P. 89 – 1962
“Pain, humiliation, pride, regret, liberation, confusion: for women they were all part of the package, at a time when the sands were shifting fast, and a tide of sexual change was threatening to submerge the familiar moral landscape.
And – here too – bias, intolerance, hatred, exclusion and injustice came with the deal. It wasn’t till later in the decade that someone found a word that summed up these attitudes: sexism.”
[Pauline M Leet, who contributed a paper entitled ‘Women and the Undergraduate’ to a student forum held in a Pennsylvania college, appears to have originated the term ‘sexism’, in November 1965.”
P. 105
Cuban missile crisis
“Sophie’s sense of apocalyptic hopelessness is echoed in many other accounts, such as that by Zena, a Cardiff schoolgirl:
“I was 14 at the time.. Someone burst into the classroom, exclaiming ‘Russia and America are at nuclear war!” In the hubbub that followed, I sat silent and can now recall the desolation I experienced that my family and friends (and I) would perish, with lives unlived and words unexpressed…”
P. 190 1965 “the traditional understanding of of sin and virtue was on the wane. The rising motion was that centuries of guilt, repression, shame, prohibition, stuffiness and double standards were being replaced by a new age of honesty, openness, spontaneity, empowerment and sexual freedom. In the era of op art, and the Wilson government’s ‘white heat’ of technology from which would emerge a newly forged Britain, the new freedoms appeared to be correspondingly black, white and streamlined.”
P. 192 “The Knack, also 1965, starring Rita Tushingham, was the tawdry, slapstick tale of Nancy, an out of town ingenue who became the object of desire for three misogynistic flatmates. The films ends with a disturbing sequence in which Nancy is portrayed as an unhinged singleton having rape delusions; the blokes, of course, are merely having ‘a bit of fun’. ‘Girls don’t get raped unless they want it,’ said one of them. The Knack’s director won the 1965 Palme d’Or at Cannes… Woody Allen’s hugely successful male wish fulfilment screenplay for What’s New, Pussycat? – a fantasy about a man besieged by lust-crazed females who all want to trap him into marriage – could have won an Oscar for its commodification of women.”
P. 193 Shrimpton’s public appearance at the Melbourne races, bare-legged in a mini-dress with no hat or gloves, provoked a press furore”
P. 210
“A glance through almost any generic women’s magazine mid-decade reveals the social aspirations of the mainstream middle-class wife… dinner parties were a minefield of taste and taxonomy: what cutlery to use for your avocado vinaigrette, which glass to drink your whisky from, what to talk about; how to serve coq au vin, trifle or Camembert with crackers… social rigidities were as coagulated as the chocolate mousse… Since it was first introduced into the UK in 1962, the Tupperware party had been a fixture on the young-wife circuit.”
P. 220
Jenny Diski; “Most women who lived through the early and late Sixties whether as political molls or psychedelic chicks can recall that they were mostly of ornamental, sexual, domestic or secretarial value to the men striking out for radical shores. The Left was never known for its willingness to embrace gender equality, but no more were the ‘heads’ r the entrepreneurs of the counterculture.”
P221
The culture of male control was not confined to rich, powerful celebrities. The divorce courts highlighted extreme cases like that of a Mr Kenneth Cox who objected strenuously when his wife Dorothy became involved with a local Girl Guide and Brownie group. Having already prohibited Dorothy from getting a job, the dictatorial Xoc now refused to let her anywhere hear the Girl Guides. He also tried to force her to have sex. But both parties’ pleas for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty were rejected by the judge. Male jealousy and ownership of women were seen as legitimate.”
P. 222 “The journalist Virginia Ironside… “For women, it was absolutely grisly… I remember the sixties as an endless round of miserable promiscuity. It often seemed easier and, believe it or not, more polite, to sleep with a man than to chuck him out of your flat.’ And worse was to come. But in 1965 there was no solidarity, no channel and no vocabulary with which to express discontent. The sexual power struggle was still in its infancy.”
P. 257
“Far from being a hotbed of clever talk about feminism and the sisterhood, social life at university was … a cut-and-thrust competition to attract men. Sophie felt alienated by the idea of equality for women: … I thought about women as rivals and enemies and I actually thought that women were slightly inferior. The cool people to be with were the men. I didn’t want to be hanging around with a load of women…. I learnt to be quite good at pretending to be stupider than I was. So, I could still get high grades, and at the same time I could flirt with the blokes and seem unthreatening.”
P. 263 Juliet Mitchell wrote The Longest Revolution when she was 25 years old… draws on historical, anthropological and sociological strands of Marxist thinking to question and explain women as workers, as family members, as mothers, as partners and as fully contributing human beings: one half of the human race. Women were not, she reminded her readers, a minority, but fundamental to human existence… The ‘true’ woman and the ‘true family are images of peace and plenty: in actuality they may both be sites of violence and despair.”
P. 360 “The starry, romantic egotisme-a-deux of the 1960s is permeated with the ideal of coupledom… By the mid-1960s, 96% of women aged 45 were married. Almost half of those women had found a husband by the age of 21. And the days of parental intervention in their daughters’ choices were over, with comedienne Joyce Grenfell catching the 1969 mood: “Daddy and I are delighted that you are going to marry a middle-aged Portugese conjurer, darling. Bur are you sure he will make you happy?”
P. 409 1970 “the Family Planning Association finally changed its rules to allow contraceptive advice to be given to unmarried women. They also, in 1970, commissioned the poster that brought fame to everyone concerned, portraying a man in a jersey whose repentant expression and swollen tummy hardly needed its inspired caption: “would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?”
At the beginning of the decade, nearly 60% of girls who had been asked their opinions of pre-marital sex in a psychological survey considered that it was ‘Always wrong’. By 1970 that figure had dropped to under 15%.
About