1969

The We Generation

‘Sweet Caroline …’ serenaded Neil Diamond in his famous 1969 hit:

I look at the night and it don’t seem so lonely

We filled it up with only two …

The decade of the 1960s is often associated with the growth of individualism and self-absorption, as personal freedoms advanced. Being yourself, doing your own thing were the mantras. But a closer look brings us up against a variant of that familiar narcissistic trope. We might label it ‘the We Generation’ – a cohort as in love with each other as they were with themselves. Of course, there’s nothing new about romantic love, but this 1960s version took its cue less from troubadours and La Traviata, and more from the idea of togetherness. Underlying togetherness was the revelatory notion that the sexes might be equal.

As the 1960s draw to a close, it’s time to explore how real that equality was, and whether the decade really was a turning point for women. Since midway through it, small signs have been indicating that liberation is on its way; but a thousand contradictory factors continue to erode our confidence that it’s real. Where do bunny girls fit into progress for women? Surely being a provider of ‘fucks and domesticity’ isn’t compatible with togetherness? Will the We Generation live up to its peace-and-love promises, or are they built upon sand?

Throughout the 1950s, most couples still conformed to the time-honoured ideal, by which the man was expected to be the provider, dominant and aggressive, while the woman was submissive, domestic and often tearful. This ideal was seen as ‘natural’; it drew sustenance from the Bible and tradition. ‘Men must work and women must weep …’ as the poet wrote; ‘He for God only, she for God in him.’fn1 Marriage was assumed to be a lifelong commitment, among a generation who only had recourse to the divorce courts in extremity. Divorce was seen as scandalous, tainted and no fun.

In 1969 the indefatigable social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer decided to revisit the sexual and marital attitudes of the English public, in a follow-up to a survey he had presented twenty years earlier.fn2 What he discovered confirmed that the meaning of commitment had indeed changed. The stakes had become higher. Geoffrey Gorer now showed that the historic ideal had been replaced by the wobbly but heartfelt ‘ideal of equality’. When he asked his respondents what most contributed, in their view, to a happy marriage there was, compared to his 1950s sample, a greatly increased emphasis on comradeship and partnership. ‘Love and affection’ came near the top in a lengthy list of qualities that he suggested to them might be of importance in a marriage – far above sexual compatibility, a happy home, and interests in common. The word ‘togetherness’ recurred frequently in the interview transcripts. Gorer now coined the term ‘symmetrical marriage’ to describe what he saw as a new state of affairs. In the symmetrical marriage, the planets of man and woman were travelling through that dark, lonely night on parallel orbits.

The starry, romantic égotisme-à-deux of the 1960s is permeated with the ideal of coupledom. Cohabitation was the exception to marriage, not the rule. Weddings held sway as they always had done. By the mid-1960s, 96 per cent of women aged forty-five were married. Almost half of those women had found a husband by the age of twenty-one. 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 Portuguese conjurer, darling.¹ But are you sure he will make you happy?’

It seemed as if the Merseybeat generation was as attached to the idea of lifelong commitment as their parents’ generation had been – with the difference that rose-tinted romantic fulfilment was at the heart of the promise they made to each other. ‘Togetherness’, peace and love, and compatibility were of the moment, as never before. Music business secretary June Child started living the dream from the moment the seraphically handsome singer and musician Marc Bolan first walked into her office:

It was like an electric shock, the most extraordinary thing …²

Within hours, Marc had asked her round:

It was a beautiful summer’s day. He opened the door and said, ‘Would you like some muesli …?’

We sat out on the tiny little bit of grass at the back of the house, eating muesli and talking. And then he said, ‘I’ve got something to give you,’ and … he brought out this little piece of paper and I opened it, and it was the most beautiful love poem. And I looked at him, and he said, ‘I’m in love with you,’ and I was absolutely speechless.

And I knew, I knew that it was right.

From then on Marc and June were inseparable, their marriage ending only with his early death.

But between 1960 and 1969 the number of divorces in England and Wales more than doubled – from 23,868 to 51,310.

When The Guardian’s reporter Ann Shearer went to talk to a group of divorcées to find out what was going wrong, one of them – through a cloud of cigarette smoke – told Shearer how she saw things:

The trouble is, in the West, we’re all so hooked on the ideal of romantic love as the only way to live that we’re left thinking there’s nothing when it lets us down.³

It seemed that almost as fast as the knots got tied, they were unravelling. Placing ‘togetherness’ at the heart of marriage was putting the institution under unprecedented strain, at the same time as making the divorce laws less and less fit for purpose. The boom babies were quick to marry, and quick to part when things went wrong. Many of Geoffrey Gorer’s respondents saw adultery as a deal-breaker. Fidelity ranked almost as high on their scale of priorities in marriage as love and togetherness. A woman who was asked how to deal with an errant husband replied:

Ignore it if it’s a mere flirtation; if it’s a lot more than this she should leave him.⁴

A twenty-two-year-old lorry driver was categorical about what should be done with a straying wife:

Divorce her …⁵

he said. He himself had been unfaithful three times in the year that he got married, but seemed unaware of any contradiction; meanwhile a thirty-five-year-old man, asked the same question, saw it as a case of cutting your losses:

Thump her – then the man.⁶ Try to patch it up with the wife … if this fails, divorce …

The stigma attached to divorce was slowly diminishing. When the etiquette guru Drusilla Beyfus wrote a guide to modern manners in 1969, she commented on the softening of attitudes. Divorcés, who now included many of the great and the good, were finally permitted to enter the Royal Enclosure at Ascot. Some divorcés even remained friends, though others didn’t, creating a whole new landscape of social sinkholes to be navigated by the modern hostess.

The debate was shifting too. By the end of the 1960s something had to give, as couples found themselves trapped in loveless unions. If the stardust had dimmed, why – many argued – should such couples be compelled to remain together? From 1966 the term ‘irretrievable breakdown’ began to enter the vocabulary of churchmen and lawgivers. Now came the turning point, when Parliament passed the 1969 Divorce Law Reform Act which allowed for a ‘no-fault divorce’, provided the pair had lived apart for two years (or five, if only one of them wanted to split up).fn3 Dropping out, tuning in, and peace had yet to be embraced by a puritanical and materialistic Establishment who regarded the flower power generation as self-indulgent drifters. But LOVE, heart-shaped, primary-coloured and radiant, had emerged victorious. Its hippie-dippy anthem, ‘All You Need is Love’, was on everyone’s lips. The pick-and-choose generation had been given a legal blessing to opt for togetherness – or, if they preferred, to do their own thing.

*

But seeing love as a right could cause terrible fallout:

I found the man I wanted to be with and that was that.⁷

recalled Amanda Brooke-Dales:

I saw it as ‘This is Love, and we have to be together.’

Amanda’s ‘wild oats’ period ended abruptly – when she met Bernard Butler. Unfortunately, Bernard, an attractive American and a resident diplomat at the embassy where she now worked, was already married and the father of four children.

Bernard Butler was not a philanderer; he had married young and never before had an extramarital affair. By contrast, Amanda had leapt onto the permissive sixties bandwagon, gone on the Pill and, from about 1966, enjoyed an easy-come, easy-go attitude to relationships – ‘I behaved exactly as I wanted, and just had a good time.’ Wrecking a marriage was not part of her plan. To begin with, she saw their affair as being no more than an office fling: another in a long list of flings. But this one was different. In a short time the relationship had run out of control, feelings were intense on both sides, and the need to be together outweighed all other considerations. As things accelerated she began to realise that their love was causing dreadful damage to his marriage and, briefly, she tried to pull away. ‘But that just made things worse.’

Bernard decided to leave his wife. There was terrible pain, distressing rows, anger and jealousy. ‘It was all a big, big mess, and actually the whole thing was about as bad as it could be.’

But today, Amanda, who is in her seventies, cannot regret the long and rewarding marriage that she had with Bernard. Their feelings for each other remained as strong, over the thirty years they spent together until his death in 2000, as in the early days of their illicit romance. As in a fairy tale, ‘we lived happily ever after’. But their happiness came at a cost.

For Amanda, widowed now, it has taken time to unscramble the motives and factors that caused two well-meaning and educated people so devastatingly to injure a third. She believes there was something in the air in the 1960s that permitted a type of behaviour of which, today, she would be ashamed.

It’s funny about guilt, isn’t it? I didn’t feel guilt at the time, because we were in love, and Bernard’s marriage wasn’t working.

And I thought I knew everything – but really I knew nothing about the importance of a marriage with four children, and what it does to people. And sometimes, for all our happiness, I look back and ask myself: how did you have the nerve to do it? To be the other woman, and to be as ruthless as I was, in thinking, ‘Well, bad luck about the wife and kids.’ Because certainly, if I’m honest, that is what I thought at the time.

And I would put that down to the sixties zeitgeist.

I am quite critical of my sixties self. I sometimes think: you were a very selfish, spoiled, badly behaved, careless young woman, who thought you could play around with sex and emotions – and I don’t think of it as being very admirable. Breaking up a marriage is a pretty serious thing to have on one’s conscience, and I do have it on my conscience. I bloody well should too, it caused terrible pain.

And yet – I don’t exactly regret it.

I think my generation thought that the old rules had led to a lot of repressions and unhappiness and hypocrisy, and we were going to behave in a more free and open way – and if someone’s wife and four small children got in the way that was part of the price that was going to be paid, you know?

