Baby Boomer Women, Growing Old Disgracefully
Without Prejudice
Baby Boomer women like me went through some of the most revolutionary changes in Modern History. Vietnam, Feminism, protest, the Sixties, the times of free love, drugs like LSD, marijuana.
The music changed, the fashions changed, England and Haight Ashbury became the two most important places in the World for cultural change. The fifties lay behind us as a time of repression and the sixties and seventies lay ahead as a time of Freedom for women, we were excited.
Everything was possible.
I had a powder blue mini, was married at 17 and had four kids at 24, all girls. All born in the space of six years, I loved being a Mother, I had found my role in life. A wife and Mother, it was a great time to be young, carefree, and adapting to new changes on the horizon. My friends were the same, although not quite as free as me, I was the most free as I had a husband that worked seven days a week.
By the time he was home he literally didnt give a shit what I had been up to, he was too tired. So it was my time with my friends and kids and I was still young enough to enjoy it. And having lived in the U.K from ages 12 to 16 I was more worldly than my Australian friends and female neighbours. I wore platforms, mini skirts, hot pants, frilly pirate blouses, midi skirts with lace up knee high boots.
I was a hippy Mum that believed in freedom, human rights, protested about the war in Vietnam, mainly as my brother was affected by it. It hit close to home and needed to be stopped. I saw Hair when I was 17, sang songs from it, it was so different, so exciting, the words echoing how we felt. Music of protest, drugs, swearing, nudity, it was beyond comprehension and we had to take off to Sydney to see it as it was banned in conservative Melbourne.
I was a wild child of the very late sixties on the one hand attending a posh Grammar School in Wakefield in Yorkshire and on the other hand an avid rabid follower of fashion in the hallowed hall of the Mecca Locarno. I was allowed to go on Saturday afternoons to the tweeny disco and live band venue, seeing groups like The Who, The Herd, The Kinks for a small entry fee. It was a time to be a teenager like no other. Carnaby Street, Biba, Mary Quant ruled fashion, Twiggy arrived and we faithfully followed and the Music !
Jim Morrison, Radio Caroline, The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Traffic, Procul Harum, it was psychedelic, groovy man, a time of change, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and even Bill Hayley came around again. So different to the times of Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Lonnie Donigan and his skiffle group. The Everley Brothers. We cried at You'll Never Walk Alone before it became a football chant.
We laughed at weird and wonderful songs, I've got a ferret sticking up my nose, the Wombles song and fell in love with Dougal, the dog. I had glook dolls, smoked ciggies in packets of ten, cheap at the off licence, watched Top Of The Pops and The Monkees and Soccer matches. Saw the Mexico Olympics on colour TV and England trounce Germany in The World Cup. Loving the Leeds United Players who made it in to the team.
It was a time of innocence, a world of fashion, music and revolution. I was 15 and felt like I knew everything that was there was to know. Wore my own clothes courtesy of a free thinking Mother, who let me buy my own clothes. I bought stay up stockings as soon as they came out, Pretty Polly, wore bells in my ears, lace knee high socks and turned my pleated box pleat School skirt over and over at the waist until it was a mini.
And then my parents decided to return to Australia, where my fashion was unusual, but someone said my skirt was too short and then asked if they could buy it off me. My military mac, the same. Melbourne was so conservative Jean Shrimpton was despised for wearing a knee length skirt to the Melbourne Cup. I wore minis so short they were literally gasp worthy and still wore my English makeup of Max Factor pancake, pale frosted pink lipstick and tram lines around my eyes, false eyelashes and peel off vinyl eye liner in glossy black.
I had to spend six months working off the chub I had put on in England, obsessively weighing myself every day at the big scales in the ladies powder room in Myers Chadstone, my first work place in Oz. I drank only water and ate steamed dim sims from the subsidised cafeteria. I hated the retail industry with a passion and thought longingly of my role as a Junior lowly mail order clerk at Empire Stores in the U.K.
I walked to work every day, worked five and a half day weeks and the chub eventually came off. Enough for me to be waylaid by my engaged Boss in the cavernous dark storeroom and he pushed me up against a wall and kissed me at Christmas. Then the bosses Son, who was gorgeous, did the same and I realised a difference of 10 kilos makes a big difference to your sex appeal. No one had even looked at me before, except for the spinster boss who made me wear a hideous too big blue uniform that made me look like a frumpy housewife.
To be continued......
