To think the 1960s were a great time to be alive?

[firstcape]

Having watched some documentaries on life in the 60s,

it seems to have been a brilliant time to be alive, (being middle class)
nice large modern houses, seem to have pretty much everything needed. People seemed far more polite. The fashion was brilliant, and so very smart. Men seem so much more handsome too!

I'm not sure 1960s South Africa was a great time to be alive OP....

Well you could get the pill sashh, because I did as a single student at university.
I think the point is that music, film, literature and drama were exploring social injustice and people were politicised and fighting for change.
In the seventies this meant that the women's movement gained strength,, opened women's refuges, fought for equal pay and battled through the glass ceiling.
Yes there was inequality, poverty, sexism and racism, but there was a strong movement for change and high levels of political awareness.

I enjoyed being a child in the 60s, it was a time of great optimism and hope. As sash points out, there were huge challenges to being female in a sexist society, but there were opportunities to challenge, protest and effect change. And we did.

I stand corrected, maybe it depended on the GP.I know where my mum went only one of the two would prescribe it at all.

Oh and no TV in South Africa.

As a gaysian, not really. I doubt SA was particularly great unless you were wealthy and white.

Hmmm, I'm not sure. My siblings and I were born early 70s. My mother was a teacher and once she announced she was pregnant she had to leave her job soon afterwards. No maternity leave/pay. You were just expected to be a housewife when you had young kids.

I think the 60s might have been good if you were a kid, a teenager or a man. Otherwise not so much. Though better than the 50s I guess.

My mums tales of early married life in the 60s sounds like total drudgery. They had a fairly nice detached house (were both teachers so fairly middle class I guess) but couldn't afford furniture. Stuff was more expensive in relation to wages than it is now and no stores offering 0% pay it off over 4 year type deals. So they sat on cushions for over a year until they could have a sofa.

No supermarket. So mum worked full time and then had to spend Saturday trudging round various shops for food. No convenience food, so lots of cooking in the week.

Other household stuff taking longer, I remember some weird washing machine which had to be connected by a hose to the kitchen sink taps and seemed to take forever.

No microwaves, no internet, no Netflix!

I was born in 1960 , you need to ask people who were adults then , as childhood memories are completely different . We lived on a council estate , in a town on the South Coast, in a town with very expensive houses so looking back huge differences in lifestyles amongst the kids at school
Houses, expensive to buy , mortgages very difficult to get
Food , very expensive in the 1960s, healthier diets ? Probably because there wasnt the money for large portions or snacks , a packet of crisps was a treat
We rarely had holidays , then only to grandparents who lived in Devon
No equal pay for women ,
No equal opportunities for women .....I remember in the early 70's careers books in my school , 1 for careers for boys , 1 careers for girls

So OP , the 60's were a start of something , remember we weren't long out if a war and rationing that carried on into the 50's so things were brighter , but you are way off the mark if you think life was better for everyone then

Yes you did have to choose a GP who would prescribe the pill, but you didn't have to have permission from a husband.
I knew quite a few single people who had babies and kept them. It certainly wasn't a massive social stigma amongst people I knew, often hard and easier if the family was supportive, but a couple of friends managed all on their own. I think it is easy to think of everything as a worst-case scenario, without appreciating the nuances of the time. The David Kynaston books are good for giving a broader picture.
I think you also have to remember the power of television. Dramas like Cathy Come Home had a huge impact on attitudes to poverty and housing in the mid-sixties.

I don’t many people were having a great time in the sixties in SA. Many white people emigrated, the remainders lived in a very oppressive society. Being black in SA in the 69s is practically the epitomy of wrong time wrong place.

The Summer of Love never made it to my northern city

I was born in 1960. There definitely were single mothers then, it was much harder though.
I would say life was much harder for the majority of people in the UK, but also simpler.
Being cold and a bit hungry was just a fact of life, things like not having adequate (or any) sanitary protection, being hit in school, etc etc.
Swinging London was just on the surface, only affected a few hundred people, and apparently was fuelled by prostitution, both male and female, I've since found out. Though no one really talks about that side of things.

feelingverylazytoday Do you think more people were cold, hungry and had inadequate sanitary protection in the sixties than they do today?
I do wonder how the Mumsnetters of the future will define the current decade.
"Loads of people were hungry and had to use food banks. Nobody thought seriously about politics, they just watched crap telly and messed about on social media, while politicians lied and did what they liked. Nobody cared about climate change, they washed their bedding every day, flew everywhere on holiday, threw food away and used loads of plastic without thinking about it".
Will that be true of the whole decade or is the reality more nuanced?

