The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> 1960s and Secularisation —<br />
separation <strong>of</strong> sex roles, but acknowledged that women worried over men<br />
and accepted that love was not necessarily for ever. 36 What was novel in<br />
Jackie between 1964 and 1978 was the disappearance <strong>of</strong> discourses on<br />
domesticity, separate spheres, and women’s limited career ambitions. <strong>The</strong><br />
virtuous sexual girl was now a matter for negotiation rather than rigid<br />
abstention. Moreover, the home hardly featured at all in the strips.<br />
Discourses on feminine identity was now conveyed by everything other<br />
than family, domestic routine, virtue, religion or ‘respectability’.<br />
<strong>The</strong> same process, though more carefully modulated, was going on<br />
within conventional women’s magazines. This market entered a crisis in<br />
the 1960s with rapidly falling sales. A few ‘traditionalist’ magazines like<br />
Woman’s Weekly, with its diet <strong>of</strong> romantic fiction and homely virtues,<br />
succeeded in catering for the older married woman. But many failed,<br />
including Housewife which declined and ended in merger with another.<br />
<strong>The</strong> future lay with magazines like Everywoman, which relaunched in 1966<br />
on the assumption that its women readers were workers as well as housewives,<br />
had shared fashion and beauty concerns regardless <strong>of</strong> age, and were<br />
keener on real-life fiction rather than romance. As Cynthia White suggested,<br />
there was a fundamental shift by women readers away from publications<br />
which treated them as ‘domestic functionaries’. 37 Whilst supporting<br />
traditional items such as cookery, clothes and the furniture, there was a<br />
decline <strong>of</strong> features on mending and ‘making do’, thereby undermining the<br />
traditional home-keeping virtues <strong>of</strong> thrift and being able to darn and<br />
sew. In part, magazines became driven by consumer-buying. 38 But they<br />
also became less concerned with womanly ‘virtues’ and developed an<br />
engagement with their readers’ wider concerns. Some, like Woman and<br />
Woman’s Own, made subtle compromises between ‘tradition’ and ‘change’,<br />
perhaps most noticeable through a new breed <strong>of</strong> agony aunt. Unlike their<br />
predecessors <strong>of</strong> even ten years before, who had advised women on how to<br />
please men in the domestic sphere, ‘aunts’ like Marje Proops and Clare<br />
Rayner were now treating women as equal partners in relationships, and<br />
exploring sexual issues in explicit ways by, for example, publishing letters<br />
from troubled women (and men) about the myths <strong>of</strong> sexuality (including<br />
the length <strong>of</strong> penises and the width <strong>of</strong> vaginas). For the younger woman,<br />
there were more adventurous publications. <strong>The</strong> pioneer She (founded 1955)<br />
came into its own in the late sixties, treating its readership as intellectual<br />
beings with a mix <strong>of</strong> serious and open-minded discussion <strong>of</strong> both social<br />
issues and ‘women’s writes’. Its stablemate Cosmopolitan (founded 1972)<br />
took an even bolder stance, combining a glamorous presentation with a<br />
feminist treatment <strong>of</strong> women’s liberated sexuality, careers and entertainments.<br />
39 Other magazines and books in the same vein for young women<br />
followed: Honey, 19, Over-21, and Shirley Conran’s Everywoman.<br />
<strong>The</strong> discursive change was swift and dramatic. <strong>The</strong> fifties’ construction<br />
<strong>of</strong> the ‘respectable’ woman <strong>of</strong> homely virtues, the last widespread vestige<br />
177