Was There a Sexual Revolution in Britain in the 1960s and 70s?

Kate Millet, writing in 1970, asserted that ‘the term “sexual revolution” has such vogue at present it may be invoked to explain even the most trivial of socio-sexual fashions’ (Loc 1672.) If we accept Jeffery Weeks’ definition of sexuality as ‘the product of a host of autonomous and interacting traditions and social practices: religious, moral, economic, familial, medical, juridical’ (1985 p6) we see that a sexual revolution would be a very profound social and cultural change.  For Kate Millet, it would result in ‘a permissive single standard of sexual freedom… uncorrupted by the crass and exploitative economic bases of traditional sexual alliances …[which] would bring the institution of patriarchy to an end’(Loc. 1687.) It would also presumably bring an end to heterocentrism.

Millet, Dominic Sandbrook, Jeffery Weeks and Sheila Jefferies argue that changes in sexuality in the 60s and 70s were part of a longer, more gradual shift occurring sporadically since the 19^th century. Sandbrook, Weeks and Andy Beckett posit that changes were most significant for gay men and Weeks and Jefferies consider the change in women’s sexual freedoms to have been cosmetic at best. Becket argues for the seventies being ‘the real sixties’ (2009. P209) when discussing advances made in gay rights and feminism. This essay will look at all these arguments and the experiences of heterosexual women and homosexual men and women during those two decades.  

It will be argued here that the 1960s and 1970s saw significant advances in the sexual liberation of heterosexual women and homosexual men and women but that this is due less to a revolution and more to several important law changes regarding sexual behaviour and women’s rights and a new openness in discourses around sex. In reality, the majority of people did not drastically change their sexual behaviour or attitudes. It is tempting to conclude that the sexual revolution existed for a minority of young, white, urban, middle class heterosexuals in the sixties and young, white, urban, middle class homosexuals in the seventies with both groups taking a politically challenging approach to older heteronormative values. However, this would be to fail to appreciate the wider underlying social shifts which came before the sixties and the ways in which this period paved the way for greater sexual freedom since. It will be useful to consider the sixties more closely in relation to heterosexual experiences of change and look at the seventies in more depth in relation to change for homosexuals.   

That laws governing sexuality changed in the sixties and that speech around sexuality became more open and public is undeniable. Sandbrook says ‘At the beginning of the 1950s…it was commonly accepted that the state had the right to regulate sexual behaviour’ ( 2006 p478) and cites studies which leave ‘ no doubt that before the sixties most people received no sexual education at all’ (479.)  These were to change.  The Obscene Publications Act 1959 and the relaxation of film and theatre censorship in 1968 allowed sex to be portrayed more openly. In 1964 Oral contraceptives became available to married women and the 1967 Abortion Act also gave women somewhat more power and freedom over reproduction. The Sexual Offences Act  (1967)at last decriminalised consensual private sex acts between men over 21 and the  1969 Divorce act also made it easier for people to end unhappy marriages.

Discourses around sex also increased. Weeks, writing in 1985 says ‘if the history of recent sexuality can be seen as an explosion of speech around sex then the 1960s experienced a decisive, qualitative escalation of the volume’ (pg 20) There was a surge of books about sex aimed first at married couples and then at single women but these cannot be considered evidence of the sexual liberation of women. Beckett asserts that ‘the main beneficiaries of this new permissiveness were men’ (2006 p221) and  Jefferies argues that this was a new form of subordination and that ‘behind the baloney of sexual liberation, the naked power politics of male supremacy were being acted out’ (1990 p2.) The books of this time either ignored homosexuality or discussed it as a mental disorder.  Weeks argues that heteronormative ideologies had not been overthrown when he says ‘feminist and militant gay movements of the seventies grew explicitly in opposition to the dominant tendencies of the decade.’ (Weeks’emphasis. 1985. P20)

The concept of a sexual revolution assumes that there was a solidly defined structure of sexual norms to be turned upside down in the sixties but Kate Millet argues that a sexual revolution for women began in the last three decades of the 19^th century related to increased legal rights of women and a new expectation of men to take more responsibility for their sexual behaviour. A sexual revolution, she argues, was bound to take place ‘by stages that are capable of interruption and temporary regression’ (1970 p1734) and that the 1930s to the 1960s was such a time after which women would again make political and social headway  (1970 p1704.) Interestingly, Sheila Jefferies makes a very different analysis arguing that it was the threat to patriarchy of the first wave of women’s liberation which led to the birth of sexology, a science ‘founded on the assumption that sex played a crucial role in maintaining women’s subordination’ (1990 p93.) The sixties and its sexual revolution, Jefferies argues, is part of this tradition, another occasion where increased rights for women again led to new ways in which women could be controlled sexually (91-94.)