Someone just the other day very casually announced on a thread that x is so different now because "everyone" has "much more money" and so they do a, b and c with their piles of cash @missclimpson

People are very myopic.

Just look at OP.

Some of the PPs didn’t actually live through the sixties.
With respect, you don’t get the real experience of those times from reading history books.
We didn’t miss modern technology or gadgets/domestic appliances etc because we’d never HAD them! We were thrilled to get our first family car, or colour tv, or a stereo, not sobbing at the lack of a dishwasher or mobile phone, which didn’t exist then!
And the whole zeitgeist was optimism, youth, boundless opportunity, a “can do” mentality.
It’s no surprise that Star Trek started then, with its view of the future as multiracial, peaceful, high tech and prosperous. Star Trek was credited with the first interracial kiss on US tv (Kirk and Uhura).
On Earth, the 60’s were all about pushing for civil rights, for women, for black people, for gays. Homosexuality was legalised in Britain in 1963. Abortion in 67. We ditched the death penalty. The Women’s Lib movement took off, paving the way for the Equal Pay Act of 72.
I don’t know where a PP gets the idea that girls were denied education, either - I was at a state grammar and got a free grant to go to uni to study medicine, the first generation of my family to have that chance. My dad left school at 14 to earn a living in the 1930’s.
We were giddy with change and alive with possibility. And no I wasn’t rich or middle class- my dad was born in a slum and worked as a labourer when he was demobbed from the RAF after WW2.

i was born mid 60s but wish i had been born earlier so i could have enjoyed the 60s though i must admit the 70s were brilliant to grow up in. my parents were lucky to have been allocated a council house in 66 so life was so much better for them rather than the damp rat ridden flats they had had to endure for their marriage. ive always been a bit hippy so think the 60s would have suited me fine

missclimpson it was definitely way more common then, and I still live in a working class community and am on benefits myself (due to being a carer).
Why do you think people were much thinner then? It wasn't because diets were healthier (they really weren't), a lot of people just didn't get enough to eat, or didn't like the food that was available. I grew up in a house where you had to eat what was given or go hungry because there was no alternative. I went hungry a lot because things like fried sausages and tinned ham made me feel sick.
Houses weren't insulated properly and central heating wasn't the norm. Ice on the inside of the windows was a thing. A lot of adults used to suffer from rheumatism due to damp living conditions, both my parents did and they were only in their 30s.
I've never been well off myself but none of my kids have ever gone through some of the things I went through, and a lot of kids I grew up with were much worse off than I was. It's all relative.
On the plus side, a lot of parents used to spend money on alcohol and fags rather than putting their kids first, and that attitude seems to be dying out now, thankfully.

My parents describe it as a time of hope and progress so at that point they felt things were improving and there was work available which you could work up through the ranks. So even though my mum was living in poverty it didnt occur to her it eould stay that way. She feels that there is less hope in younger generation now.

Well said missclimpson

Agree Babdoc, that echoes what I have been saying as someone who was there in the sixties (and does remember it 😀). It was me who mentioned the Kynaston book as a helpful idea for people who wanted more context.
I am always a bit puzzled by threads on here about the seventies (when I had a young family and was working full-time). I do remember the annoyance of temporary shortages, electricity cuts etc, but it certainly didn't affect the whole decade. The worst thing was the start of the Thatcher years.

feelingverylazytoday I think to some extent people overall were thinner because they weren't consuming large quantities of sugar and fizzy drinks. My own family were lower middle class, but by the seventies I was teaching in a very poor area of a large northern city. Some of the children came to school hungry, but at least they got a decent school dinner every day then. We used to find ways of giving them breakfast too.

@sashh You beat me to it - marital rape is one of the first things that I always want to mention on these nostalgia threads.

@babdoc Your argument seems to be that the 60s were a time of great improvement.

That's true, but something can be "not very good" at the same time as it is "getting better quickly".

Women's rights (for example) were worse than now, and getting better faster than they are now.

Trills I don't think those of us who were there in the sixties are indulging in nostalgia. We are saying that it was a time of politicisation and change that led to the Women's Movement and ultimately changes in the law. Marital rape was certainly part of the agenda.
However I don't think there is any reason for complacency about sexual violence in this decade.

No, those of you who were actually there have a more nuanced recollection.

The opening post certain was nostalgia though - just saying how lovely and nice it must have been. Is there a word for nostalgia for a thing you've never experience?

It may have been exciting, invigorating, maybe. Nice? Not so much.

Heavens above, a South African banging on about how great life was in the sixties???

I’m going to hazard a wild guess that you’re white OP...