IN 1964 MY mum bought a short-skirted turquoise suit. All but one of the jacket’s dozen buttons survive, a testament to her fondness for this boxy suit with buttoned breast pockets and cuffs. Even the four large holes punched in each button for thread have the wide-eyed look of the day. These may be ordinary buttons but their style, ‘zooming’ colour and chunky shape speak to the graphic simplicity of the 1960s.
The sixties happened for everyone, but not necessarily at the same time; it took until the 1970s for some aspects of that decade to alter the provincial landscape and, even then, some people felt the sixties happened elsewhere. One clear way in which that decade lit up the provinces, however, was in the matter of dress. The switch from accented femininity and formality into something free and easy was a boon to every woman willing to adopt the look.
My mum knew the sixties had arrived when she paid her 3s 6d for the complete and unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover though, this being Chesterfield, she wrapped her copy in brown paper in order to read undisturbed at the hairdresser’s. A few years later, the male assistant in a local chemist’s shop approached her with a perfume that had just come in, quoting its tagline: ‘May I be Intimate with you?’ (Revlon introduced Intimate in 1955, but no provincial chemist would have asked that question then.) The sixties definitely had landed.
Mums need not be mumsy any more, and mine was a modern mum. She took me to the park wearing a Sloppy Joe jumper, ski pants and slip-on pumps, and pushed me in my pushchair in a tightly belted trench coat. Youth was no longer confined to the young. Women of my mum’s generation were only in their thirties when the sixties struck, and were just as ready to pull on short (if not quite so short) skirts and psychedelic-patterned dresses as the next woman.
Not everything happened at once, though. In the early 1960s I seemed to be forever trailing after Mum in the search for the gloves that matched the handbag that toned with the shoes. In the previous decade, Katharine Whitehorn appeared on the cover of Whitehorn’s Social Survival doing the trick she had been ‘taught by the charm school people – holding gloves, bag, plate, glass, cigarette and fork and still having a hand free to shake’.1 The search for complementary accessories seemed an equivalent balancing act, as well as a hangover from those years.
A 1965 fashion shoot, ‘One Woman in Her Day Plays Many Parts …’2 divided a woman’s day into eight acts: Working Girl, Handyman, Sportswoman, Wife, Mother (shown wearing the same clothes as her daughter), Girl turns Gardener, Hostess (dressed for a party in a ‘printed voile harem dress’) and Chauffeur. ‘And the silly thing is that the more she does, the harder it is for her to get any notice taken of it all.’ The editorial was a peg on which to hang a fashion shoot, but it nonetheless signalled a change in tone as well as a new approach. The magazine was Nova.
‘A New Kind of Magazine for the New Kind of Woman’, Nova blasted on to the scene in March 1965, priced 3s. My mum bought the first issue and stayed with the magazine until its demise ten years later. Pitched at ‘women who make up their own minds’3, Nova was impressive for its sheer heft even before you turned to the first of its 178 pages. ‘Nova is a magazine for women who cook, sew, like clothes and realise that these are not enough. They still have time to think.’4 Extraordinary though it may seem, the idea that women think still required some underlining. A 1968 Sunday Times advertisement announced that ‘At the Sunday Times we like bright women. Some of our best friends are. So are some of our best writers …’5 The advert was headed ‘Birdbrain’.
Nova was a magazine to keep and come back to. Cutting-edge design complemented lengthy interviews and articles expressing cutting-edge views. Features from 1966 included ‘The New Spinsters’ (‘solitary but no confinement’) and ‘Walled-in Wives – Diagnose Your Neurosis’, the latter tackling a subject making waves since Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963). And there were audacious cover features such as that in March 1967: ‘Yes, we are living in sin. No, we’re not getting married. Why? It’s out of date.’ Picture that incendiary headline thumping on to suburban doormats.
