Hazel Wheeler 
Diary of a Young Wife 

The year is 1953 and the North of England, like everywhere else, is full of women ‘keeping house’ for their husbands. Washing must be scrubbed by hand over the sink, socks must be darned by hand and tea must be on the table by five o’clock sharp. Immersed in this world is Hazel Wheeler, a feisty young woman, Yorkshire born and bred, who is in her first year of marriage. Contending with the daily drudgery of continual housework, an interfering mother in law who ‘always knows best’ and a constant struggle to make ends meet, The Diary of a Young Wife 1953 chronicles the first shaky steps of marriage for newlywed Hazel Wheeler. Challenged by the sexist cultural climate of the time, Hazel desperately fights to fit her passion – writing- around the unenviable daily demands of a 1950s housewife, and, terrified of social pressure to have children, finds herself ‘wondering if there could possibly be a means of having a family without the bodily distortion.’ The Diary of a Young Wife 1953 offers and engaging insight into married life in the 1950s.