Amanda Brooke-Dales is entitled to reproach herself; but, as a woman ‘helping herself’ to someone else’s spouse, wasn’t she guilty of something that men have been guilty of for centuries, often unrepentantly? Don Juan refused to see the light, and burned in hell; but he and his smooth-talking colleague Casanova have always been saturated in aspirational glamour, sex appeal and attractive bravado – the Mick Jaggers of their day – while a woman who plays around is seen by others, and by herself, as ruthless, a wrecker, selfish, badly behaved, a Jezebel. Amanda is careful not to criticise Bernard. But it takes two to break a marriage. Why should her trespass be seen as more unforgivable than his – a sin more accountable to women than to men?

*

Marriage in the late 1960s was in a process of reconfiguration. The rumblings of change had been audible over the years since 1945, with a post-war divorce explosion accompanying a baby boom, and the growing belief, as more and more women entered the workplace and labour-saving devices promised to take the effort out of housework, that marriage could and should be a democracy. The Marriage Guidance movement, which had surged in the 1950s, was relevant as never before; its booklet Sex in Marriage, advocating ‘simultaneous orgasm’ as a desirable ideal, sold over half a million copies.

Drusilla Beyfus chose this moment to interview twenty-three married couples and present a composite portrait of ‘what it is like to be married today’. Beyfus’s case histories show how women in the late sixties were swimming further from the shoreline of old-fashioned respectability, while at the same time wrestling with the undertow of conformity. They also reveal some of the fault lines and fissures opening up in the marital terrain: a volcanic convulsion in slow motion.

Take Jack and Joan, for example, who were both struggling to encompass infidelity within their marriage. Nothing new there. But both adopt the contemporary vocabulary of freedom and togetherness, while Jack’s sense of entitlement and his untrammelled access to a bit on the side are very much of their time: ‘The trouble is I love girls … [and] girls are endlessly available.’⁸ Jack was finding it difficult to stay within the limits. ‘I know I am a terribly immature person and as I have continued in this boyish vein, freedom has made the marriage viable.’ Joan for her part was trying to deal with all the falsehood and cheating. ‘Periodically throughout my marriage I feel that if I don’t get out of this I shall die.’ But she too was open to offers from other men, though she found the practicalities got in the way: what if it was half-term, what if the children got measles? Despite all this, their marriage stayed alive. Something in Joan craved conflict: ‘I feel I’ve just got to have a quarrel … I find real togetherness absolutely suffocating.’

Meanwhile, Frances and Tom had unthinkingly embarked on an incompatible marriage, and were coming unstuck over sex. A decade earlier, and Frances’s honesty in expressing her own desires would have been unthinkable. She wanted more fulfilling love-making than Tom was giving her. She had an affair. It was physical, uncomplicated – ‘I’m like a man about this. I need a screw every so often and like to have it and get it over with and cheerio. But since men don’t expect a woman to feel like this, you can’t. You get yourself horribly tied up.’ But Frances admitted that Tom’s jealousy acted as a check to her excesses, and she remained sufficiently traditional in her views to regard grooming as part of her wifely duty: ‘I still have this corny conviction that you have got to look lovely for your husband … I take about three-quarters of an hour in the morning to get dressed and made up and hair and everything.’

The relationship of a third couple, Alexander, a long-haired ex-public schoolboy, and Rosie, a working-class shop assistant and occasional model, illustrates a quintessential 1960s conundrum: how can freedom co-exist with commitment? The pair had forged a laid-back marriage via drug use and a mutual love of psychedelic music. ‘I love Alexander,’ said Rosie, ‘and I don’t think I shall stop. I give him love, look after him, cook his meals, do his washing and hope he likes me.’ Alexander, who admitted to having stolen Rosie from his best friend, was trying hard not to give in to a sense of male ownership – ‘You are doomed if you think a person is yours … Possession is an illusion. But I find it frustrating because whereas it is clear to me that Rosie is not mine and she belongs to everybody I do suffer from jealousy. She has been whipped off once already …’ Rosie was on the same bandwidth: ‘Ideally, everybody should be able to make it with each other … [But] I do get unhappy when I think of him sleeping with another girl because I think he might prefer her to me … It’s just jealousy. Maybe I can get over this thing.’ However, the harmonious vibes soon became discordant when Rosie found out that Alexander was sleeping with a man, and she became so hysterical that he felt forced to hit her.

For most of Beyfus’s interviewees, contentment remained elusive. The biblical gender division had been bust up by work and permissiveness. New ideals were at war with old assumptions. And nobody, it seemed, was emerging the victor.

Back to the Garden

When BBC Television screened its much anticipated documentary Royal Family in 1969, one of its supposed aims was to demystify the marriage at the heart of the monarchy. Royal Family portrayed the daily life of HM the Queen, her husband and four children. About two-thirds of the British public watched the transmission, in which the Duke of Edinburgh was shown barbecuing sausages at a Balmoral picnic, and his wife appeared to serve her breakfast cereal from Tupperware boxes. But, of course, the royals were never ‘just like everybody else’. The affected informality was saturated with rank and pedigree, and in 1969 their tweediness, Scottish grouse moors, clipped accents and side partings made them seem more remote than they had ever been.

Caroline Harper’s story will take us on a long journey away from that vision of the upper-class marriage. Aged seventeen, and entranced by the colourfully psychedelic group on the periphery of her privileged circle, Caroline had started smoking dope seriously in 1967. From then on, bit by bit, joint by joint, she began to reconfigure how a woman could live, jettisoning the frivolous ephemera of femininity: Cordon bleu cookery, secretarial skills, flirting and the rest. Travel, and drugs, would take Caroline to new places on the planet, liberating her body, her mind and her spirit.

Nevertheless, for a while, grouse moors remained part of her world; and the cultural tug-of-war is perfectly illustrated in 1969 when Caroline attended a weekend gathering held in a baronial property in Argyllshire. The youthful debs and double-barrelled delights who were of the party were all well known to Caroline through her parents’ polo world, and they included her exact contemporary, Princess Anne, daughter of the queen. At the age of eighteen, the princess was already old before her time, having embarked that year on a round of ribbon-cutting and official tours. Princess Anne was trapped in a privileged time warp from which there was no escape; royalty had condemned her to a lifetime of equestrianism, eccentric millinery and good works.

That evening the company round the dinner table was divided between the younger generation, who were all of them, with the exception of the princess, completely and utterly stoned; and the parental generation who, as their offspring descended into uncontrollable giggles, soldiered on desperately trying to keep up appearances in front of Her Royal Highness.

I was SO – goodness me – GONE!⁹ Luckily I had enough buddies around me, because when I smoked dope, I was not actually capable of holding on to this world as well.

Poor Princess Anne, she was having a horrible time. I honestly think it was hideous for her. I remember feeling sorry for her, though I expect the feeling was mutual.

Who knows what went through the princess’s mind that evening as she found herself on the wrong side of the table at Ardchattan Priory: a helpless witness, as her young contemporaries abandoned every pretence at formality, rambling dementedly and spouting nonsense, pop-eyed with the best mind-bending Moroccan? Probably she felt left out.

Meanwhile, for Caroline, the drug culture of the late sixties was an irresistible magnetic field, pulling her away from her familiar world of polo players and landed earls, towards a dimension from which there would be no going back. With each step she made, she lost a foothold on the closed Brideshead community that espoused lineage, land, the season and the cul-de-sac of a ‘good’ marriage. Dope was a constant; but for six months amphetamines played a role in loosening inhibitions and sharpening a consciousness that was already posing questions about class, identity and belief. On speed, Caroline and her new friend Sue stayed up talking all one night until, as dawn broke, with piercing clarity, the existence of God – ‘or, as quantum physics would say, a benign universal intelligence’ – became a demonstrable reality. But that was only the start. Speed had served its purpose, but LSD was a passport to exploring further realms of the mind. So, with Sue and her other close friend, Hawke, she entered the drop zone, stepped over the hallucinogenic threshold and let herself free-fall into the multicoloured skies of innermost spiritual freedom where time slows, the senses are at their most heightened and the view of our jewel-like planet is both distant and astonishingly detailed. And where everything she thought she had understood was transfigured at a molecular level. Solid became fluid, static became active. ‘And – I know it sounds corny – but I was more taken by the level of inner freedom and love, and a profound, deep, full-body, mind-soul knowing, that felt a thousand times stronger than any brain-knowing that I’d had previously.’ From here there was no return: Caroline’s path ahead would be defined by the zealous quest for spiritual revelation.

But first she had some scores to settle.

My mother was very, very, very worried, and she’d say I was killing her and making her ill. And I do feel so sorry for her! She really had hoped I would marry the aristocrat! By that time all her friends’ daughters were marrying the right men and doing the right thing – and they’d ask her rather pointedly, ‘How’s Caroline?’

And I did something dreadful. I came down for the polo ball. And I deliberately sought out the most shocking person I could, and brought him down with me. His name was Ivo. We’d met at some party or other, and he was from a completely different background. He had two teeth – I think he must have been in a fight – and bright orange hair, and skin-tight satin trousers.

My poor mother – I think she cried. It was just SO horrible for her. I mean, choosing a man who was the polar opposite of what they wanted for me was a very unkind thing to do to my poor parents. But I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been angry with them.

Actually Ivo was a gentle soul …

But he was not for keeps. Hawke (‘a full-throttle hippie’) was in a different league. Thus, after they drifted into bed, she found herself falling deeply in love with him, and the journey began.

