Baby Boomers

Time and Ageing Bodies

Woodspring, Naomi

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781447335153
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Gérontologie

This ground-breaking study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.

SIX

The past and present converge

It is over 40 years since the end of the Sixties, the postwar cohort is ageing and, by many calculations, old. This chapter presents participants’ descriptions, understandings, and thoughts about ageing body, time, and identity. In this chapter, interviewees provide a window onto their lives as they delve into past memories, current experiences and thoughts. Through the quotes, we begin to understand how time, body, and identity are intertwined. The Sixties is explored as an ongoing influence in their lives, especially as it relates to ageing and to who they have become and are becoming as older people. The section of this chapter titled ‘The present’ looks at how the influences of the Sixties era are reflected in the cohort’s embodied ageing selves.¹ Of course, memories, the past, and the present are perceived through the lens of relative time.

Mind and body, our embodied selves, the whole of who we are, is a seamless enmeshment. As embodied selves, we live in time in all its manifestations, from rhythmic body time to timescape. We can never pull our embodied selves out of time. The temporal dimension and embodiment are never separate, never really discrete. Our individual bodies are embedded in time and time is embodied within us. This embodiment is so profoundly intimate that we rarely think about it because it is just part of us. As we saw in the last chapter, enveloped within mind and written on our bodies is the stuff of our identities. It can be described as our neurobiology or the sense we feel of our me-ness or an irreducible interplay of both. Of course, body interweaves with the ongoing development of our identity in the form of gender, age, size, experience and memory, and so on. Where are the boundaries of embodiment, temporality, and identity? Where does one begin and the other end? It is difficult, if not impossible, to know. In this chapter, research participants discuss their lives – in the past and through the present.

The past

Living the Sixties

In Chapter Two we saw that research participants had their own interpretation of involvement in the Sixties that did not necessarily match media stereotypes of that period. Their experience of that time was varied – it was ‘their’ Sixties. Few participants would define themselves as part of Swinging London. Yet, many interviewees stated that the period from 1958 to 1973 – the Sixties – was a strong influence on their lives, regardless of whether or not they were directly involved in the politics or subcultures of the day. Other interviewees signaled the influence of the Sixties on their lives through their interests or descriptions. It was that influence, the advent of the social rupture of the Sixties and the many attendant changes, that they attributed to their framing of embodied ageing. The cohort’s young and middle adult years have passed since the end of the Sixties, a considerable span in the life course, yet the social, economic, and political meanings have carried them forward into old age and embodied identity.

‘Their’ Sixties

Roy and I met on a sunny day in his small conservatory. He grew up in a rural Lincolnshire village in what he described as a lower middle-class family. Throughout our interview he discussed family events and family members as having an influence on his life; not so much by example but by default. Roy describes his experience of the Sixties:

Well, we had the television, we had the news, we learned what was going on at Woodstock.

Paul describes his Sixties:

Paul: I wasn’t a hippie. I was involved in politics, yes but not in the way you might think in terms of the Sixties.

Naomi: So, how were you involved?

Paul: Um, I was a member of the Oxford Conservative Society. I was on the committee of the Society.

Margaret and I met at her office. She kindly squeezed me into her very busy work schedule. She is from a long line of women who worked in the textile mills. Although her life was very different than that of the previous generation of her family, she puts it in the context of ‘normal’ as she describes her life in the Sixties:

But, we started our own business and then, of course, I did work but the children were with me as well. But I don’t feel that that time had a great influence on me apart from just normal bringing up because whatever happened to me at that time was normal. I didn’t know, I didn’t think I was doing anything different because it seemed normal what we were doing.

