Scholarship in British film history has tended to suggest that the female characters in New Wave films are marginalised, dismissively associated with the trappings of consumer culture and responsible for the ultimate containment of their âAngry Young Menâ protagonists. In Sex, Class and Realism, which was published in 1986, John Hill situates the New Wave in relation to broader socio-economic and cultural changes in post-war Britain, including womenâs shifting relationships with work, motherhood, family life and patterns of consumption. However, he concludes that the cycle failed to register womenâs changing lives in the late 1950s and identifies the âdramatic and thematic subordination of female charactersâ and a âstreak of misogynyâ running through the cycle. Revisiting the treatment of women in the British New Wave, this article focuses on the characters Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and instead explores how Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Fieldâs performances offer potent expressions of womenâs changing lives in this period. Poised between representing individual desires, confidence and autonomy, and feelings of frustration, reserve and uncertainty, their performances vividly convey their charactersâ experiences and expectations in ways that chimed with mobilities and new constructions of selfhood that were increasingly being practised by a âtransitionâ generation of young women in post-war Britain. I argue that Robertsâs and Fieldâs performances evoke the feelings of two different, working-class women, for whom expressions of assertiveness, sexuality and aspiration are shaped by contradictions, anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. In doing so, the article foregrounds and re-contextualises Robertsâs and Fieldâs contributions to the New Wave, recognising their representation of contemporary femininities in flux; and explores the promotion and critical reception of their roles, highlighting the tensions between social realism and glamour that shaped their New Wave stardom.