For women who had lived through the Blitz, a dream house was the summit of aspiration; for their daughters, like Caroline, home might be under canvas, on a beach, or in a camper van. She and Hawke were among the thousands who, spaced out on dope, sex and sitar music, set out on the hippie trail, leaving behind the convenient, sanitary society for which their mothers had laboured and penny-pinched.

Trips were not just acid. First, Caroline and Hawke went to Greece with a band of like-minded hippies. It was an idyllic interlude spent in tents on the Albanian border, where Caroline rolled the joints and washed the boys’ clothes in crystalline mountain streams. Then, in the second half of 1969, the two of them headed to India – a nation that was being colonised by the counterculture. The Beatles were early adopters, being among those who led the migration to the subcontinent, when they (and their wives and girlfriends) travelled to the Maharishi’s Academy of Meditation in Rishikesh in 1968. As Caroline recalls, ‘India was the place to go. And Hawke and I were on a “Let’s get good dope” quest. There was some very good dope.’

Their drug pilgrimage now took shape, carrying them north to Kashmir and Pakistan, stopping in cheap hostels on the way, making friends on the road with the ragged, glazed knots of long-haired, colourful, beaded Westerners with whom they climbed on board trains and buses. ‘It was the hippie time, and there would always be deep, earnest, stoned conversations going on, with Americans, Australians, French, Italians … plus a lot of laughter. Yes, it was fun, fun, fun.’ Next stop was Delhi, where the pair joined the audience for a lecture by the great teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. ‘His voice had the profound ring of truth …’ Sublime, penetrating and releasing, the guru’s words were life-altering.

Soon after, Hawke decided to go back home. After he left, Caroline took the train to Calcutta – a forty-eight-hour journey. ‘At this point I went kind of crazy …’ She felt as if her very mind was being reordered:

I remember sitting on that train and at some point deciding, well the only thing to do with this is to let it happen. Let go. I thought, if you fight it you’ll go mad. And it was as if a molecular structure had been totally melted down and then restructured again but in a different shape. It was SO intense …

And by the time I arrived on the Calcutta platform, I was normal and sane. But I was not the same person.

After her stop-off in Calcutta she travelled alone for three months, to Bombay and Goa. The ‘straight’ world, grouse moors, debs, dinner parties, polo and people-pleasing, had receded to the other side of the world, in the past. The present, shimmering and ecstatic, took shape among the casuarina pines and coconut palms stretching along the scented Goan shoreline:

A perfect moment: somebody had lent me an ancient old bike, and I was bicycling along a lane in Goa, heading towards the sea. I was wearing a glorious, full-length blue dress, with a sort of strange red dressing gown on top of it, and – before they got tangled up, predictably, in the bicycle spokes – my clothes were flowing out in exactly the way they ought to. The wind was in my hair.

And everything fitted somehow. The wind, the sun, the beach, the clothes, the freedom. It was just a lovely moment of total freedom. I was living the ideal.

India had got under her skin. Caroline returned to England, but within a year she was back, journeying to the Himalayas with her friend Sue. There she had the trip of a lifetime. They’d saved some acid – ‘Was it Californian Sunshine or Pure Light? I can’t remember which’ – and took it somewhere in a dazzling glade far from all habitation. Here, the triviality of human concerns appeared like thistledown, floating away on the breeze. Caroline tries to explain how this quintessential experience both destroyed and rebuilt:

It was terrifying and liberating – like being let out of a very tight straitjacket. Something inside me knew that the only safety lay in letting go …

And then came the bliss. Love – all-embracing, all-encompassing, unconditional love – with every cell in the body participating …

How could a man live up to this?

When the drug wore off, I had this appalling sense of loss, of grief. That’s why I searched for it, for years …

Caroline Harper has been seeking transcendence ever since.

Her quest was one that many hippies embarked upon at that time. From Marrakech to Kabul, Istanbul to Jalalabad, the escapist impulse took hold of innumerable daydreamers setting out to shake the dust of Western materiality from their sandalled feet. But Caroline’s adventure highlights an aspect of that escape story that relates more specially to 1960s women’s experiences. This was a true liberation, a release from the pressures imposed by marriage, family alliances, class and convention. Some women in the late 1960s reacted to oppression by becoming feminists and taking up the political cudgels – but this was not for everybody. In Caroline’s case, guru wisdom and hallucinogenic drugs turned a life dominated by externals into one of interiority and a profound search for truth and answers. Everything known, everything assumed – from taking a proper partner to a ball, to women’s place in the gender hierarchy – was challenged and deconstructed as she re-evaluated her entire identity.

‘“We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” It was all about that. We’ve come from the stars, and we’ll return to the stars.’ After Calcutta, after Goa, after LSD, Caroline Harper was never the same again.

*

On 20 July 1969 the stars seemed closer than they had ever been before. Three American astronauts conquered a mysterious frontier of space, landing a module on the moon. In the small hours of the morning, British time, Neil Armstrong stepped onto its surface.

My parents woke us early. We had all been invited to a cousin’s wedding, and were staying for a few days with relatives in a village not far from Cambridge; they had a television in their sitting room. In blurred black and white, the pale, space-suited figures moving robotically against an inky sky looked like Michelin men, slightly comic. But something of awe and moonshine remains in my memory, associated strongly with the more earthly wedding festivities, held on a mild summer’s day in my uncle’s garden. Small children bounced ecstatically across the lawn on pneumatic orange space hoppers, the latest toy craze. Older guests, many of them decked out in flamboyant hippie crushed-velvets and lace petticoats, milled on the terrace drinking still champagne. Someone played a lute. The sweet hay scent of hash drifted across the herbaceous borders. There was creamy home-made blackcurrant fool whipped up by Henrietta, the bridegroom’s beautiful sister.

In truth, she was the most glamorous person at that party – along with her friends. For that year Henrietta had joined hippieland. The company she mingled with was a Rocker-meets-royalty crowd of romantic dropouts, including Ormsby-Gores, Tennants, Sir Nicholas Gormanston, Henrietta Moraes and Sir Mark Palmer. Palmer led this pack of aristo-bohemians eager, like many of their arty predecessors, to sample the lawless glamour of gypsy life; and with them my cousin Henrietta had taken to the road (‘the chequebook hippies’, she now calls them). Over the summer of 1969 much family talk revolved around the doings of her group. Horse fairs, camp fires, Arab stallions, painted wagons and birdsong captured our imagination. At that time I was jittery with nerves. A letter had arrived from the local education authority announcing that my own safe world was under threat. The girls’ grammar school I attended was to be amalgamated with two other schools, and reconfigured as one enormous melting pot of a co-educational comprehensive. All my adolescent longings and fears of exclusion were intensified by the imminent and scary prospect of boys in the classroom. With all that looming on the horizon, it appeared to me that a life of gypsy camaraderie, bohemian romance and freedom of spirit was surely an ultimately desirable (if utterly unattainable) form of existence.

The same feeling of not being asked to the party was also gnawing at me as the autumn term approached. During the holidays London friends came to visit. Their sophisticated daughter, three years older than me, told me she’d been at the occasion everyone was talking about, the free public concert held on a beautifully sunny day in Hyde Park to welcome the Rolling Stones back on stage after a two-year absence; in the event, following the drowning of band member Brian Jones, the occasion became one of tribute, at which Mick Jagger, robed in white, gave a eulogy and released hundreds of white butterflies over the heads of the transfixed audience. Even though the band was barely visible, she made it sound electrifying: ‘Of course the Stones were miles away.¹⁰ It was like looking down a telescope the wrong way, but a tiny Mick Jagger danced like a dervish in his white dress leaping above the heads of the audience. I wore my Indian shirt, very fine pink voile with purple embroidery around the neck, and white jeans …’ I was green with envy. Why couldn’t I have been there?

In August 1969 people were also talking about the Isle of Wight Festival, billed for the bank holiday weekend. It followed on from Woodstock, three life-changing ‘days of peace and music’ which had brought Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin together before an audience of nearly half a million hippies in upstate New York a couple of weeks earlier. Now, just a short journey from home, there was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to hear Joe Cocker, the Who and the Pretty Things, but above all Bob Dylan. It would be the biggest open-air concert in history. I was fourteen, and I knew my entreaties to go would fall on deaf ears. But how could I be alive at such an amazing time, and miss out on all this?

So many of the people I’ve talked to, and the books I’ve read, conjure up a picture of youth, beauty, love and elation in the late 1960s. Was it a phantasm? Those late-sixties summers had a heightened quality that sets them apart. But of course, women had other things on their minds.

Time for a reality check. We come down to earth with a crash reading a mundane report in June 1969 of ten women lavatory cleaners in a Birmingham factory going on strike for equal pay. Another small news item from July reminds us that a quarter of a million British women were burdened by caring for their elderly relatives; one told the reporter that she had entirely given up going on dates to look after her sick mother. Or catch the flavour of everyday life for a group of London housewives, via British Pathé’s coverage of a hairdressing salon in the East End. The Cinemagazine crew filmed a dozen middle-aged women having their hair washed and rolled up into symmetrical corkscrews, then being placed in a row under identical metallic domed dryers to knit, gossip and read the paper, before emerging, brushed, backcombed and beatific, with lacquered helmets like sculptures.

