Her Brilliant Career, By Rachel Cooke

‘These are tales, above all, of derring-do. Records will be broken, and hearts’

What do we think of when we think of the 1950s? For Rachel Cooke, there are two distinct versions which live on in the public memory. Depending on your point of view, you might look back to the ‘sepia Fifties, all Linoleum and best china’, or instead ‘the Technicolor Fifties, all atomic prints and Swedish-inspired modernism’. What retrospectives tend to agree on is the ‘monolithic’ figure of Fifties women: ‘a compliant, smiling creature who knows little or nothing of sex, and stands no chance at all of getting to the top of advertising or any other career’. This thoroughly researched and wickedly funny book aims to re-examine the role of women in that decade through the lives of ten women who achieved fame or notoriety in their chosen fields.

As Cooke herself acknowledges, Her Brilliant Career does not attempt to rewrite history, making the Fifties into a feminist paradise. She points out that in 1951, 75% of adult women were married, and women made up only 30% of the workforce in 1956. Although Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English for the first time in 1953, abortion was still illegal, and it was necessary to provide a marriage certificate in order to be fitted with a diaphragm. The women Cooke writes about are outliers, trailblazers; their stories are definitely not representative of everyday experience. The desired response is ‘fuck yeah’ – a typical story might end with the heroine ‘fleeing to the Black Sea on a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince’.

The cast of Her Brilliant Career are a diverse bunch, taking in gardeners, lawyers, rally car drivers, cooks, architects and more. Some were professional women, some came to prominence after their retirement. They come from a mix of social backgrounds, though all are white. Many were married (some repeatedly), some were widowed, others were more-or-less openly lesbian or bisexual. Mainly they had been empowered in some way by the opportunities offered to them during World War II, which they were determined to make the most of later. Some, such as Joan Werner Laurie, the magazine editor and founder of SHE, feel rather modern in their sensibilities (she claimed at one point ‘not more than twelve readers a month cancel their subscriptions because of their horror at my lack of refinement in choosing the contents… we have even told our readers exactly what a bidet is for’). Others, such as the gardener Margery Fish and the notable lawyer Rose Heilbron, are more obviously tied to their decade (though I do have a soft spot for Heilbron, who took the lead in a number of controversial murder trials, but once told a newspaper ‘I am serious about my career, but that does not mean I shall give up dancing’.)

While none of the women Cooke discusses are exactly household names today, they are not necessarily forgotten either. The most contentious legacy probably belongs to the pioneering Brutalist architect Alison Smithson. A memorable figure with a ‘Russian-doll face and avant-garde clothes’, Smithson’s personality could be as confrontational as her architecture: her best-known works include The Economist building in London, and Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets, a housing estate which remains controversial today.

Others are slowly coming back into vogue. Film director Muriel Box had some big successes in her day, despite Cooke’s assertion that her ‘shots are prosaic, and her films want for pace and, sometimes, emotional truth’. Her 1957 film The Truth About Women has recently been released by the BFI (‘inexplicably’, Cooke says). Likewise, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes became a big name in the early Fifties, on a wave of popular enthusiasm for archaeology which even saw the game show Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? (in which experts tried to guess the purpose of random objects found in the British Museum) become a huge television success. Her quasi-pagan, vaguely erotic geological history of Britain, A Land, went into several editions on its release, but was then forgotten, until a 2012 re-release with an introduction by Robert Macfarlane.

Aside from the ten potted biographies, Cooke also provides copious footnotes, containing additional biographical information, recipes and the like, and useful appendices on Fifties fashion and notable books written by women during the decade. There are times when she goes a little overboard on the technical details of gardening or architecture, but the reader is always bought round by a witty comment. Discussing the horrors of ration-era cookbooks, Cooke says ‘I remain unconvinced that anyone ever cooked a crow for dinner – though I hope the thought of its black feathers shocked you’. Of another character, she observes that ‘his doctors, as they were wont to do, had given him a year to live’. She has an eye for quirky and memorable details, for example the law banning the movement of flowers by rail in 1943, which led to an outbreak of smuggling (as Lonesome Reader notes, if he’d been alive then, Elton John would probably have become the Al Capone of floristry).

If Her Brilliant Career doesn’t require us to completely re-evaluate whatever ideas we might have had about the Fifties, it does show that social eras are rarely as homogenous and immutable as they seem from a distance. Whether these precursors are remembered by posterity is another matter. There’s a lot of information in this book, and I’m not entirely sure what to do with all of it – although I enjoyed reading about Muriel Box and Margery Grey, I don’t feel particularly tempted to seek out their films or gardening books. Instead of a conclusion, Cooke offers the appendices, which are perhaps more useful, with some gems like Barbara Pym to be found in the fiction section. In some cases, the lack of conclusion could be frustrating - but maybe, now and then, it’s good to read a book which just makes you say ‘fuck yeah!’.