th-century women’s lives. She describes here how her research into the 1950s often felt like time travel, taking her back to a lost world of Spangles, holiday camps and coronation chicken. There is certainly warmth in her curiosity as she delves into the stories of her mother’s generation. She is as adept at recreating the daily life of a lesbian debutante as of a communist Cambridge undergraduate or a working-class woman whose life is transformed by the arrival of a hire-purchase fridge.
These are the kinds of contrasts that characterise this book, which takes us from Butlins holiday camps to Egypt during the Suez crisis, and from the Miss World pageant inaugurated at the Festival of Britain to a brothel where the prostitutes were branded with the name of the pimp tattooed on their left breasts. We witness the nightclub hostess Ruth Ellis murdering her lover and see a beauty queen rejecting an offer of marriage from a reactionary suitor and becoming a TV presenter instead. The husbands and lovers of the female cast also demonstrate great disparity. Set against the husband who confiscates his wife’s pearls when she uses the word “bloody” is the man who lovingly prepares each one of his baby’s bottles of milk.
Some of the cast is now familiar in the public eye. There is the young Joan Bakewell donning tight black trousers and shivering in unheated lecture halls at Cambridge, determined to meet everyone, do everything and be “perpetually in love”. Bakewell is one of several now well-known figures to appear in Nicholson’s panorama of Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.
Here we see Constance Spry masterminding the flower arrangements, Jean Metcalfe broadcasting from inside Buckingham Palace and Mary Whitehouse making her first appearance on Woman’s Hour with a speech asking how ordinary women could take the new Queen as their model, putting her dedication into washing up and cooking. Further from the public eye is a young teacher eating only tinned food in order to save up for a television on which to watch the spectacle, girls waiting eagerly in the rain for a sight of their queen, and women in Scotland dismissing the whole escapade as Hanoverian propaganda.
Nicholson’s are not books with explicit arguments, any more than the parallel volumes by David Kynaston are, but as in Kynaston themes emerge. She is concerned to remind us how difficult a time this was for women. The 1942 Beveridge report, in most respects a blueprint for a new equal society, explicitly frowned on married women working when they were so busy “ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race”. In 1951, only 22% of married women worked. Even by 1959 only 1.3% of girls left school to pursue higher education.
In the process, Nicholson’s judgments are rightly and often amusingly sharp. She is irritated by the “dysfunctional” attitude towards high-heeled footwear and the enthusiasm for that “impractical badge of female bondage”, the skimpy apron. And she is outraged by the lack of sex education (“now you’re a woman, take care of your three ‘Fs’: your feet, face and fanny” was typical advice), by the self-help manuals on how to trap your man (never talk about yourself, never beat men at games), and by the sexual incompetence displayed by the men once trapped (“I don’t know what an orgasm is!” is a frequent refrain from the wives).
Sometimes psychological nuances are lost in the briskness of the judgments. Nicholson suggests that in the “male-dominated marketplace” of the 1950s, prostitutes existed on the same spectrum as beauty queens; that the myth that beauty made you “Somebody” was as worthless as the diamante diadem awarded to the winners. But wasn’t it more complicated for the girls involved? Even for more liberated women, sexual attractiveness can be crucial to self-definition; these women were discovering their own desires at the same time as they were arousing those of others.
But though there is not space for complex psychological analysis, there is space for intimacy. Nicholson is unusual among social historians in portraying personal experience in novelistic detail. Her skill as an interviewer leaves her subjects revealing long-kept secrets and her flair as a writer makes us care about these young women and what happens to them. We care enough that when Nicholson portrays the reunion between a mother and the daughter she was forced to give up for adoption, it is tremendously moving. “See, the tears are coming now,” the mother tells Nicholson. “I’ve carried that grief in my heart, and in the body, I’ve carried it around with me all that time.”
Lara Feigel is the author of The Love-charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s is published by Viking (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £13.59
