The Death of Christian Britain

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