How Was it for You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s
VIRGINIA NICHOLSON
(Viking, 512 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064
They say if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there. Virginia Nicholson’s How Was It For You? gives the lie to that cliché. A series of interviews with women who lived through that most self-regarding of decades, the book is studded with telling details. It’s a marvellous corrective to the fantasy that the Sixties were one long, lazy reverie of rock, raunch and relativism. One woman remembers having “screamed till my nose bled” at – wait for it – a Cliff Richard concert. Another recalls how the facts of life were explained to her in a domestic science class, when Miss Green had her charges carry out a “four-needle exercise [to] knit a uterus [with] a nice ribbed bit at the bottom for the cervix” before having them work a tennis ball through it. “Now,” she told the girls, “you know how a baby is born.”
Miss Green’s class would have been altogether too much for her fellow teacher Mary Whitehouse who in 1964 launched herself on a one-woman crusade to rid the land of the “propaganda of disbelief, doubt and dirt that the BBC projects into millions of homes through the television screen”. Nicholson is admirably torn on the Whitehouse question. On the one hand, she doesn’t want to dismiss the freedoms that the Sixties ushered in. On the other, she knows that Whitehouse was right when she said that something was being lost. For Whitehouse wasn’t anti-sex.
