Tower and Town, October 2019

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Virginia Nicholson

How Was It For You ? Women, Sex. Love and Power in the 1960s ??

There must be many of us living here for whom the 1960s was a decade of change and a time when you ‘took off’.

Virginia Nicholson, the daughter of Quentin Bell and the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell, a renowned social historian, takes us from a world of women wearing hats and white gloves tied to the home through to a time of ardent women’s liberation movements and the entrance of Germaine Greer.

She interviewed more than 40 women, both famous and anonymous, telling their personal stories in a touching and often humorous way. You meet the wife of a Hull trawler skipper who, having had a very stay at home life, was galvanised to take action after a triple trawler tragedy to secure safer working conditions at sea. This changed her life and the lives of many others like her. You hear the story of Pattie Boyd who at 21 years married George Harrison and at first lived the life of a dream; there is also a mother of one of the first thalidomide children who was told he would not live beyond five but is now in his fifties having learned to swim and play football. There are many girls who broke away from their staid rural homes to find a life of freedom in London.

There is definitely a sense of déjà vu as memories are jogged which create smiles of recognition as you are reminded of the introduction of washing machines and Kenwood mixers into your kitchens, Mary Quant, Bunny Girls, Cindy dolls, Mods and Rockers and Flower Power and all that went with it.

Virginia Reekie