How should we compare those two tumultuous decades, the Sixties and the Seventies? Decade is such a convenient man-made term when applied to history, suggesting that complicated changes can be neatly summed up in tens of years, much as Catholics murmur decades of the rosary, slipping the beads through their fingers to count off ten Hail Marys at a time as they meditate upon Christ’s life. Less pain and muddle if you package things neatly, perhaps.

Our perspectives on history are partly shaped by our sense of our own social position and power. Fashions in understanding swing back and forth, depending on pundits’ own politics and ideologies.

The Sixties are lauded as emancipatory and swinging one year, then subsequently derided as productive of greed, selfishness, the decay of the family and of morality. The Seventies are often mocked for encouraging the ridiculous antics of bra-burning feminists — that began in the Sixties — and politically correct politicians. These myths need disentangling. These caricatures obscure what was progressive about those times.

How do I know? Because I can point to changes on the statute books (such as the Equal Pay Act, which came into force in 1975); and also because I was there. Many of us initially burrow into history via the narrow tracks of our own lives. It’s not accidental that we do that. We had a lot of encouragement from socialists to become amateur historians. The new history that began to be written in the Sixties, pioneered by Raphael Samuel and Sheila Rowbotham and others in the Ruskin History Workshop at Oxford, tried to develop concepts to describe ordinary lives, how political changes had an impact on them, how people understood history in the making, both as something that affected them and something they themselves affected. Autobiography and memoir began to be newly cherished. Stories of individual lives fed into and meshed with a sense of group lives.

When I think back to my suburban adolescence in the Sixties, I remember above all the availability of pop records and the impact of television. There we all were, each family crouched in its little cave, entranced by the storytelling newcomer perched in the corner, and newly connected as a tribe by our access to the little flickering screen. TV quickly opened up a route towards pop culture, via programmes such as Ready, Steady, Go!. It led also towards subversion and rebellion: satirical programmes such as That Was The Week That Was, poked a finger through the right-wing certainties in which I was brought up. My Tory parents took the programme in their stride and laughed as heartily as we children. Few people I knew actually lived the trumpeted new lifestyles of the Sixties; we discovered them as image, via technology. Wearing mud-coloured jumpers and skirts, we could flick through fashion magazines and check out white plastic boots by Courrèges and op art minis by Mary Quant; our budgets did not run to actually buying them. May ’68 in Paris, British student protests, the rise of Black Power in the US, could all be consumed, via television, as spectacle. They could also be pointed to by radical historians as inspiring the new wave of feminism.

Following Philip Larkin, we could say that the Sixties began a few years in, with the Beatles’ first album and the invention of the Pill. Hymns to free love did not, however, celebrate women as equals. Male freedoms were often exercised at women’s expense.

Controlling fertility was seen as women’s responsibility: boys just wanted to have fun. It took the determined efforts of the 1970s women’s revolution to combat ignorance, hypocrisy and intolerance. Crucially, women’s liberation was started by young mothers (some of whom were single mothers) who called on men to take an equal share in bringing up children. Feminists of the period are often written off as anti-mothers.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. Similarly, the communes of the time can be sneered at (too many lentils) but they represented genuine (if sometimes painful and short-lived) experiments in creating new sorts of families that did not confine women to the kitchen. Men had to take their turn with housework and cooking. If sexism was being explored, so too was racism. Black activists, scholars and historians were raising consciousness, constructing new pictures and stories around the idea of citizenship. Nowadays we can forget these struggles, take their outcomes for granted.

Rather than try to argue that the Seventies were “better” or more progressive than the Sixties, I would understand the Seventies as building on the developments of a decade that had seen the abolition of hanging, the legalisation of abortion, the decriminalisation of male homosexuality, and the consolidation of the welfare state and the NHS. Not a bad time at all.

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