Soon after her sixteenth birthday, Leila Williams first dipped her toe into the world of beauty queens. She is marked by a heavenly peace, which can comfort and encourage her husband in uncertain or trying times.

What she has created, gathering together dozens of different personal accounts from the decade, is an important and humane book of female social history. Her highest priority and aim in life is living for Christ, which shapes how she thinks and conducts herself in every arena of life: work, relationships, church, and free time. Do a princess and a factory worker – or, for that matter, a middle-class, university-educated housewife, longing for a career – really have more in common with each other, as women, than they do with the men of their own class?The stories of everyday women were the highlight for me, although there were so many of them that it was tricky at times to remember who they all were. This is an interesting book based largely on anecdotes, but the world it describes will be familiar to any girl who grew up in the 50's or 60's. Is there really any one coherent story to be told, about all the women in the UK in one decade, set apart from the story of the whole population? Really interesting to dip into the lives of the different women who had been interviewed for this social history. Her new task was to master the complexities of her chosen profession with all possible thoroughness.

I hope I am making sense but either way, I am glad that gender expectations have greatly loosened since the 1950s – it is no longer as strange for a woman to climb the career ladder, for example, though we are still mostly expected to take on housewifely duties when it comes!In marriage, one of the qualities of a good wife to look for is her willingness and ability to tackle problems . It chronicles the attitudes of the time, the struggles and triumphs (not matter how small) of various women. There are parts of this book where the author sort of rambles, and I felt several times that it could have been pared down quite a bit, but overall, it's a really good, well-written social/cultural history that I couldn't put down.

When things look bleak in the home, a good wife knows she has to maintain a positive attitude for the atmosphere to remain cool. Several years ago, I edited a story by the historian Alexis Coe about the different ways literary husbands and wives publicly acknowledge each other in their books. My North American grandmother, who was born in 1920, certainly thought she was the luckiest person on earth when they moved off the farm and into town and from there into major cities. She includes a wide range of women from all parts of society but the common theme is how constraining life was for so many of them. Reading this book and remembering with a certain amount of nostalgia how it was then, I also thanked my lucky stars I had enlightened parents who took it for granted that I would have a career and not just a job and that even though I would probably marry I would always be able to support myself financially.The advent of birth control meant that women were able to take control of their bodies and have a say in the number of children they gave birth to, a right denied to previous generations.

The author quotes widely from several women she interviewed (and from other sources, many of these interviews and diaries) and adds in her own commentary to build a picture of the decade.Take Liz, who was 19 when she married David in 1952 and promptly produced six children alongside running a shabby, unheated farmhouse, providing all the meals, doing some gardening and generally helping out on the farm. A world where the darker side of the decade encompasses rampant prostitution, a notorious murder, and the threat of nuclear disaster. Liz, the daughter of an accountant in Lewes in Sussex, was having fun with the Young Conservatives at the time of Churchill’s triumph in the 1951 election: hunting, playing tennis, acquiring basic secretarial skills at Mr Box’s Academy in Brighton, or hooked into her full-length taffeta ball gown, wearing rose pink lipstick, dancing at the Young Farmers’ Club. Charm and beauty are naturally appealing qualities in a potential wife, but Scripture teaches that a God-fearing woman is truly praiseworthy. edu/publications/gender-and-equity/good-wife-reputation-dynamics-and-financial-decision-making-inside https://www.