Nor should we forget Britain’s backwaters, like feudal Frampton on Severn, buried in Gloucestershire farmland, where eighteen-year-old Julie Barnfield was growing up just touched by modernity. Here, the high spot of the year was Frampton feast, a line-up of helter-skelters, dodgems and hooking the goldfish that entranced the village girls – as much as the black-leather-jacketed boys who ran the rides:

Every August these lads arrived with their collars turned up and their drainpipe jeans … And these lads were there with their quiffed hair thinking they were real Jack the lads … We’d sit on the steps of the dodgems and stare at them in adoration.¹¹

This was Cider with Rosie country: muddy, superstitious, rumour-mongering and conservative. ‘London may have been swinging, but Frampton certainly wasn’t …’ Julie and her friends got no sex education, though in 1960 they weren’t so stranded in the sticks as to make Lady Chatterley’s Lover unobtainable; someone got hold of a copy and read the rude bits aloud, ‘giggling hysterically’. The pop magazines reached Frampton too, and the Rolling Stones were popular. At the age of thirteen Julie had her first boyfriend and managed to keep out of ‘trouble’; but several of her friends weren’t so lucky and found themselves pregnant brides at sixteen. She left school in 1968 and went to work in a shop in Gloucester, spending her wages in the local pub.

I can remember getting absolutely out of my head on Ponys …

Ponys and Cherry B and Babycham – they used to be the popular drinks.fn4 Awful, used to give you the most terrible hangovers. And cider …

Drugs got through to Frampton too, via a lad who had left the village, seen the wider world, and showed up on the village green one day, bearing a marijuana cigarette:

I can remember him passing it around, and I can remember being frightened to death … Oh, it was awful – a terrible thing to be doing, sat out there with this wacky-baccy. Oh no, goodness me, tut, tut!

Julie described Frampton as a ‘gluepot’ – ‘Nobody wanted to leave!’

Far from Chelsea, far from the fleshpots, attitudes remained anchored to the past. In Cardiff, Jenny Sullivan was working in a typing pool, still living at home aged twenty-four, and submitting to a ten-thirty curfew every time she went out for a date. She would get home to find her mum waiting up in her flannelette nightie with a bottle of aspirin by her side. Finally, in 1968, she informed her parents that she was going to flatshare with a cousin:

Mother wept ostentatiously in corners, father looked grim-faced …¹²

She sobbed, ‘What do you want to do in a flat that you can’t do at home? The neighbours will think you’re a prostitute. I won’t be able to look anybody in church in the face any more. I’m so ashamed …’

Infrequently, dwellers in the remoter corners of the country caught disturbing glimpses of an alien tribe, like Margaret Lloyd from Merthyr Tydfil, who took her family to the seaside resort of Rhyl on Bank Holiday Monday:

The whole place was swarming with strange beings in flowing robes, unwashed hair and beads …¹³

[We were] not a little frightened of this weird crowd who pushed and shoved on all sides, despite their repeated chants of, ‘Peace, Man’.

Sunshine and Rainbows

However, for a whimsical fourteen-year-old, it was the doings of those colourful partygoers that fed my daydreams for several summers, and which remain to this day part of a nostalgic mental hinterland for many of my generation. Swinging London was passé by now. But the out-of-reach minority of Beautiful People still had lots of thrust left in their engine. Marsha Hunt’s description of being ‘the only girl rocker’ at the Isle of Wight brings home what an unmissable occasion it was:

One could have imagined that our revolutions in music, sex, fashion, drugs and alternative cults were all there was in the world – we were the ruling class.¹⁴

Fun, fun, fun. For the few, anyway.

Having recounted the bliss of taking acid on the road with Jimi Hendrix’s roadie, Melissa North goes on to describe spending a dream summer in 1969 at an arty retreat in the hills above St Tropez. The pop and cultural aristocracy of the day gathered by the pool, smoked joints, lunched under the almond trees. ‘I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.’¹⁵ A little further up the Côte d’Azur eighteen-year-old Rosie Boycott had taken a villa for a month with a bunch of wealthy hippyish school friends; for three weeks the rent, and a hedonistic lifestyle – ‘champagne-soaked peaches, nights on the terrace under the lemon trees, and days on the sun-sparkled beaches’ – were subsidised by shipping in dope on flights from London, and selling it for a hefty margin to the clientele of the St Tropez restaurants.¹⁶

Back in London, Pat Quinn’s bunny croupier job kept her out of the red for a couple of months until her return to drama school. Getting Pat to talk about her life in the 1960s is like turning on a tap. Years in London have supplanted her Irish brogue with a posh, throaty, suggestive drawl, and a torrent of starry-eyed, stagy celebrity gossip gushes forth in a breathless stream, with walk-on roles by artists, poets and the leading theatrical luvvies of the day, from Michael York to Tony Richardson, from Ned Sherrin to Zeffirelli. Pat was an exotic bird, flitting from one twig to another. ‘We were it – we were everyone who was anyone.¹⁷ Marc Bolan lived in a basement across the road, and further down the road was David Bowie.’ One day, sitting on the top of a double-decker bus, she spotted Terence Stamp on the pavement – ‘I ran down the stairs and followed him down the road. I’ve never done that before!’ She sighs. ‘He was so beautiful …’ And there were ‘wonderful parties’, of course. Her crowd hung out in Indian restaurants, jazz clubs, the Opera Tavern, the Royal Court, the Poule au Pot, the Arethusa. Pat’s ungovernably curly hair gave her Marsha Hunt-style street cred, and she shopped at Biba – ‘FANTASTIC! A trouser suit! A black boa made from sheepskin! And Kensington Market, and Granny Takes a Trip. We were the Beautiful People.’

Meanwhile, jet-setting model Grace Coddington also holidayed in über-gregarious St Tropez, where she and her hip restaurateur husband Michael Chow careered around in a grey E-type socialising with Catherine Deneuve, David Bailey and Ali McGraw. Back in their minimalist home in Fulham they posed for the photographers ‘as one of London’s most happening couples’. And Edna O’Brien, made famous by her ground-breaking novel The Country Girls and liberated from her marriage to Ernest Gébler, was celebrating by partying with a galaxy of household names such as Marianne Faithfull, Sean Connery, Roger Vadim and Shirley MacLaine. Puzzled by the prestige of her new circle, O’Brien recalled, ‘Some serendipity threw us together … It was a more innocent time.’¹⁸

*

Was it? Ann Leslie thinks so:

The Sixties … were extraordinarily hopeful times, its young almost naively excited by everything new …¹⁹

– as does ex-débutante and biographer Fiona MacCarthy:

No woman of my generation could be unaffected by the prospect of expanding possibilities that became so potent a feeling in the air.²⁰

Since around 1963 the candy-shop door had been thrown open, offering an appetising array of colourful lollipops to the flocks of sweet-toothed passers-by on Freedom Street. From mantras to miniskirts, Suck magazine to space travel, gypsy caravans to Californian Sunshine, the universe seemed to be expanding.

Small wonder, then, that in the late 1960s we start to see the homosexual woman emerging from her holes and corners: testing a more tolerant climate, reclaiming status and visibility for the lesbian sisterhood, and tentatively advancing in a rainbow T-shirt that she would, one day, wear without shame.

So how far along the road to liberation had gay women travelled in the 1960s? The answer has to be, they were still a very long way from ‘Out and Proud’. The advance was happening against a background of hostility and ambivalence towards same-sex relationships among women. Anxiety pervades letters to the magazine agony aunts, like these:

I’m in my late twenties and intend sharing a flat with another girl of the same age.²¹ But so many people have hinted that this will lead to an unhealthy relationship that I’m beginning to worry.

Is there any way of preventing these feelings occurring between women, or any treatment if they do occur?

I’m 14 and am always dreaming about my music teacher.²² The problem is that she’s female, like me. I even get a peculiar feeling when I see her. Am I daft or is it natural to feel like this?

(You will grow out of it, she was assured.)

Even in the permissive world of Jenny Fabian’s Groupie, lesbianism is regarded as nice – but deeply dodgy. Early in the book, Katie gets initiated into how to ‘go with chicks’. To start with, she feels out of her depth, but her friend Roxanna is beautiful and, after all, ‘a hand is a hand and a clitoris is a clitoris and when you can feel the pleasure beginning to rise up inside you, it doesn’t really matter about the sex of the hand’. Nevertheless, it is emphasised that neither of them is a ‘real dike’. The real dike, the ‘Les’ (Roxanna says), is sick; she wears flecked tweed, and does weird things with rubber strap-ons. ‘No, making it with a chick for me is like making it with a guy without the hangups.’

As with the broader women’s movement, a key challenge was putting a name to a life choice. The lesbian subculture was shrouded in secrecy, shame and uncertainty. Where establishing their identity was concerned, gay women had a learning curve ahead of them.

In 1963 Esmé Langley had convened the early meetings of the Minorities Research Group, the first social and political organisation in this country dedicated to lesbians. In 1964 she and her colleagues had founded Arena Three – twelve sheets of duplicated A4 stapled at the corner – in whose privately circulated pages gay women (and men) could read book reviews, fiction, correspondence and features, and feel that they were not alone. It was a struggle to reach this readership, since the ‘respectable’ press refused to carry advertisements for the publication. Maureen Duffy’s lesbian novel The Microcosm (1966) also tapped a well of isolation. ‘We read it, reread it, reread it,’ remembered the poet U. A. Fanthorpe.²³ Duffy received numerous letters – ‘[They] wrote and said I had changed their lives and given them courage to be openly themselves …’²⁴

As the decade progressed, word was spreading that lesbians no longer needed to hide. Arena Three came alive with a buzz of opinions about isolation, dress, lesbian heritage and identity; among them was the emerging view that some lesbians experienced their sexual orientation as a kind of freedom, preferable to labouring under the constraints of conventional wife-and-motherhood. Yet still, most contributions to Arena Three were pervaded with the assumption that the lesbian was somebody who was basically deficient: a kind of offensive mutant, who at best could only emulate the happy heterosexual.

