Someone should write a book about the retreat to a notional fifties utopia

[hirez]

Women in charge of agricultural machinery! Tweed safety gear! Helicopters! Driving home from the pub trashed!

Comments

[quercus]

Spent my time watching that looking out for JH-R relatives.

That wasn't your Mum was it? Driving the blue Ford tractor, wearing a bright red cocktail dress

[hirez]

Nah, mum wouldn't have held with anything quite so cushy and modern as an auto box.

[anonymous]

That would be "Speak for England" by that "White Merc with Fins" bloke.

[mimmimmim]

I'm not a massive fan of the 50s. It seems like most other decades managed to make things better for women - even the war gave them a chance to prove what they could do - but the 50s was an attempt to shunt them all back into their pastel boxes in their pretty skirts. :-)

That said, tweed safety gear is never to be sniffed at.

[quercus]

Wasn't education getting a bit of a shake up though? AFAIR (modulo my Mother's generation), women's access to tertiary education improved a lot during this decade. This extra demand was one of the reasons cited in the Robbins Report as to why we then needed to build new universities in the '60s. In the USA it had been the influx of GI Bill students post Korea, in the UK it was women who were now accepted by universities and were starting to fill them.

[mimmimmim]

True, true. And the country became much more multicultural, and stopped being quite such an Empiremonger.

And on a shallow note, there were some really cute frocks...