The Observer Magazine of 28 January 1968 featured women talking about ‘families, life, husbands, sex, love, careers, money, children’. And gnomes.
Pamela, a clippie on the buses, may have objectified the passengers when she said, ‘You don’t have a lot of time to talk to the fares,’ but probably hinted at being objectified herself when she revealed: ‘Quite a few flirtations do go on.’
‘Running a bus,’ she said, ‘is rather like running a home, only more interesting.’ A year ago, she said, she had five gnomes in her front garden – now there was just one. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that too much time is bad for anyone… if you were at home not doing a job, all you’d be thinking about all day is, who’s taking your gnomes?’ Wise words.
The actor Carol White, of Cathy Come Home and Poor Cow fame, then just 24, was glad of the shift in attitudes. ‘I had been acting since I was about 11 and I had a good film part at 16. But in those days there were only two kinds of part: dumb blondes or insipid intelligent women. Now the super thing is that they accept that an attractive girl can play an intelligent girl.’
Carole, a 30-year-old accountant who worked from home with two young children, and an early exemplar of pandemic lockdown life, admitted: ‘If I had nothing but domesticity, I’d go round the bend, up the wall and loop the loop.’
Her frustrations appear to speak to present-day anxieties. ‘I’ve often thought of working in the kitchen where I could be frying things at the same time, but at the moment I’ve migrated back to the living room.’
Carolyn, 28, similarly echoed the pressures of modern parenting. ‘To my mind, one of the worst pressures on mothers today is child psychology. Having read all the books from Winnicott to Spock, I am inclined to keep looking at my children and wondering if they are normal.’
