My eureka moment: Nothing to lose but the washing up

From The Times Higher Education…

Rebellion was everywhere in the 1960s, recalls Sally Feldman, but Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch made the most audacious demand of all: for a feminist revolution that was personal and political

When I started university in the late 1960s I thought I had the world at my feet. We all did. We were the children of the post-war boom, of swinging London and psychedelia. We were the ones who were going to change the world and it really seemed as if the transformation had begun, especially for women. In our first term, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the album of the moment. We’d all pile into Lynn Barker’s room in hall to absorb the full virtuosity of the Beatles on her stereo. We also tried to squeeze into Gary Arlott’s room to squeal at Monty Python on his TV, but failed because girls weren’t allowed in men’s halls in the evenings. That outrage led to our first political sit-in. While other campuses were raging against the Vietnam war and the Kent State shootings in the US, we campaigned against the university’s paternalistic residential strictures.

One girl, whose name was Sheila I think, ignored those constraints with glorious abandon. She was the university social secretary for a while, booking bands who today would not have got out of bed unless it was to perform at the O2 centre or Wembley, but in those days did the campus circuit just like everyone else. The Who played at a Saturday night disco, The Animals at another. Pink Floyd and Jeff Beck serenaded our May Ball. One night Sheila managed to smuggle into her room an entire band, The Move, plus their two roadies. Unfortunately, the warden of the hall had decided to take advantage of the balmy summer evening to hold a bridge party on her lawn. Disturbed by sounds of thudding and gasping, she flashed her torch into the shrubbery, only to confront the spectacle of a line of shaggy-haired rockers climbing out of Sheila’s window, way after curfew. More…