The Summer of Love
A look at women's narratives of the 1960s
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This July, I thought it might be fun to do a little “Summer of Love” series- although whether ‘Love’ comes into it might be debatable.
I wanted to look at an era that continues to fascinate me: the 1960s. When asked what era of history I would most like to go back to if I could, it is always a toss up between the 1920s/30s and the 1960s. I think mostly because these eras tended to see a lot of changes for women and feminist ideas. I have visions of taking part in women’s marches, ‘flower power’, and shopping in Carnaby Street, London for the latest sixties fashions.
I remember my mum telling me about how she bought a pair of Biba stockings in the 1960s and thought she had made it! I loved to hear stories of how my grandparents were shocked at Beatle-Mania, and of my parents riding around on a Vespa dressed as Mods.
But I realise my eyes have rose-tinted specs and that not everything in the 1960s was great for women, although the arrival of the contraceptive pill and a push for more equality by the Women’s Movement was a start.
In this three part series, I’m going to examine some of the writing around women’s experiences of the 1960s, and consider how these affect how we live today.
First up: unwanted pregnancies, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, and Lynne Reid Banks’ L Shaped Room.
Lynne Reid Banks is often remembered by school children of the 1980s as the author of The Indian in the Cupboard, but she was actually so much more than that one novel, including being one of the first female British news reporters appearing on ITN. For six years from 1955, she interviewed such heavyweights as Charlie Chaplin, Audrey Hepburn, Rita Hayworth, Louis Armstrong and Agatha Christie.
Born in Barnes, south-west London, in 1929, she was evacuated during WWII along with her mother and cousin to Saskatoon in the Canadian prairies for the next five years. Once back in England, she attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rada) and later, like many women of her era, became a secretary before her role as a freelance journalist.
Outside of her journalism role, Reid Banks wrote the novel The L-Shaped Room, an influential story of an unmarried middle-class woman whose father has thrown her out of her home when she becomes pregnant.
The book, written in moments of boredom whilst at her ITN job, netted her a £20,000 publishing deal- a large sum in the 1960s for a first novel. It became an unexpected success, and was later made into a film, with Leslie Caron in the starring role being nominated for an Oscar, a Bafta, and a Golden Globe. Reid Banks however was apparently not happy with the film, which changed the book’s story.
In her first novel, Reid Banks takes the unconventional storyline of a young middle-class woman, Jane Graham, who, once finding herself pregnant and homeless, takes a room in a dingy boarding house in Fulham, and prepares to hide her pregnancy. The setting was apparently based on a miserable night spent in a boarding house there by Reid Banks after running away from home. Part of the book’s success was likely due to it coming out in 1960, right on the cusp of societal changes and social attitudes towards women and marriage in particular.
“Banks’s compassionate first novel examines the stigma of unmarried motherhood in pre-pill, pre-Abortion Act Britain”. Victoria Segal, The Guardian
In 1960, when Reid Banks’ book was first published, the contraceptive pill underwent trials in the UK, with Enoch Powell, Minister for Health, announcing in December 1961 that ‘birth control pills’ could now be prescribed on the National Health Service (NHS). Prior to this, the government’s reluctance to provide the Pill (as it became known) had meant that charitable family planning clinics had been the only providers of contraception for women.
By the 1960s, several reliable methods of birth control had become available, giving women greater control over reproduction. The widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, however, was hailed as one of the most significant medical advances of the era, playing a leading role in the emergence of the postwar Women’s Liberation Movement, allowing for greater sexual freedom for both women and men.
The first contraceptive pills had been developed during the 1950s in the US and supported by the women’s right’s campaigner Margaret Sanger. During the early part of the 1960s, the demand for the Pill grew through doctors surgeries, and by 1970, 700,000 married women in Britain aged between 16-40 were taking them. Initially, some GP’s refused the Pill to unmarried women, however the National Health Service (Family Planning) Act of 1967 empowered Local Health Authorities to give both family planning advice and provide contraception to both single and married women.
It wasn’t without its health scares and controversy, however, with connections between taking the Pill and a higher incidence of blood clots, strokes, and heart attacks being cited. By the 1970s, a link had been made between taking the drug and smoking leading to an increase in blood clots. A drop in the number of women taking it during the early 1980s occurred, being repeated in the 1990s when a link with thrombosis received attention in the media.
In the 1980s, a mother named Victoria Gillick campaigned to prevent her teenage daughters, and all girls under sixteen years of age, from receiving contraceptive advice from NHS doctors. She gained the support of two hundred MPs, appearing at the High Court seeking a declaration that none of her five daughters could be prescribed or advised on birth control until they were sixteen. The High Court however ruled against her, allowing that GP’s could issue contraceptive advice without parental consent.
Gillick did successfully win an Appeal overturning the ruling, however the issue was later settled by the House of Lords, who ruled it lawful for doctors to prescribe the contraceptive pill to under-16’s under particular circumstances, leading to the phrase ‘Gillick competence’, used in medical law.
“In terms of access to contraception, it meant that provided a girl under the age of consent was able to understand the risks involved, accept appropriate advice, was resolved to have sex and wished her parents were not informed, then a doctor should be able to prescribe them contraception.” People’s History NHS
The case brought to light the moralistic and access issues around birth control in the UK, and showed how ingrained the contraceptive pill had become in British society, with the issue not being whether girls under sixteen should be prescribed the Pill, but whether parents had the right to be informed, and with whom consent should lie.
As a further side-note to the issue of unwanted pregnancies of the era, abortion remained illegal within the UK until 1967 with the advent of the Abortion Act, as long as specific criteria were met, making the procedure available through registered practitioners on the NHS.
