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An exuberant group biography--"a splendidly various collection of 'brief lives' written with both gusto and sensitivity" (The Guardian)--that follows ten women in 1950s Britain whose pioneering lives paved the way for feminism and laid the foundation of modern women's success. In Her Brilliant Career, Rachel Cooke goes back in time to offer an entertaining and iconoclastic look at ten women in the 1950s--pioneers whose professional careers and complicated private lives helped to create the opportunities available to today's women. These plucky and ambitious individuals--among them a film director, a cook, an architect, an editor, an archaeologist, a race car driver--left the house, discovered the bliss of work, and ushered in the era of the working woman. Daring and independent, these remarkable unsung heroines--whose obscurity makes their accomplishments all the more astonishing and relevant --loved passionately, challenged men's control, made their own mistakes, and took life on their own terms, breaking new ground and offering inspiration. Their individual portraits gradually form a landscape of 1950s culture, and women's unique--and rapidly evolving--role. Before there could be a Danica Patrick, there had to be a Sheila van Damm; before there was Barbara Walters, there was Nancy Spain; before there was Kathryn Bigelow, came Muriel Box. The pioneers of Her Brilliant Career forever changed the fabric of culture, society, and the work force. This is the Fifties, retold: vivid, surprising and, most of all, modern. Her Brilliant Career is illustrated with more than 80 black-and-white photographs.… (more)
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The book is all based on secondary sources. We are introduced to a variety of women , who were ambitious, eccentric, determined and sometimes quite odd who achieved or reached their peak in a post war Britain. I wondered about the choice of these particular women and I don't think the author has the expert background to write up a professional assessment of these women and their long term legacies within their fields. To make the stories of these women readable there is a lot about their personal lives , their love affairs, their marriages and their divorces. The author likes penetrating the bedroom. Were they role models for later generations of sixties, seventies and eighties women? I don't think these women were feminists or gave much thought to advancing women's rights and careers. Each was personally ambitious and comes across as an eccentric character. As a group these were women who depended on other women to run their homes and bring up their children.
I bought the book because of the chapter on Alison Smithson and I found I liked the human angle sketch of Peter and Alison but why did the author not consult the books written by the Smithsons themselves? Awkward too in that the Smithsons were a couple of note and you cant consider one without the other. I also liked the introduction where there is some original reflections about what it meant to be a fifties woman.
In summary, treat this book it as a fun read of the period and look for other writing if you are actually interested in a fuller picture of any one of the featured women or if you are interested in the originality of their ideas and why they were really part of the social fabric of the fifties then probe elsewhere.
A clever idea ( the introduction is the best bit) but I don't think it quite comes off. Some of the women would have been mortified to be written up in this way.
Spain is the only one I had heard of before, and all of the women (and the author) are British which means Her Brilliant Career gives its readers a glimpse of post-WWII life and cultural mores in Britain--another perk for me because I haven't read much about the era between the Blitz and the Swinging Sixties. Two other fun features of the book are its subversive novels list and select bibliography--I always love a book that increases my To-Be-Read pile.
It started generally talking about a variety of women in the fifties and how the author had to exclude several people from her choice, some of whom I wish she had written about. I had never heard of any of the women included before and I found it interesting to read about them and see about their lives and it sometimes felt like they were very overshadowed by their partners.
In the kitchen with Patience Gray is about a cookbook writer who has lapsed from popularity.
The Show must go on featured Nancy Spain, Joan Werner Laurie and Sheila van Damm who had relationships with each other and were determined to make headways in their chosen careers. The chapter head "Three trouser-wearing characters" made me a little non-plussed, with Katherine Hepburn trouser-wearing while unusual was not as strange as some people would like to think. The author seems to use it as a shortcut to indicate that they were lesbian.
The chapter on Alison Smithson, Architect left me cold.
The chapter on Margery Fish made me want to visit her garden.
The Brontes of Shepherd's Bush was about Muriel Box and Betty Box, female director and producer respectively was interesting where these were women who carved careers out for themselves despite resistance.
Digging for Victory about Jacquetta Hawkes seemed to be more about her husband J B Priestly and their relationship than about her career.