Sandbrook argues that the developments of the sixties ‘look less like a revolution and more like the latest stage in a long period of development’ (2006 p481.) Using a survey by Eustace Chesser in 1956 he shows that half of women born between 1924 and 1934 had had sex before marriage (481) with contraception being available from 1918. The contraceptive pill emerged in the sixties but Sandbrook argues that it was not easily available then (p490.) He asserts that the concept of sexual permissiveness in the sixties is a myth confined largely to anecdotes of a vocal minority (479) living in London (199) and cites Ross McKibbon’s argument that there was a ‘clear relationship between sexual permissiveness and income levels’ (McKibbon in Sandbrook 481.)

I interviewed Mo Pritchard, a white, middle class, heterosexual woman who came to London from Kent in 1960 at the age of eighteen. For Pritchard, the sexual revolution existed. She says ‘I think it was easier for me because my mother had discovered and enjoyed sex and told me all about it, openly (not done at the time’)(20012.) Ann Oakley cites a study by Chesser in which women who had been told sex was an unpleasant duty by mothers were much less likely to find it enjoyable than women whose mothers had given the opposite impression (1974 p79.) For Mo, the contraceptive pill was central to her experience of the sixties. ‘Better than sliced bread, the washing machine or any other innovation… woohoo! If I fancied a bloke, I could indulge.’  However, Pritchard goes on to say   ‘underneath, for a long time was a slight guilt that I enjoyed this “disgusting” act as my Aunt Grace called it.”

Jennison and Bartle discuss how many young women were held back from seeking contraceptive advice from these feelings of guilt and ‘how pressures combine to make women feel guilt where none is needed ‘(1974 p33.)   The pressures they mention include disapproving families, fear of moral lectures from doctors or clinic staff or simply having no precedent for thinking about such things as contraception (27-35.) It is revealing that Pritchard says of the contraceptive pill ‘I was allowed it for heavy periods’(2012.) She never needed to mention her need for contraception at all.  This sense of shame for women around sexuality is argued by Oakley and Millet to be socially constructed. Millet says’ the conditions of patriarchal society have had such profound effects upon female sexuality that its function has been drastically affected, its true character long distorted and long unknown (1970 p2865.) Drawing on anthropological studies of other cultures, Oakley argues that the ‘natural’ differences in male and female sexuality accepted in Britain in which men are perceived as sexually aggressive and women as sexually passive, are socially constructed from childhood.  ‘A man proves his masculinity by going to bed with women whilst a woman proves her femininity by not going to bed with men.  Masculinity equals sexuality whereas femininity is opposed to it’(1974 974 p79)

However, whilst these attitudes survived into the sixties, women were suddenly expected to immediately enjoy sex or risk being considered frigid or having’ inhibitions.’ ‘The concept of the ‘inhibition’ was a powerful weapon in the armoury of 1960s sexual revolutionaries…to be accused by a man of having inhibitions was a serious matter, the implication being that the woman was old fashioned, narrow minded and somehow psychologically damaged.’(Jefferies 1990 pp 95-96.) Asked about this, Pritchard said ‘If you knew too much about it, the man would think you “were no better than you should be” but ‘to refuse sex we were definitely frigid or a lesbian – couldn’t possibly be that the man was totally unattractive!’ (2012)

Jeffery Weeks argues that this new sexualisation of women’s bodies at a time when women were still financially dependent on men led to the ‘relatively new phenomenon that the choice of a marriage partner could be dictated by sexual attraction’ (1985 p27) and therefore new pressure on women to be sexually attractive and available. Jefferies supports this saying of the popular book ‘Sex and the single girl’ (1962) by Helen Gurley Brown, ‘It instructed girls on how to use specifically sexual lures to hook men ( 1990 p106.)  Pritchard remembers this imperative ‘a spinster was still seen as a girl who couldn’t get a boyfriend.  We were all desperate to get one and a ring, if poss’ (2012.)

Power relations, it seems, did not change in the sixties and so the concept of any true ‘Sexual Revolution’ is not supported. However the impact of the sixties on heterosexuality had long lasting effects which were felt more fully in the seventies and beyond. The first women’s liberation groups were formed in 1968. Millet’s SexualPolitics and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch both published in 1970 were very influential on feminist thought. The contraceptive pill became more widely available in the 1970s and began to have what Sandbrook called ‘an enormous impact on British sexual behaviour’ (2006 p490.) It also led to greater freedom for women who could have smaller families and enter the workforce in greater numbers leading to feminist action to obtain equal opportunities and equal pay.   Also ‘Feminist theory on sexuality developed throughout the 1970s and 80s to encompass a wide ranging critique of male sexual behaviour, male violence and its effect on women, and the construction of female desire’ (Jefferies 1990 p239.)

