Old School Future

Picked this up for a fiver in a secondhand bookshop in Camden: a science-fiction anthology published by The Bodley Head Science Fiction Club in 1953, containing the first six stories of the longer American edition. What's interesting about the cover, apart from the lovely retro space hardware, is the depiction of a woman at the helm of a spaceship (or perhaps controlling lunar orbital traffic from a space station). I imagine she's toggling the radio to remind the space cowboy who's just buzzed her that he's violated about twenty navigational regs.

EDIT: Further thought - maybe the presence of a female space pilot/traffic controller in this old science-fiction illustration isn't so unusual; during the Second World War, just eight years in the past, when the book was published, women had taken on all kinds of roles previously considered the exclusive domain of men.