Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

Rachel Cooke tells the story of ten extraordinary women whose pioneering professional lives - and complicated private lives - paved the way for future generations. Plucky and ambitious, women such as film director Muriel Box, plantswoman Margery Fish and architect Alison Smithson left the house and its images of 1950s domesticity. The other women include the writer Nancy Spain, magazine editor Joan Werner Laurie, rally driver Sheila van Damm, the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes and Rose Heilbron QC.