This change was felt and experienced by Mo Pritchard whose experiences caused her to enter the seventies as a feminist.  ‘Subsequently …I saw that, in fact, men still controlled our sexuality in many ways… It would take many years for us to gain a measure of equality – we are still not there but a lot better.  I was unable to take out a mortgage to buy a flat by myself in the early seventies …Many careers were not open to women… If you were a secretary, the best you could attain was senior secretary to CEO – always the “wife” never the boss’ (2012.) The editor of feminist magazine Spare Rib which started in 1972, Marsha Rowe, shared this frustration ‘Ihated having to be a secretary. But I really did have a sort of idea that maybe women were there to support men… you lived your creativity through the man’ (in Beckett 2009 p223) In the seventies this would begin to change although Mo Pritchard believes inequality will always exist. ‘I burned my bra and did my bit but, it seems to me, that so long as women bear the children, we will not be able to fulfil our full potential.’

If ‘sexual revolution’ is a misleading term to describe heterosexuality in the sixties, it is even more so to describe homosexuality. Sandbrook argues that in the early sixties ‘homosexuality was still popularly regarded as evidence of moral degradation, a psychological disorder or a debilitating illness’ ( 2006 p494) and gives evidence that ‘public attitudes to homosexuality was still extremely hostile’ citing the research of Geoffrey Gorer showing the most common reaction 1 in 4 was ‘revulsion’ whilst a minority, 3 in 10 women and 2 in ten men, opted for ‘pity’ (495)  Sheila Jefferies says ‘ The sexual revolution was heterosexual’ (1990 p110.) She makes reference to The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort published in 1972 which made no mention of homosexuality and mentioned bisexuality as simply a variant of heterosexuality in the context of group sex (p111.)

The experiences of gay men and lesbians in the sixties and seventies certainly show some common struggles and combined efforts to overcome them but in many ways the difficulties they faced were different. Whilst only gay men were in danger of prosecution (until 1967), only lesbians faced the challenge of trying to achieve any kind of material stability in a patriarchal system built around a male ‘breadwinner’.

The early 1960s were dangerous for gay men despite significant attempts to decriminalise homosexual acts between men in private. The Wolfenden Report advocated this in 1957 and the Homosexual Law Reform Society which became active in 1958 and included such notable men as Bertrand Russell and Lord Atlee ‘ceaselessly badgered newspapers and MPs for a change in the law’ (Sandbrook 2006 p496.) Allen Horsfall in hisessay ‘Battling for Wolfenden’ describes an increase in aggressive prosecution of men for private sex acts which continued into the early sixties.  He writes of the late fifties ‘ I knew of one man who was convicted for a single private act which had taken place ten years previously’ (His emphasis. 1988 p18) and of 1963 ‘ The witch hunts were starting up again including one in Bolton where ten men faced charges in respect of private behaviour. This led to loss of imprisonment, loss of employment and ultimately a suicide’ (1988 p25.)

The law was changed on 27^th July 1967. However, this cannot be considered revolutionary as sex between men was not decriminalised because of social acceptance of homosexuality but due to a tolerance for it as a mental disorder. Sandbrook describes this as ‘a general shift from revulsion to condescension’ (496.)

For lesbians this devaluing of their sexuality as a form of mental illness was not new. Sheila Jefferies cites many sexologists of the fifties taking this view including Frank Caprio. He asserted that lesbians were likely to be sadistic, kleptomanic, psychopathic or otherwise neurotic and unstable ( 1990 p55.) According to the Freudian Edmund Bergler ‘the unconscious reason for female homosexuality is to be found in an unsolved oral- masochistic conflict of the pre-Oedipal child with the mother’ (in Jefferies 1990 p53.) This was the experience of Elizabeth Wilson who, in the 1960s, ‘worked on the fringes of psychoanalysis’ and described it’s stereotyping of women ‘slightly mad’ and found psychoanalysis ‘warped..fatally’ by its ‘ support for male privilege’ (1988 p45) In an earlier essay Wilson said ‘ this attitude of ‘you are sick’ rather than ‘you are wicked’ was actually the more undermining of the two’ (1974  p112.)

Wilson felt herself fortunate to have been white and middle class because an inheritance enabled her to buy outright a house ‘at a period when an unmarried woman could not get a mortgage’ (1988 p48) and ‘lifted us clear of the intense oppression faced by many working class lesbians’ (1988 p49-50) However Wilson’s account of being a lesbian in the sixties ‘Memoire of an anti-heroine’ stands out mostly for the invisibility which was the price of her freedom. She describes being asked repeatedly by family and friends when she was going to get married despite living happily with her long term partner. ‘Our relationship was largely invisible.’ (1988 p 48.) It seems that for most of the sixties homosexuality still remained largely hidden. This changed in the seventies and it will be interesting to look at the most ‘revolutionary’ activism.