But, between them, Esmé Langley and Maureen Duffy were raising the profile for lesbians. Over these years there was press coverage of a kind not seen before. Ahead of the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts in 1967, BBC1 screened two Man Alive documentaries confronting the topic of ‘consenting adults’. The second of these, entitled ‘The Women’, featured Steve, a twenty-four-year-old with short-back-and-sides, wearing mannish trousers, collar and tie, talking about her distress at how society could not accept her for what she was. What does her mother think about her? asks the interviewer, Angela Huth. ‘She just thinks I’m disgusting,’ was the reply.²⁵ Next, Huth asks a couple named Cynthia and Julie about the early days of their romance. They are filmed sitting on the couch in their Wandsworth living room, dressed similarly in woollies and button-up blouses. Julie glances adoringly at her partner. Cynthia speaks for them both: ‘I just don’t see any difference between a normal couple falling in love and two women falling in love. It’s as romantic as the two people make it.’ The BBC cameras were also welcomed in to film at London’s favourite gay women’s haunt, the clandestine Gateways Club in King’s Road. Huth interviewed a group of its members. ‘Why did they need a special club?’ asked Huth. Couldn’t they just go to an ordinary pub? ‘I like to be in a world which isn’t particularly dominated by men … I like to be able to sit there and not have some man come and try to pick me up, which happens the whole time. I just happen to like a society where everyone is really equal – quite apart from being lesbian …’ The speaker was a long-haired brunette who resembled a French intellectual with her well-bred, gently accented voice and fashionable dark glasses; for the televised interviews also provided evidence that 1960s lesbians didn’t have to look like, well, lesbians. The androgyny of the straight world was permissive in the best sense: it allowed homosexual women to be genuinely unisex, without having to look like short-back-and-sides caricatures of men.

The slender pamphlet that, from 1964, first threw a lifeline to women isolated by their incongruent sexuality.

Following the transmission of ‘The Women’ there was a Late Night Line-Up discussion in which Maureen Duffy was on the panel, speaking passionately in support of a more open society. However, she was up against the Tory MP Ray Mawby (an active campaigner against the Sexual Offences Bill), who put his view that the Man Alive programmes should not have gone out before the 9 p.m. watershed – ‘This is dealing with a twilight area of abnormal people, and it’s something that I wouldn’t think is up for public discussion.’²⁶

But Mr Mawby was out of step, and in 1967 the bill was passed which partially legalised homosexual acts in private between two men. Women homosexuals had never had to fear prosecution, but, as we have seen, the misery and isolation they experienced could be as acute as that of their male counterparts.

Perhaps the most overt airing of gay female relationships came in 1969, when the film version was released of Frank Marcus’s 1965 stage play The Killing of Sister George. By today’s standards the portrayal of the butch, tweedy, gin-and-tonic-swilling George (Beryl Reid), and her kittenish, doll-loving girlfriend Childie (Susannah York) appear heavily stereotyped, locked into a model of lesbianism that hadn’t budged since the 1930s. By this model, the couple play out their relationships according to the rigid gender divisions of traditional heterosexual society, the ‘butch’ taking on the gruff, macho dominant role, while her sweet, ‘femme’ partner bills and coos in chiffon nighties like any dolly bird. But for its time The Killing of Sister George was a pioneer in validating a lesbian relationship, with all its ups and downs, rather than showing it as aberrant. Its drama lay in the central bond, with the audience’s sympathies swayed as George and Childie’s ‘marriage’ is invaded and despoiled by the ruthlessly attractive Mercy Croft (played by Coral Browne in a scarlet dress, at her most sinuous and witch-like). It also legitimised lesbianism by filming a protracted, semi-documentary sequence in the Gateways Club, where the clientele were recruited as extras and paid handsomely to be themselves. The footage gives life to a historic club and its regulars in their customary gear, mostly smart trousers, short hair and jackets, doing the ‘Gateways grind’ on the dance floor. When The Killing of Sister George was released it was given an X certificate because of a somewhat clinical scene at the end where Mercy seduces Childie; some local authorities cut this harmless scene, or banned the film altogether. But wherever it was screened it attracted a large lesbian audience. ‘The showings of the film seemed like big gay public occasions in an era before such things existed,’ remembered one of them.²⁷

The straight press remained po-faced. The Daily Mail reported that the Bishop of Lichfield felt so overwhelmed by the number of X-rated films like The Killing of Sister George that he had become too embarrassed to go to the cinema. He pleaded for the ‘so-called permissive society’ to be reversed for the sake of the community as a whole, and for there to be more films like Mary Poppins and The Jungle Book.²⁸ Even right-on Nova sat on its hands, running a feature that insisted, reassuringly, that the three actresses themselves were ultra-heterosexual. It quoted one of them expressing her squeamish distaste for girl-love: ‘[It’s] like being fed marshmallow when you want rock cake.’²⁹ In the Daily Mirror, columnist Marjorie Proops was honest about her responses to the film, which were ‘an uncomfortable feeling of disquiet, a feeling of inexplicable uneasiness …’ But she confessed that it had also shifted her views:

I, like most other heterosexual women, prefer not to think about lesbianism.³⁰ This film, which I saw last week, has compelled me to stop fooling myself and pretending it simply doesn’t exist.

But her recognition, tolerance and charity had limits:

The one good thing open discussions of this subject can do is make the rest of us pity, rather than condemn, our less normal sisters.

As ‘Steve’ told the BBC, ‘[My mother] can’t accept me … I’ve never been really happy.³¹ It just makes you feel you might as well be in prison. ’Cos it’s a sort of prison anyway.’ There was no getting away from it: those sisters still had a long way to travel on the road to toleration, acceptance and the freedom to be themselves.

In the world of the popular press and its readership, women loving women made great entertainment, and it wasn’t against the law. But it was still sad, creepy and weird.

You Say You Want a Revolution

Marjorie Proops was struggling to be broad-minded. Female solidarity has never been a given. Fifty years earlier, every stone-throwing suffragette campaigning for the cause was outnumbered by the passive majority who preferred a quiet life; similarly, when it came to women’s oppression, there was a lack of consensus.

In March 1969 The Observer’s Pendennis column reported the views of a radical, and angry, feminist playwright named Jane Arden.fn5 Arden saw her sex as being members of an underclass:

Woman, like the Negro, is singled out from the beginning.³² She’s something special: passive, frivolous, weak, lacking in leadership, incapable of dealing with power. Women are seen to be a slave-group, appendages of men without identities of their own …

I’m talking about freedom …

Jane Arden was also keen to tell readers about her next project, a publication which she hoped would uncover the ‘resentment … hidden violence … [and] pain’ that men imposed on women.

However, Pendennis himself took the unrepentant view that no such problem existed:

We haven’t met a woman yet who felt ‘oppressed’ by simply being a woman …³³

We … believe that if women feel oppressed it isn’t because of men, but life.

Readers were then invited to comment. Pendennis’s bulging postbag the following week testified to a wide range of views, from the vehemently feminist to the acquiescent and traditional. Christine Hyatt from London agreed with Jane Arden:

‘Woman Power’ should be as powerful a slogan as Black Power, but most women just don’t want to know.³⁴

‘Most women’ felt deterred by the prospect of turning the sex war into a battleground. But Mrs Mary Wingfield from Suffolk saw nuances in the equality argument:

Those who rant and rave about equal opportunity only seem to have in mind equal opportunity for top jobs and top privileges …³⁵

They’d be the first to protest about women’s rights, she continued, if somebody offered them equal opportunities to become coal miners or morgue attendants. And Mrs J. Reynolds from Derbyshire could see nothing to be gained by freedom:

A true woman can only flower in a state of security and the knowledge of protection of man …³⁶

but Janet M. Turner from Putney had complicated reservations:

I will happily have my body dominated – but not my mind …³⁷

Meanwhile, a correspondent from Reading, Mrs M. Allsebrook, put her views succinctly:

What a career woman really needs is a good wife …³⁸

and Mrs Clare Smith from Surrey was unapologetically rude:

Horrid, nasty, smug Pendennis.³⁹ Patronising, cocky, sneaky, masculine Pendennis.

But Pendennis gave lead position to a letter from the well-regarded Nova journalist Irma Kurtz (later to become Cosmopolitan’s longest-running agony aunt), who, by contrast, contributed a somewhat aloof overview of the subject:

Sitting here in a world that is infected with injustice and shaking with war, it seems to me very sad that someone with Miss Arden’s talent as a writer … should devote herself to a crusade which is so beside-the-point as to seem a creation of her own psyche.⁴⁰ It is not our identity as women we must find, but our identity as human beings.

Kurtz had no intention of climbing on board the emergent women’s movement bandwagon. ‘Of course I support wholeheartedly the liberation of women,’ she wrote later in her memoirs.⁴¹ ‘What woman of spirit does not celebrate release from antiquated restraints? If I never became a ranking member of the movement, that is because I am unable to sit for long in any congregation of made-up minds, no matter how sympathetic their aim.’

