Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions

This book represents a major remapping of the literary history of the 1950s. Our cultural memory of the period has been dominated by the 'Angry Young Man', the teenage revolution, 'consensus' politics, and the emergence of 1960s permissiveness. Yet this picture seriously misrepresents the new position of women in postwar society. Women in the 1950s are usually understood to have played a traditionally nurturing and reproductive role, to have obediently returned to the home after the upheavals of the war. In fact the numbers of working women and the range of work they undertook expanded throughout these years. The vital contribution that working women could make to a modern economy and an egalitarian society was recognized in popular literary genres written by and for women: romances, country house novels, magazine stories, and fiction for adolescents. Such narratives have never previously figured in the literary history of the 1950s. This book offers a new and exciting insight into the postwar realignment of gender roles and the modernization of concepts of femininity. In the light of this new perspective it also offers a rereading of more familiar, canonical texts of the period.