Revolution was certainly the aim for Stuart Feather and Keith Birch, active members of the Gay Liberation Front. The GLF’s ‘attitude was ‘the government can change the law…our aim is to change public opinion, to change people’s minds’ (Feather in Beckett 214.) ‘ GLF brought together politics which had been flowering in the social movements of the sixties and other political ideas which had laid dormant for many years.’ (Birch pg 51)

In 1970 the well-known Liberal Louis Eakes was arrested on suspicion of seeking sex in a public place and the Gay Liberation Front marched in protest demanding an end to discrimination, for psychiatrists to stop treating homosexuality as a disease, for the age of consent to be the same as for heterosexuals and for gay people to be able to contact each other, meet and kiss and hold hands as publically as heterosexuals (Beckett 2009 p212.) ‘The notion of the personal being political informed both the theory and practice of GLF and was perhaps both its strength and weakness’ says Birch 53. The GLF became known for its high visibility and confrontational attitude with many of its activists appearing in drag at many public events including trade union marches and targeting organisations seen as ‘anti-gay’ but it was over by 1974. Mainstream gay activists were unhappy about the drag element and confrontational aspect and Birch says ‘The whole experience was intense…and left us politically and emotionally exhausted..we had changed, the world had changed a little and we went off in different directions …But GLF had made possible many developments in the following few years’ (58-9.) Birch describes a more ‘confident and visible lifestyle’ (59) which became possible after this and Beckett lists as the most important of the long lasting developments started by GLF , the first Gay Pride march in 1972, the starting of Gay News in 1971 and the starting of London Gay Switchboard in 1974 (2009 p219.)  

Whilst the GLF existed for homosexual men and women, it was widely felt by many to be a male organisation. Birch describes it as ‘overwhelmingly male, white (and) young’ (1988 p52) and Janet Dixon recalls ‘We, the lesbians, began to abandon the GLF dream.’ Dixon’s account of her separatism stems largely from her experience that mainstream feminism failed to recognise the disadvantages of lesbianism in society as a feminist issue and wished to distance itself from the image of ‘bra burning lesbians’ (1988 p72) and that the GLF failed to recognise lesbians as having distinct issues related to their being female. Jeffery Weeks defines the problem as lesbianism being both a sexual category and a political definition in a period in which heterosexual feminists overlooked the importance of sexual identity(1985 p201.)  The failure of gay men to recognise the disadvantages of female homosexuals is defined in the acerbic words of Susan Hemmings ‘Male brain death on the issues of patriarchy is not confined to heterosexual men’ (1988 p11.)

Whilst many mainstream lesbian gay rights activists continued to work within feminist and gay rights groups, the separatists lived in communes and rejected men entirely. Dixon felt that ‘Something inherent in maleness necessitates its expression in systems of hierarchies. Competitiveness, aggression, brutality and maleness are all one and the same’ (1998 p70.) Dixon rejected maleness to the extent of stopping using tampax which were essentially ‘cotton wool pricks’ and becoming vegetarian to ensure she was not eating a male animal ( 1988 p79.) Dixon’s separatism ended in 1977. Separatism, she argues ‘came up against the age old problem of how to transpose the idea onto the material world’ (p82.) An all-woman world is not possible and the sexes have to interact.  However Dixon feels that the opportunities the separatists took ‘to disseminate our beliefs to huge numbers of women’ at national conferences was ‘responsible for making lesbianism, eventually, respectable inside the WLM’ (1988 p73) and that graduated separatism ‘can be seen as the ripples which pass outwards from this….you do not have to be a separatist or even a lesbian to enjoy the benefits of graduated separatism. It has meant that women’s groups of all kind… can now quite legitimately organise around women-only issues’ ( 1988 p76.)

It is interesting to note that at the radical ends of gay rights activism at this time gay men, with the GLF, took their activism into the public sphere confrontationally whilst lesbian separatists confined themselves to an isolated domestic sphere in an essentially passive protest. Of course a larger proportion of gay rights activists, male and female, did neither as part of their on-going campaign for equality.

It seems clear that ‘sexual revolution’ is not a useful term for the changes which happened in the 1960s and 1970s. A revolution would have resulted in women having complete sexual equality with men and homosexuality being accepted to the same degree as heterosexuality.  The experiences of Mo Pritchard, Marsha Rowe, Stuart Feathers, Keith Birch, Elizabeth Wilson and Janet Dixon were that this did not happen. The arguments of Jeffery Weeks, Sheila Jefferies, Kate Millet, Dominic Sandbrook, Ann Oakley and Beckett have supported the view that change occurred in discourse and in law in the sixties but that real change in sexualattitudes and behaviours have been more gradual although discernible and significant. Today, in 2012, we see that promiscuity is still often seen as shameful in a woman but laudable in a man and that gay men and lesbians are still unable to marry and still face prejudice and discrimination. The sixties and seventies sparked many changes which continue to develop today and lead us towards sexual equality but they did not constitute a sexualrevolution.

Bibliography

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