I was eight in 1950 and I thought my life was normal. All our mothers stayed at home. Our fathers went to work, came home tired and our mothers fed them. Poorer women worked in factories or did piecework at home. Hardly any went to university or had careers. Nobody swore or spoke of sex: we had rationing, Queen Elizabeth II, men in charge of contraception (no pill), smog, the death penalty, no telly or central heating and a pleasant, detached suburban house.
But my mother often lost her temper. Only towards the end of the decade did I realise why. She was a clever, dynamic, energetic, loud, creative woman with nothing exciting to do. She was stuck in the house, like most women after the second world war: cooking, cleaning, ironing, luckily comfortably off, but still like a caged lion, desperate to escape. She tried to perk up her life, with flower arranging, gardening and Latin American dancing, but it wasn’t enough.
Luckily things were shifting. In 1953, the government accepted equal pay for female teachers and in 1955 for civil servants, just as my girls’ grant-aided grammar school started pushing girls into taking science. Girls at most secondary moderns weren’t pushed to do anything. There was no point. They were going to get married – headed for the life my mother couldn’t bear. But, fortunately, she could afford to open a coffee bar in Soho. The first one had just been opened by Gina Lollobrigida only a street away. Life was getting more exciting, for my mother and me.
Music was changing. Instead of my parents’ favourites – Edmundo Ros, Petula Clark, Alma Cogan, assorted crooners and the odd daring calypso – we suddenly had rock’n’roll. Big cracks were appearing in the oppressive, conformist, colourless world. Loud and relatively wild music, hooped petticoats, jiving, teddy boys, Elvis and more overt sex arrived, and girls started screaming, which shocked our parents, even mine, who were, by 1950s standards, comparatively wild. To them, the new music was a cacophony and they wanted me to carry on dressing like a proper girl.
Too late. In 1959, I was at art school, with bare feet and dressed in black – black jeans, black jumper – in CND and marching from Aldermaston. Girls and young women no longer had to wear twinsets and frocks and aim only for husbands. We scorned our parents’ drab world. Young women could march about, protesting. Everything looked brighter and full of possibility.
From 1958, women could even enter the House of Lords. We could escape the suburbs, go anywhere, wear anything, do anything. We thought we could change the world. In those days, optimism was easy.
•Michele Hanson is a Guardian columnist and the author of What the Grown-Ups Were Doing: An Odyssey Through 1950s Suburbia
