London - No decade in recent history carries quite as much romantic baggage as the supposedly Swinging Sixties.
In the public imagination, it was a decade of unbroken sunshine and sparkling blue skies, the headlines full of chart-topping pop stars and world-conquering footballers, a world of Minis and miniskirts, endless possibilities and thrilling pleasures.
Even now, half a century later, we still live in the Sixties’ shadow. In an age of unprecedented economic austerity, stagnant social mobility, international terrorism and political bickering, we cannot help but dream of a lost golden age when life was sunnier, simpler, easier and happier.
Yet were the Sixties ever really like that? And if not, isn’t it time we banished the caricatures of Swinging London, and faced up to what life was really like for millions of ordinary people?
That, at any rate, is the obvious conclusion to draw from a new book, Women Of The 1960s: More Than Miniskirts, Pills And Pop Music, based on dozens of interviews with British women who went to school, got their first jobs, got married and had children during the most celebrated decade in modern British history.
For, as many of them told the author, Sheila Hardy, life may have been fulfilling and often fun, but it was often a long way from the stereotype of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.
“Swinging Sixties?” remarks one woman. “Not really in my life, but we didn’t live in or around London . . . As far as I’m concerned the whole thing was just a media myth.”
“I was probably too busy with small children to notice,” remarks another.
Yet the real story of these women’s lives could hardly be more fascinating.
Their memories certainly confirm that the Sixties was an age of dramatic new opportunities, a world often poised uneasily between the Victorian past and the 21st-century future.
Theirs was a world defined not by casual sex and drugs, but by casual weekend jobs and home-made mini-dresses, Berni Inns and G-Plan furniture, daily trips to the shops and cherished holidays to Butlins and Blackpool.
Yet it was nonetheless a world of tremendous excitement and endearing innocence - and one that throws the arrogance and anxiety of our own age into sharp relief.
Even at the time, girls born in the Forties and Fifties were conscious that they enjoyed opportunities never open to their parents and grandparents. Born in the shadow of war, they grew up during the biggest economic boom in our modern history, with wages rising every year and unemployment almost unknown.
As one woman remembers: “You could go from one job to another when you got fed up with the one you were doing, and could get experience in all sorts of careers.”
It is true, of course, that girls and boys were expected to study different subjects at school. Boys were encouraged to study for longer and to tackle more academic subjects, while girls were often pushed out to secretarial colleges.
Yet the fact that so many girls were working at all represented something of a breakthrough.
One woman recalls working at Woolworths at weekends on the biscuit and sweet counter, dressed in a starched white cotton uniform, handing out bags across a polished mahogany counter.
Foodwise, many families stuck to weekly routines - cold beef on Mondays, pork chops on Tuesdays, beef casserole on Wednesdays, sausages on Thursdays, and so on, followed by rice pudding or bananas and custard.
It was little wonder, then, that many young women craved a little foreign sophistication - from the dubious charms of the Vesta curry to the sheer glamour of a trip to their local Berni Inn, where, if they were really lucky, they could have a decadent Irish coffee to finish.
Meanwhile, for teenagers, there was no more exciting destination than the local coffee bar.
One of the interviewees paints a lovely picture of Sudbury, Suffolk where she frequented the Zanzi Bar at weekends. “It had a jukebox, and we would sit in there for hours, drinking hot blackcurrant and listening to Bob Dylan.”
By modern standards, however, the girls interviewed in this book emerge as remarkably innocent. The days of sexting and internet pornography were a long way in the future; indeed, compared with their 21st-century equivalents, Hardy’s interviewees led positively cloistered sex lives.
Of course, sex was far from unknown. But in schools, sex education was rudimentary or non-existent. Many girls were introduced to the subject only through talking about rabbits rather than humans, which meant they either did not listen or were baffled by what they had been told.
Even so, a greater frankness was slowly becoming the norm. The power of television played a key part. For example, interviews with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies, the good-time girls at the centre of the Profumo scandal, suggested to some that sex was easy.
The truth is that in the Sixties, very few teenagers had sex before 16, and millions of girls still believed in the importance of chastity until they had found a steady partner, or even a husband.
There was, of course, a dark side to this apparently innocent picture. With abortion largely outlawed until 1967, girls who found themselves in the “family way” sometimes resorted to horrific back-street procedures or even tried to terminate their pregnancies themselves, with predictably grim results.
Others had their babies in hospital, only to hand them over for adoption straight away, leaving psychological scars that never really healed.
For most girls, however, the “ultimate ideal”, as one puts it, remained the dream of a lasting marriage to a perfect husband.
This was the future drummed into them in countless books, which showed women either as housewives and mothers, or in traditional “female” occupations such as nursing and teaching.
Girls got married much younger in the Sixties than they do today: most were already hitched before the age of 25, and every year thousands married in their late teens.
The striking absence from Sheila Hardy’s book, interestingly, is politics. Then, as now, most people had much better things to worry about than the childish intrigues of the Westminster elite.
Her interviewees remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the first Moon landing, but none mentions politicians of the day such as Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson.
What is also very striking is how few of them saw themselves asfeminists.
“I never really fancied burning my bra,” says one. Another, who initially approved of the feminist movement, adds that she “came to dislike intensely the brash, aggressive spokeswomen who took it to unrealistic man-hating lengths.”
I wonder, then, whether these women really were so different from their modern-day successors.
In some ways, they may appear more innocent, even more ignorant, but their priorities - a good education, a fulfilling job, a happy home life - were exactly the same as those of most girls and young women today.
The surface trappings, I admit, have certainly changed.
Berni Inns are no longer the height of fashion, few people aspire to holiday at Butlin’s, and the Rolling Stones now look like they have been preserved from the age of the dinosaurs.
Yet deep down, I think, most ordinary Britons have changed much less than we think.
Teenagers may have exchanged coffee bars for internet chatrooms, but we remain, as we were in the Sixties, a fundamentally fair-minded, sensible, home-loving and pragmatic people.
And if a teenager from 2016 met a teenager from 1966, I suspect they would have much more in common than we tend to imagine.
We may think of the Sixties, then, as a decade of tremendous change. But the remarkable thing, as these women’s testimonies show, is that deep down, things have changed much less than we think.
A surprising conclusion, then - but, I think, a reassuring one, too.
Daily Mail
* Women Of The 1960s: More Than Miniskirts, Pills And Pop Music, by Sheila Hardy, is published by Pen & Sword
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