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.

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Juliet Gardiner is a historian and broadcaster and a former editor of History Today.

Excellent readable history of women in Britain in the 1950's.