You know what they say: if you remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there. Virginia Nicholson was a shy girleen in bare legs and a cotton dress when that decade was going full bore; now she’s put together a kaleidoscopic, 492-page history of that most “yeasty” of decades: cue the pill, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, tights, Mary Quant, Christine Keeler, the Beatles, the Vietnam war, the Rolling Stones, civil rights, Thalidomide, abortion, mini-skirts, Ready Steady Go, hippies, Zandra Rhodes, “free” love, rock’n’roll, RD Laing, drugs and, at the 11th hour, feminism.
Yeastiness indeed.
This was Britain emerging post war via a “youthquake” into a consumer boom; everything old was “square” – that is, to be rejected. Little rich girls’ dreams morphed from chaste debutante presented to the queen (“We didn’t drink, we didn’t have sex, we still wore white gloves”) to being Mick Jagger’s drugged up girlfriend in a “pussy pelmet”.
In some ways it was democratic. You could get your barnet done at Vidal Sassoon’s, run up a Mary Quant dress from a Butterick pattern kindly donated by MQ herself so that we “pocket money girls” could join in the fun, nab a copy of RD Laing’s The Divided Self and ride the Underground to Trafalgar Square every inch a groovy chick on her way to the latest protest, Vanessa Redgrave at the helm.
Democratic deficit
In other ways it wasn’t so democratic. Artist Nicola Lane: “The thing to remember about the Sixties was that it was totally male-dominated.” Free love had a catch: thanks to the pill, if you could do it and didn’t do it you were a frigid Bridget. As Jenny Diski said, “It was uncool to say no”. Chicks sat in the corner rolling joints for the boys as they did the politics. “Men were just awful,” Theresa Tyrell remembers; perving, leching, masturbating, “copping a feel”; many women felt powerless. Before feminism, way before MeToo, there wasn’t the language or the self-belief. Author Virginia Ironside remembers the time “as an endless round of miserable promiscuity”.
It wasn’t just in the bedroom, either. When Jann Haworth applied to the Slade she was told women didn’t need to submit portfolios, just their photos – “they’re here to keep the boys happy”. Fay Weldon had to haul the family laundry to the coin op launderette – hubbie Ray didn’t like the “noise” of her machine. He liked women best “barefoot, naked and up to her elbows in suds”. When Rosie Boycott and Marsha Rowe set up Spare Rib, the chaps over at Private Eye sneered: “two little girls in nursery land have started a tiny tots magazine”. Women earned 54 per cent of what their male colleagues took home.
Desperate times
For thousands of “ordinary” women living lives of absolute desperation with rotten housing, Rachman-type landlords, multiple pregnancies and miserly State support, the Swinging Sixties was a chimera; Ken Loach’s docudramas on housing and unwanted pregnancy hells, Cathy Come Home and Up the Junction, were watched by 12 million.
For many the 1960s wasn’t the Kings Road or “free” sex or weed, it was socialism, marching and politics (as well as fashion, sex and weed). The idea was to change the world. To make it a better place. As Angela Carter put it, “truly it felt like Year One” and it was out of the political upheavals, the marches, the sit-ins, the love-ins, that feminism grew. As the author puts it, “a turbulent power struggle came to a head”.
Kicked off by working-class women striking in Dagenham, activist Sheila Rowbotham in December 1969 wrote her pamphlet Women’s Liberation and the New Politics, channelling howls of female unrest: “Why do we stand for it?” It was the rallying cry from which organised feminism grew. No more chicks making tea while the boys jawed.
This is Virginia Nicholson’s fifth social history book. She comes with impeccable credentials: grandmother Vanessa Bell, great-aunt Virginia Woolf, mother Anne Olivier Bell, who edited VW’s diaries, coming home from the British Library “covered in dust”. She’s knocked a good deal of dust off the 1960s and how it was for women. How wonderful.
Roll on the 1970s, feminism and her next book.
