1960s Women's Sexuality

The Sexual Revolution of the 1960s is donned as a time for female sexual liberation. With the introduction of the birth control pill in 1960, sex gains the potential to separate itself from child-rearing on a grand scale and propels its movement from a procreative endeavor to a social endeavor. As a result, women are allowed more sexual liberties and freedom in order to satiate the movement towards frequent, socialized sexual relations. Sheila Rowbotham’s chapter “1961-4” in Promise of a Dream details on her life at Oxford University during a time when the ideas of the Sexual Revolution were churning into existence on a covert level. Rowbotham’s experience demonstrates that the years leading to and during the Sexual Revolution are not as revolutionary

Hilda’s, a woman’s sexuality is evidence of her character. This is demonstrated by their discrepancy between female and male punishment for sexual promiscuity. Rowbotham protests an incident in which a male student is found in bed with a female student. The female is suspended from all universities, whereas the male is subjected to only a two-week suspension and Rowbotham notes that, “The penalties for the women’s colleges were much more severe than those of the governing male sexuality.” Women at St. Hilda’s are held on a pedestal for sexual morality and if they are caught not meeting this high standard, they are swiftly knocked down while their just as guilty male counterparts watch unscathed. In response to the evident imbalance in the weight of sexuality between the sexes, Rowbotham laments, “This fear of pleasure was meant to make us moral and I loathed it and I still loathe it.” The enforcement of traditional ideas at St. Hilda’s is the breeding ground for Rowbotham’s dissent and the gradual upheaval of preceding dominant thought. In the antecedent statement, she embodies the growing objection to the limitation of sexual activity for procreative purposes and alludes to the developing desire for societal acceptance of casual sexual relations that is characteristic of the Sexual Revolution later in the decade. However, the same traditional notions of sexuality that she detests are embedded into the foundations of

It is no longer considered cool to be a virgin, therefore, sexual activity becomes “mandatory and backsliding [is] unforgivable.” Openly discussed, mandatory, sexual activity allows for women like Rowbotham to be seen as sexual beings separate from procreation and foreshadows the Revolutionary epiphany that, “The female libido was… remarkably similar to that of the male.” Rowbotham is regarded as “a woman of status” because of the absence in her virginity. This new and overt demand for sex is part of a “subterranean shift in attitudes” that has not yet reached an institutional level, therefore, this shift is subject to contradictions and confusion. For example, during her first semester at St. Hilda’s, Rowbotham is an actor in a play where she replicates the stereotypical dress and mannerisms of a “whore,” both on stage and during her real life. Consequently, she is punished by the dons of St. Hilda’s for appearing “sloppily,” or rather, promiscuously, and is accused of letting this sloppiness affect her studies. However, on the flipside of the same coin, she worries for the absence of her own orgasms during sex and is thusly terrified of “being frigid.” The concept of