'This is what I’m capable of when I let myself go’
Rachel Cooke, Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties
Virago, 368pp, £18.99, ISBN 9781844087402
reviewed by Samantha Ellis
I thought I knew what women did in the Fifties. They baked cupcakes, wearing pinnies and circle skirts. Or they went mad in the suburbs, as per Marilyn French’s epic soap opera of despair The Women’s Room (1977). But the ten women Rachel Cooke celebrates in this sparkling book did something else: they had careers.
Which took some doing. Women still couldn’t take out mortgages in their own name, and couldn’t get a diaphragm without showing a marriage certificate. They felt guilty about ‘stealing’ jobs from men who had come back from the war; faced with the wounded and disabled, one woman felt it would have been ‘indecent’ to ask for equality. When they did work, they were seen as unwomanly — like architect Alison Smithson, repeatedly called ‘difficult’ while her equally forthright husband and business partner never got tarred with the same brush. Smithson was reportedly exasperating and I wouldn’t have wanted to live in one of her chilly New Brutalist homes, but as Cooke writes, ‘visible women in male-dominated professions are often characterised as shrill, bossy, chippy, stubborn and complaining.’ (Note the present tense.)
Each of Cooke’s extraordinary woman gets an essay (though sisters-in-law Betty and Muriel Box share one, and another is devoted to lesbian trio Nancy Spain, Joan Werner Laurie and Sheila van Damm). The book ends with a short, vivid essay on Fifties fashion, and a list of ‘good and richly subversive novels by women’ — including one of my favourites, Antonia White’s bold, messy The Sugar House (1952). The essays can be read individually, but as a whole they build an unusual portrait of the decade via its career women.
Then, as now, it helped to have a man’s support. Smithson’s husband sounds like a dream, sharing the domestic work, as well as their business, equally. Film mogul Sydney Box also determinedly gave work to his wife Muriel (a director) and his sister Betty (a producer). Betty Box Office (her nickname says it all), was a glamourpuss who gleefully wore a white floor-length mink, ‘even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters — all five foot three inches of me.’ She brought the same breezy confidence to work: when she noticed that the guillotine scene of A Tale of Two Cities (1958) was spoiled by a bicycle, she decided against an expensive re-shoot because ‘if anyone in the audience had eyes dry enough to focus on the far right background, we had failed anyway.’ Muriel comes over as more anxious and earnest — and also more committed to directing films with a strong feminist agenda, like The Truth About Women (1957). And when Sydney (not so supportive after all) left her, she was saved by feminism. She co-founded Femina, Britain’s first feminist publishing house, and threw her energies into campaigning for women’s rights. She even married again.
Margery Fish’s career began after the death of her dictatorial husband, when she started taking her garden from regimented and manicured (his ideal) to vivid, crowded and harmonious (hers). Cooke mischievously suggests that the resulting book, We Made a Garden (1956), could have been titled A Gardener’s Revenge. It was a hit with gardeners elated they didn’t have to dig for victory any more, and Fish, at 64, found herself embarking on a career she could never have dreamed of. She relished every minute of it. That same relish drove cookbook writer Patience Gray, who introduced moules marinières and moussaka to a nation delighted to be free of rationing. She then decamped to Italy with a sexy sculptor, and grew ‘wizened’ and ‘witchy’, cooking over olive wood on a huge hearth. She threw what she gleaned into Honey From a Weed (1986), which pre-empted nose-to-tail eating, the slow food movement, the revival of peasant cooking and the whole organic, locavore shebang. Both these women loved their work.
But their paths to success were pretty idiosyncratic. Rose Heilbron QC, who had clear ambitions and set out to realise them, is a more obvious role model. And Cooke wants to give us role models. As she writes in her excellent introduction, ‘Polemical books that tell us how we might close the pay gap, become FTSE directors and put an end to sexual harassment at the office are all very fine and important, but the truth is that they are rarely much fun to read. I prefer the idea of role models, inspirational figures who make you want to cheer.’ So do I. So it’s heartening to read that when Heilbron became England’s first female judge in 1957, a crowd of ‘housewives and schoolgirls’ actually did turn up to cheer.