Here Rich, who was part of Swinging London, describes his experience:

At a tangent, don’t you think we were remarkably lucky to grow up in the Sixties? My teens, for example, were exactly coincident with the Sixties – in 1960 I became a teenager and by the end of the decade I was what? 23, 22. So, I thought the Sixties entirely wonderful. And I thought the permissions, the cultural permissions by the Sixties had an enormous effect on my life in many ways. I think the social changes of the Sixties and the shifts in attitude about – a shift away from a very ossified social order that was maintained in the postwar right up to the Sixties – were liberating. Some of the obvious ones, you know, the changes in political attitudes and sexual liberation, the changes in feminist consciousness, I suppose and the awareness of the subdued role of women in the society, at the time. But, I think also personally, there was a much greater autonomy, the cultural mix allowed and the revolutionary sense in the air. I think there was a distinct revolutionary atmosphere about the Sixties right through to sixty-eight and so on. And I think the major players would have been things like easy access to so-called mind-expanding drugs for an example. LSD was an enormous influence on the Sixties or my social set of the Sixties generation. I think to me, it would have been one of the most important factors about the Sixties.

The Pill and growing up female

Rich was one of the few men who mentioned feminism, although many of the women included it in their description of the Sixties. Some women named themselves as part of the “Pill generation,” creating a demarcation line between that embodied experience and those women who came before them. This is certainly the case, as the postwar cohort were the first to experience what may, perhaps, be one of the most far-reaching changes in the course of human time – the uncoupling of sexuality and procreation. Many of the women who were interviewed discussed the effects of the Pill on their lives.

Candice: I think the Pill has got to probably be the biggest influence. Not on me personally – well, yes, on me personally, in the sense, I think, people, young women, in the Sixties were under pressure to have sex because they could without getting pregnant. In the early Seventies for me, really, not the Sixties. But, of course, it started in the Sixties. But, I think that probably, the whole business of choosing to start a family – I suppose having that choice – that’s influenced everything having to do with women’s position in society. That was the key to the whole thing.

There was some indication of class differences in women’s descriptions of the Sixties. Some working-class women disclosed that they had married and had children while still in their teens. That did not supersede their describing their lives as different and with more opportunities than previous generations of women.

Julia and I met in her sunny living room in the rural North Country. She has a lovely warm presence, welcoming me into her home. Julia comes from a working-class background, married in her teens, and then continued her education at night school. She states:

I think it gave women a lot more confidence and just a totally different way of life for women. ’Cause my mum, well, my mum never worked, she was a stay-at-home mum. She had no need – I’m not saying she had no need to work, the money would’ve been handy, but it just wasn’t something that was done unless you were desperate, I think. And so, my mum’s life was totally different to mine. So, when I was a youngster I wouldn’t have thought that I would be going out to work and being independent. The way things changed, you would not have thought that when you were 10.

There is a profoundly gendered difference in Julia’s quote between the time of her mother and her time, yet she also characterizes it as a change in her childhood imagining of the grown-up world. She uses the word “independent” – an embodied gender difference. Lisa’s description encapsulates the centrality of body to the Sixties as she relates her account of the time.

It was a wonderful period because suddenly you were free. Because growing up in Britain, in England, in the postwar period was very austere. You know, when you think you couldn’t buy jeans. I didn’t eat – I hadn’t seen – a proper orange until I was four or five, you know, older than that actually. And I could, you know, it was very, very – we didn’t have butter – it was quite a difficult period. It all seemed to be very dark as a child. I remember my father was in the Navy so we traveled a lot out, out of England. It was lovely and light but back in England that postwar period was very depressing. And so suddenly the Sixties was a – it was like an explosion of everything happening and it was so exciting and you were free and, of course, we had the Pill. We just had this feeling of freedom.

There was a sense that the ways of being female were less proscribed. Patricia describes this opening in terms of freedom of movement.

I think it is because we have the freedom to do a lot more … I’m country, anyway. I was born and brought up down the road. I used to just enjoy life and things that mum never could do that I was doing. I used to go out and I learned to ride a motorbike ’cause my boyfriend had a motorbike so I had to learn how to ride a motorbike. We used to go down to Brighton on our bikes… Now, mum wouldn’t have done that.

