Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

In Her Brilliant Career, Rachel Cooke goes back in time to offer an entertaining and iconoclastic look at ten women in the 1950s - pioneers whose professional careers and complicated private lives helped to create the opportunities available to today's women. These plucky and ambitious individuals - among them a film director, a cook, an architect, an editor, an archaeologist, a race car driver - left the house, discovered the bliss of work, and ushered in the era of the working woman.

Daring and independent, these remarkable unsung heroines - whose obscurity makes their accomplishments all the more astonishing and relevant - loved passionately, challenged men's control, made their own mistakes, and took life on their own terms, breaking new ground and offering inspiration. Their individual portraits gradually form a landscape of 1950s culture, and women's unique - and rapidly evolving - role.

Before there could be a Danica Patrick, there had to be a Sheila van Damm; before there was Barbara Walters, there was Nancy Spain; before there was Kathryn Bigelow, came Muriel Box. The pioneers of Her Brilliant Career forever changed the fabric of culture, society, and the work force.

This is the Fifties, retold: vivid, surprising and, most of all, modern.