The stereotype of the 1950s housewife--pearls, red lipstick, perfectly set hair--is both painfully familiar and rarely accurate. In Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, journalist Rachel Cooke profiles women who upended this and other social mores in postwar Britain through their trailblazing careers and complicated personal lives.
Cooke's breezy group biography trains the spotlight on women in varied lines of work, such as movie producer Muriel Box, archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes and barrister Rose Heilbron. Most chapters feature one of the women, tracing the rise and fall of her career and delving into the details of her private life; two chapters highlight groups of women who had strong personal ties to one another. Most of Cooke's subjects rose from humble origins to leave their mark on the world. The vast majority of them dealt with romantic troubles, forming attachments to strong men or mercurial women who, one suspects, might have been threatened by their intelligence and moxie.
While Cooke has done her research well, her tight focus on individual women means the book sometimes loses a sense of a larger context. Her detailed descriptions of the women's personal affairs occasionally devolve into gossip, with echoes of the 21st-century debate over whether women can "have it all." Two brief chapters on fashion and literature at the end feel tacked on. Despite these flaws, Cooke's book provides a sparkling group of portraits that, taken together, cast the '50s in a new and modern light. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams