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Looking back at how things used to be is never straight forward, as anyone attempting life writing or historical and social research knows well. Memories and evidence are always inflected by intervening years and the cultural politics of the present as well as by our psychic histories. The accounts produced by historians are always interpretations, always contextual, never ‘objective’. Nonetheless, despite this unreliability, personal narratives and memoirs can provide meaningful and sometimes unexpected insight into political events and broader cultural trajectories, just as fiction can. Autobiographical versions of the past can also tell us something about maturation, about how people change, or not, with the passage of time, as well as about shifts in wider sociopolitical and intellectual spheres.
This article attempts to explore these different levels. The focus will be on the emergence of the women's liberation movement in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and particularly on what it meant for me, as a young, radical, married woman with three children under five. Some of my sources about feminism and the family will be, in addition to memory and historical record, my own utopian polemical article written at the time (Nava 1972) and a more analytical piece written a dozen years later (Nava 1983/1992).
The year 1968 is remembered and celebrated by the left for the astonishing eruption of political insurgency around the world, in USA, France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia, UK and beyond, which was mobilised both by students and workers. ‘1968’ however refers to more than just a year. Some historians have more recently called the period between about 1965 and 1975 ‘the long 68’ to indicate a historical conjuncture, that is to say a wider spectrum of political events and social context. Stuart Hall, whose writing about conjunctures has influenced several decades of cultural analysis (Gilbert 2019), argued moreover that the most ra