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Young, Single, Disillusioned: The Screen Heroine in 1960s British Cinema

2012; Modern Humanities Research Association; Volume: 42; Linguagem: Inglês

10.5699/yearenglstud.42.2012.0079

2222-4289

Melanie L. Bell,

Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

Much has been written about the single young woman of the 1960s as a new ideal of socially and sexually liberated femininity, an image that was widely circulated through popular books and films such as Billy Liar (1959, 1963), Darling (1965), and Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962, 1964), the last exhorting the young modern woman not to tie herself down but to ‘[a]cquire men for your charm bracelet’.1 Christine Keeler, the showgirl and former model caught up in the Profumo Affair of 1963, epitomized this image of female power and sexual liberation prevalent in the current cultural imaginary,2 and by 1966 Time magazine confidently declared that ‘the girls have become as [sexually] emancipated as the boys’.3 The fabric of the single-girl mythology was woven from innumerable texts ranging across sociology (The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, 1965), tabloid journalism (‘Are Virgins Obsolete?’), public health literature (‘Marrying with a Baby on the Way’), and the extension of contraceptive services to unmarried women in 1963.4 Sexual liberation, always more imagined than real for the majority of women, gave rise to the impulses of freedom and mobility that were widely expressed in cultural representation, particularly in popular film and television. Julie Christie, in