Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties by Rachel Cooke – review

The 1950s are often talked about as if they held nothing much for women but typing, cooking and looking after children, when in fact they were an era of enormous progress for career women – British women anyway. This excellent book should go far towards setting the record straight, making it clear that although, in America, the wartime poster girl Rosie the Riveter was shoved firmly back into the kitchen from which she needed liberating by Betty Friedan, in Europe the picture was very different. Not perhaps for all women, but at least for a whole generation reaping the benefit of more and longer education. When Elaine Dundy, actress and novelist, arrived from America in 1949 she wrote of a "place where young people, besieged for six years of war, could finally see that they had a future" – which came to fruition in the 50s. Rachel Cooke, mostly renowned for her penetrating interviews, here looks back at a time when women's lives were undergoing amazing changes and completely demolishes any notion that the 50s were a just a dull and domestic time for women.

By 1957, 33% of married women worked – and they were making names for themselves in unprecedented numbers. They were such as Grace Robertson, a journalist who worked for Picture Post (as I did); she got used to being mistaken for a secretary by visitors and being treated well by her male colleagues, though they would try to get her into bed on work trips. And her girl friends' parents "stopped them seeing me. You could be a nurse, a teacher or a secretary while you waited to get your man. But a photographer? I might be a bad influence".

In 1956, Barbara Wootton, sociologist and criminologist, was a Nuffield research fellow at Bedford College and a governor of the BBC. There was Rose Heilbron, the first woman high court judge (who, as a barrister for the defence of a woman charged with setting fire to her houseboat, secured her acquittal partly by pointing out that a woman about to set fire to a boat and knowing she'd shortly be on the bank would never have put her curlers in). Jacquetta Hawkes was a wonderful archaeologist and, incidentally, JB Priestley's lover; her book A Land was required reading at one time for most of us. Margery Fish was a brilliant gardener who persuaded the National Trust to adopt gardens as well as buildings. There were some women who had enormous influence in politics; Betty Box was a film producer (who when she once asked for equal pay was asked why she needed more money when she had a rich husband – but darned well got it anyway). Alison Smithson was also married; she worked with her husband, and they shared the domestic side – he did all the shopping. Together they designed Smithdon high school, which was highly modern, but loathed by the locals – they said passers-by would be able to see up the girls' skirts.

Such women were the inheritors, perhaps, but not the copies of, the thousands of single women between the wars whose potential mates had perished in the trenches. The girls I was at Cambridge with mostly hoped that they would get married and assumed they'd have careers; this generation of women didn't generally think marriage was an alternative to working, although a few of them were more bisexual or gay than I realised at the time. For example, Nancy Spain, the writer and broadcaster, who certainly faced both ways, apparently had a relationship with Ginette Spanier, the directrice of the couture house Balmain, who was married to a tall handsome doctor. Though Jewish they had somehow survived the German occupation together; he was highly likable though once he saw me eating and turned to my husband to ask how he felt about "being married to Pantagruel".

What makes the book more rewarding than just the individual subjects themselves, good though these are, is the way that Cooke uses long and frequent footnotes to fill in the trends and contexts in which the women lived – including references to other notable women such as Anne Scott-James and her views on the way Nancy Spain dressed – jeans in the office and then "looking absolutely stunning in a Balmain dress".

Not every influential woman of the times found their way into this book: Scott-James is mentioned only in passing and Elizabeth David's enormous effect on the food of Britain might have been more dwelt on; but perhaps the very fact that there are achieving and interesting women left out goes to prove just how many such women there were. I could have done with an index to track down any women I suspected might be included, but that's about the only criticism this excellent encyclopedia of talent deserves.

Rachel Cooke will be speaking at Bristol festival of ideas on Friday 15 November (£7/£6), and at Foyles, London W1 on Tuesday 19 November (free but booking essential; email events@foyles.co.uk).