Yet at this point, real economic freedom, as we know it now, is still a long way away for ordinary, working class girls like me. Career options for professional women remain limited, even for the university-educated middle classes. Beyond shop, factory or office and secretarial work there is – what? Nursing, teaching and the civil service, of course. And for the educated women, academia. A few middle-class women venture into creative fields like advertising or journalism, yet the limitations don’t lift in the ’60s. Girls’ jobs remain more or less what you do before finding a man to marry, rather than the sometimes overblown career expectations of millions of young girls now, spurred on by fantastic dreams of instant stardom and lifelong riches.
I may be more rebellious in my thinking than the other girls I know of my age, some of whom are already married. In my case, however, I am a child of my times in that I am heavily influenced by the imagery and the printed word. Like so many others, I soak it all up. Because I have avoided further education and dived into the working world at 16, most of my ideas about life and sex come through devouring magazines like three-month-old US Cosmopolitans, eagerly purchased from Soho newsagents each month. (Britain’s Cosmo does not arrive until 1972.)
US Cosmo, with its bold editor, Helen Gurley Brown (best quote: ‘Bad girls go everywhere’), pushes forward the daring new belief that women can enjoy sex, pick and choose their partners – they don’t have to focus solely on marriage and motherhood to lead a fulfilled life. They can make themselves gorgeous – and follow their own career path. This, to me, makes perfect sense. All of it. I already understand, by pure instinct, that the traditional path up the aisle isn’t going to suit me. Too restrictive, too mundane. Men? Yes, please. Sex? Ooh, yes. Marriage? Er… no thanks. Babies? Pass. Though it will be many years before the notion of career ambition starts to emerge for me.
Yet for all my defiance and media-led ideas about sexual freedom, I am still stuck with one thing: the men around me continue to retain all the power. Even at this mid-1960s point when the social change really begins to accelerate, the men are still setting the agenda of the chase. You can reject an offer, an advance, a date. But if you like someone, fancy them, you still have to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, summoning you. It’s a convention I profoundly resent, partly because I am terminally impatient but also because I see all this waiting as grossly unfair. My argument is: if you can phone me when you want, why can’t I phone you? Yet because such equality doesn’t yet exist and communication itself is so limited by today’s standards – phone, letter or a knock on the door – I’m still stuck with that wait, staring at the black Bakelite instrument, willing it to send out its shrill, exciting sound.
This limited communication also gives men the edge in terms of keeping you in the dark about what they are actually up to. It’s so much easier for them to be vague or non-committal. Or simply untruthful, which some ’60s men are if they’re juggling two ‘birds’ at a time. Unless they live or work near you, know your friends and family, how can you, living in the heart of the big city, know anything about what they’re really doing? No Facebook, Google or website to check someone out. No blog, no exchange of text messages or tweets, mobile phone lists. No email to whizz off a swift one-line retort or naughty come-on. Telegrams, delivered to your front door, usually by bike, are the only other means of fast communication. You can hardly send a telegram to a man: ‘HURRY UP AND RING ME, YOU BASTARD’. Or even: ‘WHAT’S GOING ON, IT’S BEEN TWO WEEKS SINCE YOU CALLED’.
Voicing these things out loud when the call does come never seems to get you anywhere. Just more waffle, excuses and vague references to ‘work’. If a man you’re entangled with says they’re going ‘up north on business’ (a popular favourite in London, the frozen north being a remote place to be approached with considerable caution) for an unspecified period, you accept it. People simply could not go round checking up on each other’s behaviour the way they do now. So ’60s men, for all the historical hype about the era, got away with a lot that would be very difficult for them to get away with now. Unless you’re going steady or engaged, the unspoken rule is: they call, you can’t ring them.
Financially, too, they call the shots. Going Dutch or sharing the bill does not exist in traditional dating. The man pays for the drinks, the cinema seat, the meal, you drive there in his car – whatever needs to be paid for in cold cash is down to him. He’s doing the courting (unless he’s seriously mean, when it’s just a drive and maybe one or two drinks, if you’re lucky, in a local pub). The tradition of the man paying is reinforced by the fact that women earn much less than men and will continue to do so for a long time. Even in the rarer instances where there is some kind of equality of pay at work, you’re unlikely to find anything other than misogyny from the men in charge. ‘Equal pay, equal work, carry your own fucking typewriter’ was the mantra of one friend’s boss, an editor of a local newspaper when she joined the team as a youthful reporter.
You can, of course, invite a man round for a meal if you’re not living at home – the idea of the ‘dinner party’ is already starting to take hold now that growing affluence and full employment are virtually taken for granted – but for me this is hardly a thank-you or even an invitation to seduction. It’s more a way of expanding social horizons.
By now, I’m sharing a big flat in north-west London with three other girls where the rules of engagement with men are perpetuated. Our landlord had sensibly installed a coin-operated payphone inside the flat. After work it’s permanently engaged (without even any ‘call waiting’ to get someone off the line). All a smitten girl has for comfort is the unimpeachable, unbreakable parting male shot: ‘I’ll call you.’ Essentially, you are always waiting: at the dance (by now a club or disco) you wait for them to approach you. Then once they’ve escorted you home or you’ve been out with them – and decide you like them – you wait for the call. I’ve grown up with this, of course, but in my early twenties I still can’t quite accept it. Yet all this stratified behavioural code, had I only known it, was about to be turned upside down in less than a decade. More honest, open exchanges between the sexes were on their way.
The one thing the 20-something ’60s office girls have as their defence is their spending power on the latest fashionable gear. Traditional West End department stores like Swan and Edgar, Dickins & Jones and the new, fashionable chains like Neatawear go all out to tempt the young working spender with the very latest styles and fashions at prices aimed craftily at weekly pay packets. Temp secretaries, in particular, earn big sums working for an employment agency, moving around from office to office, if they’re prepared to put up with the hassle of switching around to strange faces and bosses every few weeks. Many dislike this idea, even with the lure of more money.
I earn around £12 a week. I manage to supplement that for the year or so when I work at the electronics company by handing out good leads that have come direct to me, the sales manager’s secretary, to a few select salesmen, getting £30 per sale in return. So I have plenty of cash to splash out on clothes, makeup and shoes. In fact, I blow the lot on clothes nearly every Friday when I receive my £9 (after deductions) pay packet, in exchange for my favourite styles: five guinea crepe dresses by Radley with wide trumpet sleeves or slinky, short, body-skimming shift dresses to go with tight, elasticated, white high boots from Dolcis, (£3 9 shillings and 11 pence) or killer pointy stilettos also costing a few pounds. What more does a girl need to get out there and attract?
Once the accounts girl has handed you the little brown envelope with the printed slip inside – no cash machines then or automatic salary transfers into a bank account, though 1966 saw the launch of the plastic revolution with the Barclaycard, the first credit card – away we all went at lunchtime, click-clicking down Oxford or Regent Street to a tiny Wallis (long relocated from its original home next to Oxford Circus tube, and still a popular chain to this day) or the bigger, pricier Fifth Avenue (long gone) on Regent Street or into one of the new boutiques for women popping up all around the hub of men’s trendy gear shopping: Carnaby Street.
There are ’60s labels I lust after like Tuffin and Foale (as spotted on Cathy McGowan on Ready Steady Go) and Cacharel from Paris. But they remain out of my price range, alas. Lured by the newspaper and Honey magazine hype,