Author Description

This book is what happens when you let eighty women spend a year and a half recording their memories of life in Britain during the pivotal period 1946-1969. This twenty four years was one of tremendous change in almost every area that they investigated. During this time, the country moved from liberty bodices to mini skirts and from ration books to ready meals. It saw the emergence of youth culture, the comprehensive education system, conspicuous consumerism and feminism; the Britain of 1969, was very different from that of 1946. The ladies describe their homes and neighbourhoods, clothes housework and food, education and work, health and childbearing, leisure and celebrations, as well as more emotive subjects, such as relationships and attitudes. Over a hundred photographs evoke the essence of the era. This book is more than just a collection of women's memories. At the end of each chapter is the brief that the volunteers were given when working on that topic. This can be applied to other time frames and will help the reader, male or female, to write reminiscences of their own. The women who took part came from a variety of social, economic and geographical backgrounds. Some ladies went to boarding schools, some to grammar schools and others to secondary moderns. Some left school at fourteen, others have PhD's. Some are only children, others had large extended families and some grew up in care. The ladies were aged from 59 to 95, so some experienced this era as teenagers and others as married women with families. The author has woven together the words of this disparate group of volunteers, using direct quotations from their reminiscences wherever possible, to reveal this era, as seen through their eyes. The result is a many faceted perspective of life at the time. The book allows those born after 1969 to gain an understanding of what life was like for earlier generations. If you lived through this era yourself, you will find yourself exclaiming. 'I remember that!'