Rose Heilbron QC was the final chapter, about a talented lawyer who carved a path for other women to follow and while she broke some barriers it still isn't easy for women in law.
Fashion in the 50s and some novels are mentioned and honestly I was left wanting. I wanted to know more about their careers, more about the balancing acts they had to have. Many of them had servants to help but others didn't and I wonder how they kept going.
It wasn't a bad read but I was left wanting more.
The women presented in Her Brilliant Career include a diverse group: Patience Gray, cookbook writer; Nancy Spain, writer and personality; Joan Werner Laurie, magazine editor; Sheila van Damm, rally-car driver and theatre manager; Alison Smithson, architect; Margery Fish, gardener; Muriel Box, director, and Betty Box, producer; Jacquetta Hawkes, archaeologist; and Rose Heilbron, QC., the first woman to sit at the Old Bailey. Her Brilliant Career also includes a Select Bibliography, Acknowledgements, and an Index.
In the introduction, Cooke points out "I prefer the idea of role models, inspirational figures who make you want to cheer. The extraordinary, mould-breaking women you will find in the pages that follow weren’t perfect. They were, like all human beings, flawed. They doubted themselves, they got in muddles, they made mistakes; feeling defensive, they sometimes seemed difficult and distant even to those who loved them. They certainly did not – dread phrase – ‘have it all’, or not all of the time, at any rate. Their children sometimes had a hard time of it. But they loved what they did and they got on with doing it as best they could in far less equal times than our own. If that isn’t encouraging – a kind of rallying call to the twenty-first-century battle-weary – I don’t know what is."
Isn't that the truth?
All the women lived in the post WWII UK, but readers not in the UK, should should still find inspiration from these ten women and what their accomplishments meant for the women of today. All the essays can be read as stand alone pieces, but as Cooke writes, "But if you read all seven of them there will, I hope, be a cumulative effect, the culture of the Fifties – its food, its architecture, its popular culture, its habits and its opinions – revealed through the lives of ten revolutionaries and taste makers who just happen to have been women. I hope these stories make people reconsider the ‘lost’ decade between the end of the war and feminism. I hope, too, that they speak to readers everywhere, whichever city or continent they happen to be reading in."
Disclosure: My Kindle edition was courtesy of HarperCollins for review purposes.
But not for women; they were just starting to
For at least half of them, I have to say, that feeling is that no matter how successful they were, they were also a hot mess. There is a long trail of deceit, neglect, and dishonesty behind some of these 'extraordinary' women; at least 3 of them should have had their children taken from them (although that's just my opinion of course). By the third chapter, I was wondering why, as much as I was absolutely loving Cooke's writing, I was continuing to read about these women; they may have achieved great things professionally but they hadn't done it with any grace or integrity.
But perhaps Cooke wanted to get the brilliant, scandalous, and brilliantly scandalous out of the way at the outset, because the remaining 70% of the book highlights women who were able to achieve great things and make a name for themselves without neglecting their children or cheating on their partners. Mostly. Well, ok, they did it without neglecting or abandoning their kids.
The highlights for me were reading about Margery Fish and Rose Heilbron, gardener extraordinaire and the first female QC, respectively. Margery's subversiveness towards her husband was hilarious and her ethos on gardening is exactly the same as my own; building and maintaining 2 acres of gardens by herself, however, is way out of my league. I loved, though, that she didn't even begin what she would become so famous for until she was in her 40s.
Rose Heilbron, however, was truly the most inspiring woman showcased in this book. Not only were her achievements truly extraordinary by any standard, not just 'for a woman', but the manner in which she went about achieving them makes her truely worthy of admiration. The way Cooke writes it, she went through her life with such grace, integrity, intelligence and rationalism, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some huge scandal to be revealed, which is a sad commentary on what I've come to expect from 'achievers'. Fortunately, no such scandal was revealed. This woman should be the role model of every female (AND male) in the world; not for what she achieved, but for how she achieved it.
As far as these books go, I think Her Brilliant Career would appeal to a broad audience. Cooke manages to write about history without causing chronic drowsiness, and about feminism without beating the reader over the head with it. Instead she allows these women's lives to tell the stories they need to tell and in the process both entertain and inform the casual reader.
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