Yes, the 60s were SEXY ... but SO SEXIST
BOOK OF THE WEEK
HOW WAS IT FOR YOU? WOMEN, SEX, LOVE AND POWER IN THE 1960s by Virginia Nicholson (Viking £20, 512 pp)
HAvE you ever had the experience of watching your life flashing before your eyes?
Traditionally, it’s a sign of impending doom, but it happened to me joyfully — to a soundtrack of The Beatles, The Mamas & The Papas and Dusty Springfield — when I read How Was It For You?
So . . . how was it? ‘Cool, man!’ Most of the time, anyway.
virginia nicholson’s absorbing work of social history exactly bookends my own adolescence and young adulthood. In 1960, I was nearly 14 when my parents made the colossal social move from Liverpool to Wiltshire, from a council flat to a mortgaged semi. When the decade ended, I had just graduated, married (in my second year at University College London) and had my first piece of journalism printed.
In between — like so many of the 40 or so women (some famous, some not) nicholson interviewed — I breathed in rebellion with the fumes of paraffin heaters and cigarettes.
I joined the CnD and the Movement For Colonial Freedom, marched against the bomb, lost my virginity, waved a ‘Hands Off Cuba’ placard, shortened my skirts, grew my hair, sampled risky free love, tried a spliff, went on the Pill, saw ‘ no Blacks’ signs in notting Hill windows, marched against the vietnam War, pressed a wistful nose against Mary Quant boutique windows, experienced horrible schism and sexism on the Left, and finally (like the good grammar school girl that I was), worked to get the degree that would ensure success. As it did, back then — when ‘to be young was very heaven’, as Wordsworth wrote about a very different age.
WHEnpeople talk about ‘the Sixties’ in cliches (mini skirts, swinging London, dolly birds), all the images come from the latter part of the decade, when the Sixties stumbled druggily into the Seventies and society really did change.
The ‘swinging decade’ began in the buttoned-up, hard-working Fifties, ‘when the demarcation between home and the world of work still lay on either side of the gender divide, and many women saw this as the way God intended.’ Indeed they did.
As a child of the aspirational working- class- turned- lowermiddle, I would never have questioned the way society was structured. Girls like me learned
about periods from pamphlets our mothers left in our knicker drawer with sanitary towels; we carefully rolled our hair like middle-aged women; we learned about sex piecemeal from friends because there was no sex education in school.
The speedy lurch from that scenario to the freewheeling, long-haired, Leftist world of free love and protest I discovered at UCL in 1966 is well-documented by nicholson in a pleasingly sensible structure of a chapter per year — each one containing a range of telling, often touching, interviews with women from many backgrounds.
This method, used with great success in her books on previous decades, brings vividly to life the big events (the Chatterley trial, the Profumo affair, the rise of Tv satire with That Was The Week That Was, newspaper shock-horror at Mods and Rockers, and so on). And because she cleverly runs the interviews in strands throughout the book, the more gradual social changes (for example, attitudes towards unmarried mothers, the lifechanging freedom of the contraceptive Pill and the rise of feminism) are allowed to unfold as they happened.
By the end, you feel like some of these women (such as Margaret Hodge, whose first child was born with thalidomide deformities) are old friends.
Beryl Marsden was born in poverty in Liverpool, but found liberation singing in a band
wearing leather jeans, dabbled in sex and drugs, made a terrible marriage and discovered enlightenment in Buddhism. She sang again in the Cavern at the age of 70. In 1965, I was thrilled to buy the first copy of Nova: ‘A new kind of magazine for the new kind of woman’. At 19, I identified with this new zeitgeist: feisty, stylish, liberal-Left, artistic. But were we a ‘new kind of woman?’ Nicholson’s empathetic, lively book can’t possibly answer that, because all her interviewees are so different. And yet . . . yes, change was in the air and it spread even to the suburbs. Campaigners such as Mary Whitehouse (wrongly maligned in my new opinion) worked hard, but the genie could not be rammed back into the bottle. Feminism may not have been mentioned in the mid-Sixties — nevertheless, it was the spirit that drove many mothers, like mine, to value their daughters’ education as never before, wanting this generation to expect and achieve more than they had done. Much has been written about the sexism of Left-wing men — and it permeates Nicholson’s book like an iffy smell. During my first year at university, I hung out with fellow students who wore Sergeant Pepper jackets, sported Zapata moustaches, preached violent revolution (while on good grants from their local authorities) and sniggeringly proclaimed that ‘ a woman’s place is underneath’. What we now know as ‘date rape’ was common. I was once asked to wash a sinkful of filthy dishes in a squalid flat while the guys talked politics and rolled joints — and I obeyed. Oh, but the colours of the clothes! The sounds! The excitement! The conviction that the world really could be transformed into a better place — and we were the ones to do it. Nicholson, born in 1957, asks herself whether she is glad or sorry to have missed the Sixties, then confesses: ‘Yes, I’m envious.’ Of course. Her next book will surely be about the Seventies. I, for one, can’t wait. For the party went on — I got a job on Nova, travelled the country as a journalist, had my first child, grew up and finally realised that the dark side of the moon would always be there, never to be illuminated by our joss stick-scented idealism. But, for better or worse, we baby boomers had a marvellous time. And in spirit, I know my sisters are still dancing with me in the kitchen to my 1964 Wurlitzer, glad we got to climb the Three Steps To Heaven.