Even Heilbron didn’t march through her career the way a man might. When her mother died young, of cancer, she gave up, and helped her father for six months. Heartbreakingly, when she’d realised that her mother wouldn’t live to see her called to the bar, she’d appeared at her bedside in a hired wig and gown. Perhaps it was her mother’s delight that made Heilbron start her training again, and maybe it sustained her through the trials and setbacks to come; she was passed over again and again, but she kept going. And when being a woman was an advantage, she wasn’t afraid to use it. Like the heroine of Legally Blonde, she won a murder case by arguing that the accused could not have planned to start a fire in the night because she’d gone to bed in her curlers, and no woman would plan to be seen by neighbours and firemen with a head full of curlers. The defence worked partly because Heilbron herself always looked so fabulous. Of the women in this book, she seems to have had the happiest life — and with the help with of a husband who was as proud of her as her mother had been, she achieved an enviable work/life balance.
Journalist and broadcaster Nancy Spain, editor Joan Werner Laurie and racing car driver turned theatre impresario Sheila van Damm had a more turbulent domestic arrangement. Though their ménage á trois must have been joyous and nurturing at times, it also caused untold pain and chaos, especially to their children. It’s a great strength of this book that while actively seeking women ‘whose private lives were as modern as their professional lives’, Cooke doesn’t let admiration stop her writing devastatingly about the collateral damage.
When it comes to Jacquetta Hawkes, who was vilified for leaving her husband for playwright JB Priestley, Cooke speculates that she wrote best in emotional crisis. Her sensuous, ecstatic geological and archaeological history of Britain, A Land (1951), was written while married, in love with Priestley, and mourning another lover. Once she married again, her work got tamer — until at 70, she suddenly produced A Quest for Love (1980), a roman à clef generally agreed to be mawkish and loopy. Cooke reads it as a statement of ‘what might have been had its author dared to remain outside the establishment, had she not tamped down her emotions so definitively. Look, she is saying, this is what I’m capable of when I let myself go.’ It’s a generous reading, and a compelling one. So many of these women had their brilliant careers because they were willing and able to let go, to ignore guilt, to enjoy themselves. Their excitement is infectious — Cooke says she was ‘goggle-eyed, in awe’ as she researched this book and I read it the same way. It works, the way she wants it to, as ‘a kind of rallying call to the twenty-first-century battle-weary’ because it shows that for all its agonies, sometimes the battle can be fun.
Which took some doing. Women still couldn’t take out mortgages in their own name, and couldn’t get a diaphragm without showing a marriage certificate. They felt guilty about ‘stealing’ jobs from men who had come back from the war; faced with the wounded and disabled, one woman felt it would have been ‘indecent’ to ask for equality. When they did work, they were seen as unwomanly — like architect Alison Smithson, repeatedly called ‘difficult’ while her equally forthright husband and business partner never got tarred with the same brush. Smithson was reportedly exasperating and I wouldn’t have wanted to live in one of her chilly New Brutalist homes, but as Cooke writes, ‘visible women in male-dominated professions are often characterised as shrill, bossy, chippy, stubborn and complaining.’ (Note the present tense.)
Each of Cooke’s extraordinary woman gets an essay (though sisters-in-law Betty and Muriel Box share one, and another is devoted to lesbian trio Nancy Spain, Joan Werner Laurie and Sheila van Damm). The book ends with a short, vivid essay on Fifties fashion, and a list of ‘good and richly subversive novels by women’ — including one of my favourites, Antonia White’s bold, messy The Sugar House (1952). The essays can be read individually, but as a whole they build an unusual portrait of the decade via its career women.
Then, as now, it helped to have a man’s support. Smithson’s husband sounds like a dream, sharing the domestic work, as well as their business, equally. Film mogul Sydney Box also determinedly gave work to his wife Muriel (a director) and his sister Betty (a producer). Betty Box Office (her nickname says it all), was a glamourpuss who gleefully wore a white floor-length mink, ‘even if it did make me look like I was rolling along on casters — all five foot three inches of me.’ She brought the same breezy confidence to work: when she noticed that the guillotine scene of A Tale of Two Cities (1958) was spoiled by a bicycle, she decided against an expensive re-shoot because ‘if anyone in the audience had eyes dry enough to focus on the far right background, we had failed anyway.’ Muriel comes over as more anxious and earnest — and also more committed to directing films with a strong feminist agenda, like The Truth About Women (1957). And when Sydney (not so supportive after all) left her, she was saved by feminism. She co-founded Femina, Britain’s first feminist publishing house, and threw her energies into campaigning for women’s rights. She even married again.