Everything was being questioned and debated; everything seemed up for grabs. Angela Carter recalled, ‘the relaxation of manners, the sense of intellectual excitement, even the way, oh, God, you didn’t have to shave your armpits … hemlines, politics, music, movies.’6 The burgeoning second wave of feminism was a crucial part of that; Angela Carter again:
truly, it felt like Year One, when all that was holy was in the process of being profaned … I can date to that time … and to that sense of heightened awareness of the society around me in the summer of 1968, my own questioning of the nature of my reality as a woman. How that social fiction of my ‘femininity’ was created … and palmed off on me as the real thing.7
Writers were tackling subjects with a new candour and explicitness. ‘Our subject matter is enormous,’ Margaret Drabble wrote a few years later. ‘There are whole new patterns to create.’8 It was hip to be a paperback writer, but women were still on the receiving end of the usual mixed messages. Shena Mackay’s opinion was ‘sought on everything from the Beatles to reasons why a pretty girl should waste her time on writing novels’.9
The ease with which fiction could be translated into film and television brought its messages to much broader audiences, and swiftly: Rita Tushingham looks out from my mum’s copy of Girl with Green Eyes, Carol White from Poor Cow. All those slim-spined paperbacks – Edna O’Brien, Lynne Reid-Banks, Andrea Newman, Nell Dunn’s Talking to Women … On Tuesday evenings, my mum and godmother disappeared into the lounge to paint their nails, sips of gin and tonic alternating with strokes of Revlon nail polish, with its long, sleek, white shakeable wand and tiny ball-bearings to stop the varnish sticking to the bottle. Theirs was adult talk: women talking. It seemed exciting to me. And all the while Pentangle’s theme tune for Take Three Girls spooled through my head, suggesting that growing up was all about sharing a flat in London.
Television seemed to exist on several planes, not just the eventual transition from black and white to colour, but different gradations of black and white: the perfectly modulated tones of stiff-upper-lip Sunday-evening war films versus The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, the Establishment and the youthful anti-Establishment playing it out on our TV screens, Kenneth Moore in one corner, Tom Courtenay in the other. Weekday evenings were transformed by plays like Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, unmissable experiences, dark, gritty dramas which brought tough questions about abortion and homelessness into the sitting room and helped bring in new legislation as well as changing public opinion in a decade of radical change: the abolition of the death penalty, the legalisation of homosexuality, abortion and divorce law reform, the collapse of theatre censorship, the Race Relations Act. Debates about sex and contraception – the word ‘sex’ itself gaining currency post-Chatterley and Profumo – followed the introduction of the contraceptive pill.
The sixties saw ever more women in the workforce, and more married women among them. Women civil servants, local government workers and teachers were accorded equal pay in 1961, but it would take the now-legendary 1968 Dagenham strike by Ford machinists to enable Barbara Castle, Secretary of State for Employment, to secure the 1970 Equal Pay Act (if not equal pay). A 1967 ‘Report on Women and Top Jobs’10 showed that, within the workforce as a whole, there were two men to every woman and that among all PAYE incomes, men had an advantage of 20 to 1 in salaries of £2,000–£2,999. At levels of over £5,000, that advantage rose to 50 to 1. Joan Bakewell discovered that, in the early years of Late Night Line-Up, TV’s nightly commentary, she was paid less than her male colleagues. As Virginia Woolf wrote thirty years earlier, when discussing similar discrepancies and the lack of professional opportunities for women, ‘The cat is out of the bag; and it is a Tom.’11
I was reading Jackie in 1967, with its picture-box love stories and advertisements for sanitary towels, blue eyeshadow, identity bracelets and spot cream. A May 1969 issue advertised two careers: with the Women’s Royal Army Corps you could be a PT instructor, shorthand typist or a kennel maid (‘not many girls get to be WRAC kennel maids and grooms … But you might be lucky!’); alternatively you could nurse with the Queen Alexander’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. Men would land on the moon two months later but Jackie’s readers were not encouraged to reach too far.
