Has the Guardian got it in for the 1950s? Your report (Sonia Rykiel, pioneer of liberating fashion, dies at 86, 26 August) asserted that these years were “a time when women were expected to wear sombre tones and skirts”. The briefest glance at fashion publications of the 50s will reveal every colour of the rainbow; and back then some of us even wore what we called “slacks”. More seriously, Simon Callow (Review, 13 August) claimed that John Osborne’s play The Entertainer “presented post-Suez, mid-century Britain to itself in all its tarnished, seedy, impotent dishonesty, surgically exposing all the pain that lay behind it”.
But how a historical period is experienced depends on your generation. We “baby boomers”, born in the mid-40s, mostly experienced the 50s as a time of optimism: we had won a war against Nazism; there was a political will to tackle social problems; the greatest good of the greatest number was a concept embodied in that super-delicious orange juice dished out at NHS clinics. Rationing was just a fact of life (as children, we weren’t doing the queueing); and the empire featured more strongly in our stamp albums than in our imaginations. The social values of the time shouldn’t be underrated; some of them could do with a revival.
Dr Anne Summers
Honorary research fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
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