Femina 3: 20 in the 1970s

This is the final quilt in my series for Femina that charts the life stories of the women in my family from the 1920s to the 1970s.

20 in the 1970s

I was a baby boomer, born in 1954 and, by that time, my mother had developed great aspirations for both me and my sister, realising too late for herself, how important a good education was. She drilled this into both of us that meant, for my sister and me, our twenties were spent at university achieving the degrees that, as she saw it, would allow us entry into the middle classes.

I began my first degree in sociology and anthropology in 1973 but, after the first year I became ill. I developed a tumour on the optic nerve of my right eye that meant I had to take a year off for two major surgeries. This left me with sight only in one eye.

However, in some senses, this disruption in my life was fortuitous. It gave me time to think about my studies and I changed direction, favouring social anthropology for the next two years of my undergraduate degree.  This path led me to take up a PhD position and eventually to developing an academic career. My twenties in the 1970s were shrouded, therefore, in book-learning. Not for me the kind of adventurous carefree youth that my mother had experienced, something which, at times she wistfully remarked on!

What unites my grandmother, my mother and myself, however, is a keen sense of  female aspiration – the desire to better oneself, to educate oneself and to live a full and interesting life. What also unites us, curiously, is a keen interest in clothes and fashion. While there is only one photograph of my grandmother in her twenties, she is wearing the dress and shoes of the time – a low waisted dress and buckled shoes with a small heel. Later in life she was always very smartly dressed, and chose her clothes with care. I still have a silk blouse, her silk dressing gown and some scarves she bought on her holidays ‘abroad’.

My mother also loved clothes and, as she had little money, she made her own.   She continued sewing throughout her life, however, and, when I was small, she trained to be a teacher and taught needlework. I, too, was taught by mother to sew and made many of my own clothes as a teenager, favouring Vogue patterns above all else. During my twenties, however, I discovered jeans and big jumpers, knitting the latter out of carpet wool which I bought cheaply from the local carpet factory in my university town. As a student, therefore, my fashionista aspirations were temporarily cast aside, which, given the fashions of the 1970s, was no bad thing!

In this quilt the central silhouette depicts the wide, flared trousers and long-sleeved loose tops of the 1970s. It is made from a fabric that echoes a period when bright sharp colours and geometric or bold stylised designs predominated. The small eyes in the quilt are a commentary on that significant year in my life, when my life-path was cemented; one could say my eyes were opened to the future possibilities that a life of reading and writing could offer me.

20 in the 1970s

(32" x 20")