The new ideas finding currency in fashion, as in so much else, were reflected in adolescent clothing as well as adult styles. As I moved out of Sindy’s landscape I began to move away from home-made clothes though, when crochet dresses were the latest thing, my grandma made me a scarlet-edged black dress with a matching poncho. (A poncho!) A shop-bought Courtelle dress (‘The New Generation Jersey’12) was followed circa 1967 by a flared trouser suit from Coles in Sheffield, the source of any classy, modern clothes. It is strange to relate that trouser suits were challenging when they first came in; when SHE magazine featured Biba’s first trouser suit in October 1964 it reassured readers that the jacket came with ‘a slim skirt for the timid’.14
My mum bought a pair of Mary Quant shoes in Sheffield: chunky-heeled clover-pink suede with purple detailing. She and I ‘tried’ paper knickers which pouched oddly and unattractively and were rather like wearing an elasticated J-cloth. The experiment was short-lived. (They pouched, I presume, because, being made of a similar fabric, they could not be stretched without putting holes in them.) In 1968 with my older brother in the lead, as so often then, he and I bought vests from Wakefield’s army stores, knotted them with string and generated psychedelic swirls by boiling them up on the stove. The shop-bought tie-dyed grandad vest I wore was a haze of bruised colour, but do-it-yourself was far more satisfying.
If Sheffield was our place for classy, well-made clothes, Chesterfield Market was the source of cheap and cheerful gratification: skinny-ribbed sweaters, leather chokers and (eventually) all things glittery. My first smock, the first garment I bought, a bright checked plaid with an appliqué apple on the bodice and buttons all the way down the back, came courtesy of the market. By now, Chesterfield’s Swallow’s and John Turner’s demonstrated a muted decorum increasingly at odds with the times. They attempted to keep abreast of fashion, but Swallow’s 1965 Christmas catalogue, offering Paisley Viyella blouses, formal in style and with names like Aintree Gold, Newbury Red and Kempton Blue suggest they were backing the wrong horse. Its younger styles, depicted by well-scrubbed girls dancing in Tricel dresses, included a party dress in a bolder paisley pattern. ‘This is the trend and you must get with it, at Swallow’s’13, but these were not aimed at young women but at schoolgirls shopping with their mothers.
The dance changed yet again, miniskirts skipping towards full-length dresses, via flower-power smocks, kaftans, Afghan coats, cheesecloth and crushed velvet. How proud I was of my plum-coloured crushed-velvet flares. Floral prints like those designed by Celia Birtwell had a zinging graphic intensity – ‘graphic’ was a new buzzword – and were nothing like the naturalistic flowers of earlier decades, nor even the stylised flowers of yore; the childlike blooms of the late sixties and early seventies had their own unreality. There was a general softening and lengthening of line similar to that which accompanied a return to femininity in the 1930s, but with a different meaning. Colours changed too. Everything was plum, cherry, dusty pink, purple or clover – like my mum’s Mary Quant shoes. Farewell maroon, a colour that existed during my childhood but then disappeared, as did fawn – though few would grieve for fawn, the dying fall of the noun conveying the timidity of the actual shade. Colours do not disappear, of course, it is merely the names that change; each decade selecting its own. For me, Tango meant a fizzy orange drink, but in the 1920s ‘a lovely affair of tango silk’15 conveyed a Valentino sophistication and a different kind of fizz altogether.
My own suede shoes were dusty pink with latticework straps. I also wore a midi-length clover-pink herringbone skirt which buttoned down the front. Cardi coats were in: mine was another shade along the pink-to-purple spectrum, with murky-pink and white woollen fringing; my mum’s was purple, though we never wore them at the same time; Mum also wore a dark purple midi coat. Fashion still appealed across the generations, although tastes were soon to diverge. In 1971, we saw The Boyfriend and afterwards only just managed to resist tap dancing all the way back down the cinema steps. The 1920s were back.