Although women may have been riding scooters at other points in history, the significance of Patricia’s statement is how that example was connected to her ideas of “freedom” and change.

During this period there were significant changes in household technologies that made women’s physical labor far less onerous. The introduction of labor-saving devices, in effect, created another kind of liberation for women and, like the Pill and other freedoms, body was central.

Sally: When you think of the appliances, with that and the comforts in our home. My memories – the house we grew up in – it was a modern one built just after the war but it had a black flooring and my mum used to be on her hands and knees polishing that and it had a half rag rug over it and they made that and when I think about how hard things were. You think with the washing where now we got washing machines, we push things in. There was a boiler, and on a Saturday, me and my sister used to help and there was an old mangle and you bought blue bags and you rinsed it and then you put it in this blue water.

Loosening the boundaries

Along with the changes for women, there were other bodies of difference that were liberated in this time. Gay and lesbian people were deeply affected by the social revolution of the time. This is Bruce’s telling of that time:

I mean I was brought up in the 1950s – inevitably having been born in 1948. I think the most significant thing that happened in the Sixties was, if you think about – and you probably weren’t in the UK at the time – in the provinces, in the 1950s, in sort of middle-class households, things were fairly inflexible. People were, attitudes were quite rigid. There were really clear demarcations between what was acceptable and what was not. There was a plus side to that, of course, because life was much more predictable. If you were comfortably well off, the likelihood was, that’s how you were going to stay. But what happened in the Sixties, in society, in this country was that a lot of that rather stuffy kind of predictability was thrown up in the air and, I think, an enormous input of tolerance and understanding of difference. Not just – obviously, it affected me, in terms of sexual orientation but in terms of the way people dressed, the way we looked, the way we behaved, all these things changed. I mean the Fifties were just terrible from certain points of view – food being one of them. I think that willingness to be more open minded, tolerant, accepting of other people, in terms of their outlook, their situation. I think that has been influential – it probably influenced a lot of other people who had that experience of the Sixties.

Dressing the Sixties

Both men and women spoke about Sixties fashion as a physical marker of identity, of being of that time. I am using the term ‘fashion’ as defined as costume: clothing that is particular to a group (Wilson, 2003). The subcultures had their own specific style markers, but style was larger than countercultural looks. It was a physical statement of generation as defined by costume. What makes the costume of the day so important was that, up to this time, most teens dressed like their parents. Bill describes it this way:

I went to one or two pop concerts and things like that but I certainly wasn’t a hippie or anything like that. I wore the clothes of the day, sort of kipper ties and flared jeans and did everything that kids did in those days – put sort of flowery bits on your jeans, wore thick belts and suede jackets.

Chosen style holds a world of meaning. The mod style was laden with significance, for example, class, music preferences, and drug taking (Rawlings, 2000). Gill describes liking both the look and what mod signified:

I remember the mods and I really liked that because it was in between the rockers and the fascists and I really liked the mods. I thought they were really cool. I like the way they dressed. My boyfriend, at the time, my ex[-husband] now, he was a mod [laughter].

Grace tells the following story, in which Sixties fashion plays a central role as a metaphor for many of the values she held/holds dear.

The first party of the medical practice he had joined [husband]. And I got dressed the way I usually did and I was wearing a maxi dress, a leopard skin zip-up the front, big hood, perfectly modest, covered everything up [laughter] but I suppose was very, I don’t know, suggestive and he absolutely said, “You can’t wear that. You can’t come to meet my partners dressed like that.” And you didn’t think I was particularly a wild child but I thi...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• one: Introduction: the curiosity of ageing body, time, and identity
• two: Kaleidoscopic Sixties
• three: The appearance of time
• four: On time
• five: Body and identity
• six: The past and present converge
• seven: The future
• eight: Chiasm, the intersection of time, embodiment, and identity
• nine: Time will tell
• Appendix A: On the research
• Appendix B: Interview questions
• Bibliography