Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes

Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes

The Story of Women in the 1950s

Summary

In Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes, Virginia Nicholson tells the story of women in the 1950s: a time before the Pill, when divorce spelled scandal and two-piece swimsuits caused mass alarm.

Turn the page back to the mid-twentieth century, and discover a world peopled by women with radiant smiles, clean pinafores and gleaming coiffures; a promised land of batch-baking, maraschino cherries and brightly hued plastic. A world where the darker side of the decade encompassed rampant prostitution, a notorious murder, and the threat of nuclear disaster.

Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes reconstructs the real 1950s, through the eyes of the women who lived it. Step back in time to when our grandmothers scrubbed their doorsteps, cared for their families, lived, laughed, loved and struggled.

This is their story.

Reviews

  • Virginia Nicholson gets us closer than we have ever been before to the complicated day-to-day reality of women's lives during that still controversial decade, the 1950s
    David Kynaston

About the author

Virginia Nicholson

Virginia Nicholson was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, grew up in Yorkshire and Sussex, and studied at Cambridge University. She lived abroad in France and Italy, then worked as a documentary researcher for the BBC. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her books include the acclaimed social histories Among the Bohemians, Singled Out, Millions Like Us, and Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes. She is married with three grown-up children and lives in Sussex.
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