Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes

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. '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 'Poignantly illustrates how the women of the 1950s yearned for the innovative technology of the era to liberate them from repetitive drudgery' Victoria Coren Mitchell, Observer 'Remarkable. To today's young, it'll sound like life on another planet' Daily Mail 'Nicholson uses vivid contemporary sources and oral testimony to show the constraints under which so many women lived. Like David Kynaston's Family Britain . . . Nicholson has the same knack of seamlessly piecing gripping individual stories into a panorama of ordinary life' Sunday Times