This the story of women in the 1950s, a story which was often far from the chirpy image of the 1950s which the title suggests. The expectation of marriage also features strongly in the second book I read, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes. In a society which simply was not set up to enable women to fend for themselves, they set about building new lives and changing that society.
These women had grown up fully expecting to marry and have a family of their own but they found that after the war there were just not enough men to go round. This tells the story of the 'Surplus Women' as they were dubbed by the press in the 1920s the women whose potential husbands had died in their thousands in the First World War. The first book which I came across was Singled Out. Although she makes it clear that they are written for a general, not an academic, audience, they contain observations and anecdotes which I've found useful in my studies. Nicholson has written a number of social history books about Britain in the twentieth century, focussing on women's lives. This week's topic is the works of Virginia Nicholson. Looking over what you've typed (with only a pepper-mill for company?) Last week's typing-fest is complete, and I am now busy editing the result. And how they would never be the same again. She tells how they loved, suffered, laughed, grieved and dared how they re-made their world in peacetime. In Millions Like Us Virginia Nicholson tells the story of the women's war, through a host of individual women's experiences. But in conditions of "Total War" millions of women - in the Services and on the Home Front - demonstrated that they were cleverer, more broad-minded and altogether more complex than anyone had ever guessed. We tend to see the Second World War as a man's war, featuring Spitfire crews and brave deeds on the Normandy beaches. In 1942 Cora Johnston is grieving over the death of her young husband, torpedoed in the Atlantic Aileen Morris is intercepting Luftwaffe communications during the siege of Malta - and Clara Milburn, whose son was captured after Dunkirk, is waiting, and waiting. Read by Patience Tomlinson, Annie Aldington, Rachel Bavidge, Julie Maisey and Georgina Sutton.
A special multi-voice recording featuring five actresses that bring to life the hundreds of personal testimonies, diary entries and books that make up this superb study.
The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Virginia Nicholson's Millions Like Us: Women's Lives in the Second World War.
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