Looking for an older fiction book that starts with outdated ideas on women and ends with a strong woman protagonist

Preferably from a time when women were expected to behave a certain way, ie cant do things that men can or need a man to rescue them, so 50’s or 60’s? And then the woman protagonist subverts all those ideas to be a strong modern woman. Not really looking for a treatise on feminism, just a fiction book that would have been a bit edgy for its time.