Margery Fish’s career began after the death of her dictatorial husband, when she started taking her garden from regimented and manicured (his ideal) to vivid, crowded and harmonious (hers). Cooke mischievously suggests that the resulting book, We Made a Garden (1956), could have been titled A Gardener’s Revenge. It was a hit with gardeners elated they didn’t have to dig for victory any more, and Fish, at 64, found herself embarking on a career she could never have dreamed of. She relished every minute of it. That same relish drove cookbook writer Patience Gray, who introduced moules marinières and moussaka to a nation delighted to be free of rationing. She then decamped to Italy with a sexy sculptor, and grew ‘wizened’ and ‘witchy’, cooking over olive wood on a huge hearth. She threw what she gleaned into Honey From a Weed (1986), which pre-empted nose-to-tail eating, the slow food movement, the revival of peasant cooking and the whole organic, locavore shebang. Both these women loved their work.
But their paths to success were pretty idiosyncratic. Rose Heilbron QC, who had clear ambitions and set out to realise them, is a more obvious role model. And Cooke wants to give us role models. As she writes in her excellent introduction, ‘Polemical books that tell us how we might close the pay gap, become FTSE directors and put an end to sexual harassment at the office are all very fine and important, but the truth is that they are rarely much fun to read. I prefer the idea of role models, inspirational figures who make you want to cheer.’ So do I. So it’s heartening to read that when Heilbron became England’s first female judge in 1957, a crowd of ‘housewives and schoolgirls’ actually did turn up to cheer.
Even Heilbron didn’t march through her career the way a man might. When her mother died young, of cancer, she gave up, and helped her father for six months. Heartbreakingly, when she’d realised that her mother wouldn’t live to see her called to the bar, she’d appeared at her bedside in a hired wig and gown. Perhaps it was her mother’s delight that made Heilbron start her training again, and maybe it sustained her through the trials and setbacks to come; she was passed over again and again, but she kept going. And when being a woman was an advantage, she wasn’t afraid to use it. Like the heroine of Legally Blonde, she won a murder case by arguing that the accused could not have planned to start a fire in the night because she’d gone to bed in her curlers, and no woman would plan to be seen by neighbours and firemen with a head full of curlers. The defence worked partly because Heilbron herself always looked so fabulous. Of the women in this book, she seems to have had the happiest life — and with the help with of a husband who was as proud of her as her mother had been, she achieved an enviable work/life balance.
Journalist and broadcaster Nancy Spain, editor Joan Werner Laurie and racing car driver turned theatre impresario Sheila van Damm had a more turbulent domestic arrangement. Though their ménage á trois must have been joyous and nurturing at times, it also caused untold pain and chaos, especially to their children. It’s a great strength of this book that while actively seeking women ‘whose private lives were as modern as their professional lives’, Cooke doesn’t let admiration stop her writing devastatingly about the collateral damage.
When it comes to Jacquetta Hawkes, who was vilified for leaving her husband for playwright JB Priestley, Cooke speculates that she wrote best in emotional crisis. Her sensuous, ecstatic geological and archaeological history of Britain, A Land (1951), was written while married, in love with Priestley, and mourning another lover. Once she married again, her work got tamer — until at 70, she suddenly produced A Quest for Love (1980), a roman à clef generally agreed to be mawkish and loopy. Cooke reads it as a statement of ‘what might have been had its author dared to remain outside the establishment, had she not tamped down her emotions so definitively. Look, she is saying, this is what I’m capable of when I let myself go.’ It’s a generous reading, and a compelling one. So many of these women had their brilliant careers because they were willing and able to let go, to ignore guilt, to enjoy themselves. Their excitement is infectious — Cooke says she was ‘goggle-eyed, in awe’ as she researched this book and I read it the same way. It works, the way she wants it to, as ‘a kind of rallying call to the twenty-first-century battle-weary’ because it shows that for all its agonies, sometimes the battle can be fun.