Baby Boomer women like me went through some of the most revolutionary changes in Modern History. Vietnam, Feminism, protest, the Sixties, the times of free love, drugs like LSD, marijuana.
The music changed, the fashions changed, England and Haight Ashbury became the two most important places in the World for cultural change. The fifties lay behind us as a time of repression and the sixties and seventies lay ahead as a time of Freedom for women, we were excited.
Everything was possible.
I had a powder blue mini, was married at 17 and had four kids at 24, all girls. All born in the space of six years, I loved being a Mother, I had found my role in life. A wife and Mother, it was a great time to be young, carefree, and adapting to new changes on the horizon. My friends were the same, although not quite as free as me, I was the most free as I had a husband that worked seven days a week.
By the time he was home he literally didnt give a shit what I had been up to, he was too tired. So it was my time with my friends and kids and I was still young enough to enjoy it. And having lived in the U.K from ages 12 to 16 I was more worldly than my Australian friends and female neighbours. I wore platforms, mini skirts, hot pants, frilly pirate blouses, midi skirts with lace up knee high boots.
I was a hippy Mum that believed in freedom, human rights, protested about the war in Vietnam, mainly as my brother was affected by it. It hit close to home and needed to be stopped. I saw Hair when I was 17, sang songs from it, it was so different, so exciting, the words echoing how we felt. Music of protest, drugs, swearing, nudity, it was beyond comprehension and we had to take off to Sydney to see it as it was banned in conservative Melbourne.
I was a wild child of the very late sixties on the one hand attending a posh Grammar School in Wakefield in Yorkshire and on the other hand an avid rabid follower of fashion in the hallowed hall of the Mecca Locarno. I was allowed to go on Saturday afternoons to the tweeny disco and live band venue, seeing groups like The Who, The Herd, The Kinks for a small entry fee. It was a time to be a teenager like no other. Carnaby Street, Biba, Mary Quant ruled fashion, Twiggy arrived and we faithfully followed and the Music !
Jim Morrison, Radio Caroline, The Beatles, The Moody Blues, Traffic, Procul Harum, it was psychedelic, groovy man, a time of change, Bob Dylan, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and even Bill Hayley came around again. So different to the times of Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport, and Peter, Paul and Mary. Lonnie Donigan and his skiffle group. The Everley Brothers. We cried at You'll Never Walk Alone before it became a football chant.
We laughed at weird and wonderful songs, I've got a ferret sticking up my nose, the Wombles song and fell in love with Dougal, the dog. I had glook dolls, smoked ciggies in packets of ten, cheap at the off licence, watched Top Of The Pops and The Monkees and Soccer matches. Saw the Mexico Olympics on colour TV and England trounce Germany in The World Cup. Loving the Leeds United Players who made it in to the team.
It was a time of innocence, a world of fashion, music and revolution. I was 15 and felt like I knew everything that was there was to know. Wore my own clothes courtesy of a free thinking Mother, who let me buy my own clothes. I bought stay up stockings as soon as they came out, Pretty Polly, wore bells in my ears, lace knee high socks and turned my pleated box pleat School skirt over and over at the waist until it was a mini.
And then my parents decided to return to Australia, where my fashion was unusual, but someone said my skirt was too short and then asked if they could buy it off me. My military mac, the same. Melbourne was so conservative Jean Shrimpton was despised for wearing a knee length skirt to the Melbourne Cup. I wore minis so short they were literally gasp worthy and still wore my English makeup of Max Factor pancake, pale frosted pink lipstick and tram lines around my eyes, false eyelashes and peel off vinyl eye liner in glossy black.
I had to spend six months working off the chub I had put on in England, obsessively weighing myself every day at the big scales in the ladies powder room in Myers Chadstone, my first work place in Oz. I drank only water and ate steamed dim sims from the subsidised cafeteria. I hated the retail industry with a passion and thought longingly of my role as a Junior lowly mail order clerk at Empire Stores in the U.K.
I walked to work every day, worked five and a half day weeks and the chub eventually came off. Enough for me to be waylaid by my engaged Boss in the cavernous dark storeroom and he pushed me up against a wall and kissed me at Christmas. Then the bosses Son, who was gorgeous, did the same and I realised a difference of 10 kilos makes a big difference to your sex appeal. No one had even looked at me before, except for the spinster boss who made me wear a hideous too big blue uniform that made me look like a frumpy housewife.
To be continued......