I have provided this context, as I feel it is prudent to consider in the realm of Reid Banks’ novel.
Set in the 1950s, Jane Graham is an actress in provincial rep (as Reid Banks herself had been). She arrives at the run-down boarding house in Fulham after her father, unhappy when she reveals she is pregnant, turns her out of her comfortable middle-class home.
The ‘L-Shaped room’ is the dingy room on the top floor of the boarding house, where Jane wallows in the misery of her predicament. Jane narrates the story and introduces the reader to the other residents of the boarding house, who are all portrayed as misfits and outsiders. We discover that Jane fell pregnant through a bungled sexual encounter with her ex-boyfriend, and her decision to live by herself and have the baby causes her to be seen by some as little better than the prostitutes who live in the basement of the boarding house.
“In some obscure way I wanted to punish myself, I wanted to put myself in the setting that seemed proper to my situation”. The L Shaped Room
She becomes good friends with John, a Black musician in the next room, although the narrative has been seen by some modern day critics as containing outdated and offensive language in reference to both people of colour and members of the LGBTQ+ community. It is not clear however whether Reid Banks does this to show Jane’s provincial, middle-class nature.
The story shows Jane’s powerlessness and vulnerability as a pregnant, unmarried woman. In one scene, she expresses that even the doctor who confirmed her pregnancy looked at her reproachfully, causing a steely anger to emerge within herself. She eventually leaves his office feeling humiliated. She receives further contempt from her own father and a future love interest. The book explores Jane’s feelings of shame and humiliation.
Her experience is not all negative, however, as we see Jane experiencing kindness from both friends and strangers. She also manages to find a more sympathetic doctor, eventually turning her feelings of shame into a more positive source of strength.
I was interested in how Reid Banks’ book differs from that of The Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Written in 1965, Drabble’s Rosamund appears as a far more self-assured middle-class PhD student. Although initially fearing her ability to raise a child alone, she never appears to question her decision not to ask for support from the father. Importantly, she gets to stay living in her parents’ flat whilst they are overseas, so doesn’t have the added difficulties that Jane faces of abandonment. She also has a promising academic career and a group of friends. She appears far less isolated in her predicament, and Drabble’s intention appears to be to show that an independent, free-thinking woman of that era could cope with the idea of single-parenthood.
Rosamund also experiences something of an epiphany when visiting her doctors office, where she feels herself connected with all the other women of varying classes and situations who are involved in the miraculous role of birthing the next generation.
The book, in other words, feels more uplifting than Reid Banks’. It is radical, light, and funny- particularly when, at the opening to the novel, Rosalind attempts to ‘not be pregnant’, with her friends proceeding to drink the gin and allowing the bath to go cold. It is also enthusiastic about motherhood. It appears that Drabble (through Rosamund) wished to explore the new options available to women of the 1960s, stigma-free, with motherhood becoming her next adventure. Her love for her baby daughter once born is the ‘love story’ of the novel.
Being published in 1965, right in the middle of the sixties, perhaps Drabble felt more able to explore the newly forming choices for women and childbearing.
Reid Banks’ more squalid version of the fate of the unmarried mother, meanwhile, went on to sell millions of copies and never went out of print.
Following the success of the film, Reid Banks went on to write plays for TV and radio, as well as publishing a second novel, An End to Running. In 1962, just as her career was taking off however, she fell in love with the Anglo-Israeli sculptor Chaim Stephenson and moved to Israel.
Teaching for the next eight years on a kibbutz, and marrying Stephenson in 1965, they finally returned to England in 1971 with three sons.
“To have lived for 55 years with a man of such courage and sweetness, and watched his gift evolve to produce such powerful and beautiful works, has been the greatest happiness and privilege of my life.” The Guardian
Her time in Israel influenced her next few novels. She also had an idea for ‘bringing a toy plastic American Indian to life in a magic cupboard’, and her well-known children’s classic The Indian in the Cupboard was published in 1980. This was also turned into a film in 1995. She went on to write more children’s books, though her first was undoubtedly her most successful title.
The success of The L Shaped Room was, in a way, both a blessing and a curse.
Although she published nine more novels (including not one but two sequels to The L Shaped Room), two award-winning volumes of biographical fiction on the lives of the Brontës, two books about Israel and several more children’s books, nothing ever matched the acclaim she received for her first novel. It seemed she had caught the zeitgeist with her tale of an unwed, homeless mother.
In 2017, Reid Banks wrote about her mother, who had committed suicide in 1982, and the antisemitism she had felt towards her daughter marrying a Jewish man and choosing to live on a kibbutz.
“Antisemitism is a disease. That’s what I think...It’s like a virus that can infect an otherwise healthy psyche. It’s also a curse that can mar what could have been healthy, happy relationships.” Lynne Reid Banks, The Guardian
She also wrote about getting older, stating that she felt that she was part of the luckiest generation that had ever lived, her thinking being that they had lived through times of great history which the younger generations could only reference in books and on screens.
Lynne Reid Banks died in April of this year, aged 94.
I hope you enjoyed this first foray into a novel published right at the start of the 1960s, which would see such societal changes for women and men as the decade wore on.
Next week, I’m exploring the work and fascinating life of Nell Dunn, author of Up the Junction and Poor Cow, books which explore London during the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and the lives of working class women.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might be interested in my series on feminism:
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It’s interesting to see how women’s reproductive rights may have influenced the representation of pregnancy and women’s choices in literature. The 1960s are such a fascinating time so I’m excited to read more in this series! I remember reading The Indian in the Cupboard but I’ve never heard of this novel
This is a wonderful piece it really makes you think how slowly we have moved, especially when you take a global viewpoint.