*

In 1969 war and injustice continued to preoccupy both women and men. At the London School of Economics the mutterings were vociferous; in the early months of the year they evolved into a head-on collision between the authorities and the Student Union over the college’s financial interests in white South African companies that were thought to be complicit in upholding apartheid. There was a stand-off when the college governors had iron security gates erected on the LSE site to deter demonstrations, and a fully policed lock-out followed.

But, like the Pendennis correspondents, not everyone at the LSE was signed up to the congregation of made-up minds. Here are two contrasting stories from women students that perfectly illustrate the divergence between those resolved to jump feet first into a changing world, and those who continued to embrace the set of values they had inherited. And remember that at this time women at the LSE were (inevitably) outnumbered nearly three to one by men.

In 1966 eighteen-year-old Lucy McLaren from Leeds had arrived there to study Sociology, wearing a twinset and pearls. A buoyant, bright, blonde teenager, astute and friendly, Lucy had been sent to a private school by her old-fashioned ‘perfect wife’-style mother, who ‘could not conceive that my life, clothes, values and views would differ in any way from hers’.⁴² ‘You mustn’t appear too clever, boys won’t like it,’ she told her daughter. Though Lucy saw the Beatles perform live, the permissive society bypassed her bourgeois world of tennis clubs, church, youth-club breakfasts and vicarage entertainments. Lucy admits that, for a provincial girl, the London School of Economics may not have been her best choice of university. Almost from the start she felt out of her comfort zone, surrounded by leather jackets, blue jeans and ‘unshavenness’. ‘And I was scared stiff …’

The fear Lucy felt was a mixture. The heavily politicised atmosphere at the LSE alarmed her: ‘I just wasn’t going to stick my neck over the parapet.’ Social transgressors – like the young woman in her tutor group who had an affair with the lecturer (‘he was revoltingly grubby and never brushed his teeth’) – came with a warning light, and she tended to avoid them. And there was the jolt of hearing her contemporaries speaking a taboo language – ‘Hearing them say “fuck” was a real shock!’ But there were also the rule-breakers and trailblazers:

I remember feeling ‘I wish I was as brave as them.’ Like, people who were sleeping with more than one person at a time – and taking drugs! I felt challenged by their social ease, and the fact that I didn’t smoke, and I was terrified about drug-taking and things. As for having an active sex life, as some women of my age were, I didn’t do anything like that.

I always thought that everybody else was having more fun than me …

The student movement was anti-adult, anti-authoritarian, but this young woman’s conventional posture towards society was not untypical:

I didn’t feel anger towards the older generation. For me, the police were to be trusted, the Royal Family were marvellous – along with all their historical pageantry. I bought into their values – the family, and so on.

1968 passed in a blur. Lucy picked up that there was a ‘feeling of energy’ on the campus, but was not quite clear what it was about. Once, a friend at another college asked her, ‘So, are you going to go and riot?’ – but demonstrations were for other people, not her. That summer vacation, when so many of her fellow students were at boiling point, Lucy was quietly supplementing her education grant working in the cardigan department of Selfridges (‘to this day I can’t leave a cardigan unfolded …’). In 1969 she was back studying for her finals, though unable to ignore that her contemporaries – who included Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburnfn6 – were at the forefront of one of the most heavily publicised student protests of the decade. Life at the School was so disrupted that everyday attendance had become an obstacle course:

The whole area outside the building was just bodies, everywhere. And there were people sitting inside the building – like a sea of denim really – all over the floor, that you had to climb over.

So I ended up just not going into School. I went and worked in the Senate House Library instead.

Beyond the hurdle of finals a promising future beckoned. In the spring of 1969 Lucy had applied for, and won, a place as a radio studio manager at the BBC: that corporate bastion of middle-class values, popular appeal and political impartiality. In August, a month after graduating, she stepped over the portals of Broadcasting House – ‘and that’s when my adult life began’. In June 1971 she would meet and start dating a handsome young producer in Light Entertainment. Six months later she was married.

Looking at women’s relationship with the political protest movement, it’s interesting to compare Lucy McLaren’s short story with that of her exact contemporary, the anonymous ‘Respondent 13’, who was interviewed in 1984 by the historian Ronald Fraser.fn7

Let’s call this young woman ‘Roberta’, and let’s imagine her in the late 1960s as warm, confident and powerfully idealistic, with long dark hair and a miniskirt. Did Lucy and Roberta ever cross paths? They were born in the same year, 1948; both attended a private girls’ school, both in their early teens saw the Beatles perform live, and both enrolled in the London School of Economics at the age of eighteen. But the similarity ends there. Roberta had lost her virginity even before she arrived at LSE, while she was still at school. In 1966 she went on the Pill. And from the beginning of her time at the school she pitched into the ferment of strikes and occupations. Here is Roberta describing her first sit-in:

[We were] sitting on the floor and blocking places – everyone crowded in, eating rolls and buns, smoking cigarettes and getting dirtier and dirtier. I remember wanting to go home for a bath … But it was very exciting.

It was power – whether we would win or not – but there was also the feeling that right was on our side.

Roberta now considered herself a card-carrying Marxist: ‘I believed that capitalism would be overthrown and the working class in alliance with students would stand up and fight it.’ Union meetings were the dynamic place to be; the halls were full of massed students, Americans and Asians, black Africans and Jews; the atmosphere was edgy and thrilling. For Roberta, politics were a turn-on: the Marxists were the sexy ones, because despite being unwashed they were interesting, lively and, as she saw it, open to new ideas. This was where you had to be to change the world. She soon found a role posting smudgy hand-duplicated propaganda leaflets in pigeonholes and on noticeboards. It seemed like a good place to start.

Then the students came back from the Christmas holidays to find that the authorities had put up the gates. Tactics were discussed, and a division of labour agreed. Half a dozen women took up their positions by each gate to stop it being closed, while the men went off to fetch pickaxes and sledgehammers. A smaller group were detailed to carefully unscrew the discriminatory ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ signs from the college toilets.

While Lucy McLaren was diligently doing her best to pass her exams, Roberta and her comrades were joining a mêlée of flailing crowbars and clashes with police. Roberta’s inner group were the grubby unshaven rule-breakers in blue jeans who had most terrified the timid Lucy. Among these Marxist and anarchist friends she found a sense of fun and imagination. They ‘opened themselves out as people more’, particularly the women. But where the men were concerned, she had her limits:

I rarely socialised with those men in the evenings, because I found it difficult to go for eighteen hours at a stretch talking simply about the dialectic, about politics …

There was great male chauvinism.

Turned on as she was by the heady, empowering spirit of protest, Roberta was bored and baffled by much of the blokey baggage that went with it. The beer, the blind certainty, the made-up minds, the propagandist jargon all alienated her. And she felt the way these men treated women was disdainful. ‘[There] was that macho thing about power and political influence and being hard men … [Women] seemed to be appendages … there … on a sort of sexual sufferance.’

In the tense, combustible atmosphere of student protest, nobody seems to have given women’s oppression much airtime. Many a male Marxist ate buns, penned placards and omitted baths on behalf of black people in South Africa, Vietnamese children or the proletariat. But on behalf of women? They didn’t count. The attendant girls were there to distribute the leaflets they’d written, act as decoys and listen to them droning on about dialectics. Where women in the protest movement were concerned, liberation had barely begun.

Nevertheless, fifteen years on, Roberta judged that the protest years had given her more than they’d taken away. The interviewer asked her what she had gained of value from that time, that she would pass on to her daughter:

ROBERTA: Being involved, not sitting on the sidelines … being free to have ideas which later might seem idealistic, romantic and utopian …

We were very free – and that freedom meant one could be very uncompromised. Things were very black and white. We were fired to better the world and make it a better place to live in …

Maybe the world had to be made better a step at a time. Roberta had played her part. And she would live to see extraordinary changes.

Birth of a Movement

As the decade drew to a close the message was at last starting to get through.

The voices of women like Juliet Mitchell, Maureen Duffy, Sheila Rowbotham, Lillian Bilocca in Hull and Rosie Boland at the Dagenham works were growing in number, and in volume. As in an orchestra, the ensemble now joined the soloists. Women working in industry started to organise through their unions, and in 1969 formed the National Joint Action Committee for Women’s Equal Rights. Their acronym, NJACWER, didn’t exactly trip off the tongue, but their chorus – ‘What do we say? Equal Pay!’ – could be heard fortissimo down Whitehall. On a showery Sunday in May around 1,000 women, conventionally attired in raincoats and high heels, with umbrellas to protect their nicely permed hair, showed up at their first demonstration in Trafalgar Square. Representing affiliated groups from as far afield as Yorkshire and Scotland, they bore banners and hushed their chant as the veteran feminist and politician Baroness Summerskill mounted the steps to address them from the platform: ‘You are not only demonstrating on your own behalf, but for all women suffering discrimination in the whole country.’⁴³

The spirit of the trades union women heartened those left-wing intellectuals, students and radicals who felt isolated and terrified of being branded feminists – for in Trotskyist circles it still took courage to assert that women had anything to complain about. Juliet Mitchell began to hold classes at the short-lived Anti-University. And in a shambolic terraced house in Islington full of mothers and riotous children, the Women’s Liberation Workshop was born. In January 1969 Sheila Rowbotham’s special women’s issue of Black Dwarf had been printed and distributed. It was a plea to rise out of passivity:

We are the most divided of all oppressed groups …

We walk and talk and think as living contradictions.

We give up struggling on every front …

and a pitch for equality –

We want to drive buses, play football … We want men to take the pill.

But it was also a challenge, an entreaty, a rallying cry:

We must make a new world in which we do not meet each other as exploiters and used objects. Where we love one another and into which a new kind of human being can be born.

In parallel, some American expatriates were transplanting the green shoots of the transatlantic Women’s Liberation movement to their Tufnell Park living rooms, where they took new root:

It was tremendously exciting …⁴⁴

wrote one of them:

No one else seemed to have heard of Women’s Liberation – we were freaks. I used to be exhausted and exhilarated after meetings and used to lie awake thinking – couldn’t stop …

We wanted to be able to break down the barriers between private personal life and public political life.

Soon after, Sheila Rowbotham took up a suggestion to attend a discussion of Women’s Liberation under the banner of a ‘Revolutionary Festival’ being held at Essex University. On a slushy, freezing, February day she shared a ride from London with two women friends, talking all the way, exchanging and comparing the ideas which, in those early days, seemed to fizz from fountains of passion and belief. The concrete-and-glass Essex campus was sodden with melting snow, and their trailing maxi dresses (worn in defiance of the sexually inviting mini) soaked them to the ankles. But the hall was packed for what proved to be a chaotic, urgent and argumentative session; ideas jostled for space. The men there were feeling defensive, accusing the women of giggling like mothers at a tea party. Maoists were at odds with the New Left. Sheila began to wonder whether men needed to be there at all.

As the year progressed more groups were started up across the country. The Women’s Liberation Workshop began publishing Shrew, which campaigned for local changes in women’s lives (contraceptive clinics and the like), as well as providing a forum for divergent views. Shrew talked to a seventy-eight-year-old feminist:

In my view it is futile for women to rely on men to fight their battle for them.⁴⁵ They must do it themselves – even at the risk of being dubbed ‘battle-axes’ …

and a housewife –

I don’t think it does a lot of good.⁴⁶ I think it’s a lot of lesbians getting together for a giggle … I can’t see any good in Women’s Liberation …

These were experimental days, with small, intense, splintered clusters who formed and reformed, rambled and rabble-roused, connected and explored. Beginners’ mistakes were made. Comically imaginative, publicity-attracting tactics were adopted. The WL Workshop sent a guerrilla group into the lingerie department of a large London store, where they staged a funeral of corsetry, chanting:

A cup, B cup, C cup, D:⁴⁷

Breasts support our currency …

One young bank employee joined a group who had stickers made saying ‘This Exploits Women’ and ‘A whore makes more’. They got up at five in the morning, walked as unselfconsciously as possible into the Underground and glued the stickers onto sexualised swimwear adverts. ‘No doubt [we looked] incredibly conspicuous …’⁴⁸

The early months of Women’s Lib were illuminating, idealistic, brave, energetic and emotional. Sheila Rowbotham remembers the atmosphere as tentative and democratic rather than militant. She wrote of this time:

I don’t think any of us realised we were starting a movement …⁴⁹

The male backlash was immediate. ‘Cadres of the Women’s Liberation Workshop,’ grumbled Peter Simple in the Daily Telegraph, ‘have been energetically charging up and down escalators decorating the pictures of undressed women with subversive stickers … [They] sound a grim lot …’, while John Crosby in The Observer gave vent to some patronising mockery of the liberationists: ‘Is it just possible that the greater freedom and power women get, the more revolting they get …?^{50, 51} [And] it won’t be long – you mark my words – before calling a girl beautiful will get you a swift karate punch in the kidneys.’ Some women were also outspoken about their dissatisfied sisters; Mrs Jennifer Daly from Lymington wrote to the Daily Mail –

I am sick of reading about all the discontented, maladjusted, neurotic, inadequate women who have so little self-sufficiency that just the thought of spending one day as a housewife with just the children for company sends them screaming.⁵²

Why the majority of them ever get married in the first place beats me.

Irma Kurtz preferred, as before, to stand at a journalistic distance from her subject.fn8 Writing in the Sunday Times, she observed that the radicals had emerged from the privileged and educated classes. But there were compelling reasons behind their demands for rights, and there was a tangible discontent underlying the very condition of womanhood.

The material for a feminist movement is there.⁵³ The anger is rising. All that is needed are full-time leaders.

Throughout 1969 Sheila Rowbotham was travelling, part-time teaching, writing and reflecting on what a women’s movement might have to offer. Did the oppression of women reduce them to victims, or could they reinvent themselves as purveyors of the Utopia so beloved of the 1960s radicals? And what about sex? ‘I was as capable of wanting momentary sensual pleasure as a man, but this was a barely permissible female thought then.’⁵⁴ The same honesty compelled Sheila to admit that she was also as capable of inflicting pain on men as they were on her, and she refused to bundle all men together as brutish Neanderthals. ‘They are afraid,’ she noted in her diary of April 1969. And being a woman wasn’t always such a raw deal – she often felt glad to be spared the pressures that she saw men having to deal with.

In the summer of 1969 the dripping taps and rotten joists finally got the better of Sheila’s household; the floor of their communal bathroom collapsed. While her friends laboured with saws and screwdrivers reconstructing it, Sheila spent an intense three weeks at her desk wrestling with these thoughts and contradictions. Her new essay opened with a challenge:

The first question is why do we stand for it?⁵⁵ The oppressed are mysteriously quiet …

As she wrote, a drumroll of ferocious hammering reverberated across the stairwell. At intervals Sheila left her typewriter and navigated a plank laid across the joists to get to the toilet. ‘I felt terribly guilty not helping …’ The resulting pamphlet, Women’s Liberation and the New Politics, was an attempt ‘to probe beyond what was taken for granted …’; ‘a message into the unknown’. In a brief thirty-two pages it exposed the nature of women’s oppression, delving deep into the condition of the slighted and the subjugated, and their relationship with the wider purposes of revolution. It tore into the gendered vocabulary and thought processes that mirrored a male world view: with words like MANkind, WoMANkind and HuMANity spelling invisibility for half the human race:

Thinking is difficult when the words are not your own …

And it deftly unpacked the sex war, explaining the complex collusions that proceeded within the male/female power relationship: how flattery meets vanity halfway, how flirtation elicits obligation, and how woman’s tactics – appearing dumb and devious – were inseparable from the achievement of her ends. Where, in our society, she asked, could women find freedom? Everywhere, we are limited, cramped, stultified. The housewife may achieve some limited dignity through placing a cordon bleu coq au vin in front of her husband; the ‘emancipated’ career woman competes for attention in the professional world with her mannish attire and aggression; while the ‘liberated’ woman asserts herself through sex – an arena in which the game of wanting and being wanted was almost invariably played out in men’s favour. The pamphlet addressed housework too. Wasn’t it time for society to recognise that scrubbing the steps and bleaching the bath were not only material activities, but also ones that affected a person’s understanding of the world, their very consciousness? Capitalism had infiltrated marriage and the home. Wasn’t it also time to understand that woman’s domestic labour, above all in working-class households, took the shape of an unfair bargain? ‘In 1969 [this] still seemed revelatory.’

This was the pamphlet that launched Women’s Lib. Its author, Sheila Rowbotham, wrote: ‘All the ideas and reading of the previous few months [were] welling up inside me and tumbling out on to the pages.’

Meanwhile, the role of the working woman strikingly highlighted her double burden, both inside and outside the home. Equal pay and childcare were necessary, but were not a solution, unless women’s social subordination was also addressed. Though earning a wage gave married women a bigger share of power, it wasn’t the whole story. The working women carrying placards in Trafalgar Square didn’t only want to be paid the same as men – they wanted to prove they could do the same work as a man. Flag-carrying and slogans weren’t enough. Some tactical iconoclasm was required – the Atlantic City protesters against Miss America having set the model the previous year. Through swimwear, dolls, adverts, fashions, books and imagery of every kind, the media all unthinkingly expressed the ‘thingification’ of women. Now the time had come to oppose that unthinkingness, and Sheila Rowbotham urged women in Britain to show the world how they too felt about being sexual commodities and consumer dustbins. But the biggest challenge to this kind of gesture politics was woman herself. The female psyche was formed of stubborn material, in which the legend SEX OBJECT was deeply incised. ‘When I go out without my mascara on my eyes I experience myself as I knew myself before puberty. It is inconceivable that any man could desire me sexually …’ And women seeking a way out of captivity would find themselves in a grotesque looking-glass world where the very concept of freedom was warped and mangled.

This book has told the stories of the real women behind many of those distortions – narratives of indignity and insult that supplement Sheila Rowbotham’s necessarily terse polemic. Women’s Liberation and the New Politics was directed at a self-selecting proto-feminist readership. But surely her words were for them too? For Margaret Hogg in 1960, patronised and shunned by the medical Establishment, or Viv Nicholson in 1961, lonely and afraid, drowning in wealth. For Ann Leslie, baited and tormented by the men in her Manchester news office, and Jean Shrimpton, miserable and reluctant, giving in to David Bailey behind a bush in the park. 1963 saw Mandy Rice-Davies and Christine Keeler stigmatised, bullied, belittled and manipulated for changing the accepted scenario of female shame, and 1965 saw Kristina Reed, emerging from the posh-deb world, falling on her face because she was too well mannered to say no. Then there was Pauline O’Mahony, suffering the assaults of her groper boss in order to hold down her job in the Housing Department, while Theresa Tyrell and Floella Benjamin were afflicted by the unwelcome attentions they attracted owing to the colour of their skin. Kimberley Saunders’s boyfriend got sex in return for Sindys; Hugh Hefner created the fluffy, fake Mayfair bunnies – pets, not people. In 1968 Mary Denness and Lillian Bilocca campaigned for safety at sea – in return for a broken marriage and poison-pen letters – while the magazine agony aunts’ postbags bulged with distraught correspondence from hapless teenagers asking whether they should sleep with their boyfriends. Then spin on to Jenny Fabian, ground down by promiscuity, desperate for the right man to come along; Amanda Brooke-Dales destroying a marriage for love; gay women enduring discrimination. The 1960s witnessed confusion, cruelty, indignity, protest, politics and a crescendo of rage.

All of that oppression, and more, Sheila Rowbotham distils into a howl of pain and anger:

There is a cruel irony in the way the assertion of the dignity and honesty of sexual love has become the freedom for the woman-object to strip to sell the object-commodity, or the freedom for the woman-object to fuck her refracted envy of the dominator man …

Modern capitalism beguiles with flickering lights, it mystifies with a giant kaleidoscope … We walk into a world of distorting mirrors. We smash the mirrors. Only pain convinces us we are there. But there is still more glass. Your nose is pressing against the glass, the object suddenly finds herself peeping at herself. There is the possibility of a moment of illumination. The feminine voyeur finds her identity as pornography. The ‘emancipated’ woman sees herself as naked buttocks bursting out of black suspenders, as tits drooping into undulating passive flesh. WHO ME? Comprehension screeches to a halt. She is jerked into watching herself as object watching herself. She is being asked to desire herself. The traditional escape route of ‘morality’ is blocked. She can either shutter the experience or force some kind of breakthrough.

Women’s Liberation and the New Politics is a demonstration of the power of ideas. Before it there were groups, debates, articles, workshops and meetings.

After it there was a manifesto, and a movement.

*

The ideologues of the 1960s gave the world a tenacious vision. But it’s one that is open to interpretation. Margaret Thatcher believed that their theories damaged our society; that all their ‘permissive claptrap’ contributed to a breakdown of old-fashioned morals. But surely Thatcher’s own denial of society itself, her libertarianism and the rampant individualism of the 1980s, also owed something to the egocentricity of the doing-your-own-thing decade?

As Jenny Diski wailed in her final memoir, The Sixties, ‘That wasn’t what we meant …’

Perhaps hindsight can help us, today, to distinguish what was damaging from what was valuable in the 1960s. The decade may have fostered misogyny, pornography and objectification. But, at its best, it offered a peace-and-love Utopia that outlawed the constructs of masculinity: intolerance, greed, money and war. And for some that dream wouldn’t lie down, giving the barefoot children of the age something precious and enduring, which has guided their lives. ‘We wanted to change ourselves …’ says Melissa North.⁵⁶ ‘We took drugs not just to fall around laughing but because we thought they made us think better, and bigger … And we saw our beliefs expressed by the musicians, artists and poets we followed. It ran through all the tribes of the time. That’s why the Beatles were gods. They just kept writing songs that expressed what we all felt at exactly the same moment.’ ‘Amid all the fun and games we tried to be not so much down in the gutter and more looking at the stars.⁵⁷ That was my aim and it still is,’ said another contemporary.

The fire stays alight in many a septuagenarian breast. And it’s easy to recognise the dreamers in their different guises as, perennially, the ideologies, like the fashions, are resurrected: Eco-warrior, Anti-War demonstrator, New Age bohemian, Global Justice protester, Black Lives Matter activist – and #MeToo Feminist.

Their visions still animate our world, still inspire gratitude – above all perhaps among older women, who espoused Women’s Liberation in the early 1970s. These women’s daughters and granddaughters may learn to thank them for their attempt to change the world, to remove sexual and racial prejudice, and to bring true equality a step closer.

*

A bitter taste accompanied the waning of the 1960s. Excess was followed by hangover. After Brian Jones died Marianne Faithfull’s drug use accelerated; ‘I wanted to be a junkie more than I wanted to be with [Mick],’ she said.⁵⁸ She was with Jagger in Australia when she took an overdose of Tuinal and sank into a coma from which she emerged only after six days, the second of Jagger’s girlfriends to attempt suicide.fn9 In August news broke that five people, including the then pregnant actress Sharon Tate, had been victims of a horrifying mass murder in Los Angeles. The crimes led to the arrest and trial of the cult leader Charles Manson and his followers who carried them out. Many would take the view that the Manson murders were the end of everything the hippies had stood for. ‘They closed an era,’ said the prosecuting lawyer, Vincent Bugliosi.⁵⁹ ‘The sixties, the decade of love, ended on that night, on 9 August 1969.’ Altamont, California, was also the scene of ‘rock and roll’s all-time worst day’, according to Rolling Stone magazine, which described the moment when an audience member at a free festival was fatally stabbed yards from the stage by Hell’s Angels hired to provide security. There were scores of injuries. The concert, held on 6 December 1969, would equally become synonymous with the collapse of the hippie dream.

*

For me too, a cloud moved across the sun in the last months of 1969. The threatened amalgamation of three schools into one enormous 1,500-pupil, co-educational entity took place in the autumn that I was fourteen. For a timorous, nerdy adolescent, the timing was awful. Being good at Latin and History no longer had status. The exotic presence of a lot of pimply boys sent half my class over the edge; our uniforms had been modernised, and our navy-blue hats and box pleats were replaced with grey A-line skirts that in most cases now hit the knicker-line. Two fifteen-year-olds got expelled for selling cannabis, which turned out to be Oxo cubes. Though I still religiously watched Top of the Pops, I felt scared, immature, and completely out of my comfort zone. In 1969 my childhood ended, the giggly girly friendships on the netball pitch evaporated and I retreated into a lonesome world of poetry and stories.

At the beginning of this book I asked myself some questions about the 1960s. Did I miss out on all the fun, from being too young? Did I benefit from the accumulated experience of those women just a few years older than me who lived the 1960s more fully than I ever could? Or was I really the lucky one, to have been spared their experiences? Inevitably, my answers are mixed. I don’t envy the bunny girls, or the victims of workplace harassment, and I’m relieved I never had an abortion. I can only admire and wonder, too, at how mothers like Margaret Hogg found the maturity and courage to cope with the stress of caring for a severely and unnecessarily impaired child. And I’m also very glad, as a woman, to have missed out on much of the aggression, misogyny, bias, disadvantage, belittlement and sheer hatred that this book has described.

But let’s not pretend it all came to an end when the Women’s Liberation movement began. Sexism is like a Hydra. Chop off its head and two more grow in its place. The harassment and abuses of power described in these pages, which one might have hoped were consigned to history, are alive and well in the twenty-first century. My grown-up daughters and their generation have new battles to fight, and are discovering a new kind of feminism.

Nevertheless, nearly every woman who talked to me about growing up in the 1960s seemed to think that it was a rich and extraordinary decade; most of them had colourful and intense recollections of their youth between 1960 and 1970. Of course, I wish I had been there when Lulu was belting out ‘HEY HEY HEY HEY, Jump up and SHOUT now, everybody SHOUT now,’ from the Ready Steady Go! stage. I envy those who saw the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Or, how great to have been Mavis Wilson in 1966, in her false eyelashes and crocheted mini, partying with famous artists, or Kimberley Saunders, heady with speed and excitement astride a Triton on the A23, or Patsy Reading careering round Hyde Park Corner in her Mini on two wheels – ‘It was a wonderful life, Virginia!⁶⁰ You could do anything.’ My beautiful gypsyish cousin Henrietta, an unreachable ten years my senior, seemed to live a life like a mirage, incandescent, intensely romantic, always in love. And what teenager wouldn’t have stepped into Pattie Boyd’s Charles Jourdans? Lovely, creative, young, rich and married to a Beatle, wasn’t she the luckiest girl in the world? As for the drugs – when Melissa North told me about her time taking acid she was still intoxicated by the memory, and seemed to pity me for never having had the courage to try it out, while listening to Caroline Harper talking about her quest for enlightenment made me feel I’d only lived half a life. Politically, today, we seem to see the death of idealism – but, amid the ferment of 1968, feeling you were on the right side of the argument must have been mind-blowing. I’d have liked, too, to be with Pat Quinn as she and her celebrity friends riotously celebrated the end of the 1960s at a crazy party on New Year’s Eve 1969, even if it meant waking up with a hangover to a sadder, more sober 1970. ‘And she’ll have FUN FUN FUN …’ sang Mike Love of the Beach Boys while chewing gum at the same time. These women and many others felt they’d been set free from their cages.

So, yes, I’m envious. Of the joy, of the release, the openness, the love, the colour, candour and courage; the fantasy and guiltless freedom that certainly characterise so much of those years. All that fun. And no, the liberated sixties weren’t just a myth. Women were like fledglings tipped from the confines of the nest, exhilarated by the sun and the wind on their beautiful feathers, giddy on music, psychedelia and strange pleasures. Many felt rocketed into a brave, glorious firmament, a wonderful space and time in which to be alive. And many found a new honesty, a new language and a new voice.

But the sky was frightening, unknown and full of predators. Real liberation for women was something different.

Real liberation would be a long time coming.

It hasn’t come yet.