Growing Up

Growing Up

Sex in the Sixties

Summary

Were the 1960s really a great time of liberation and joyful experimentation? Growing Up takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution.

No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and vilified than the 1960s. And at the heart of all that controversy - the music, drugs, fashion, hopes, dreams and political movements - is sex.

In this wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the sexual landscape of the 1960s, Peter Doggett has assembled a dozen little-known stories that reveal how the sexual revolution transformed people's lives - for better or worse.

'An important reappraisal of a decade that changed us, for good and ill' Sunday Times

'Fascinating...shows rather conclusively that the sixties was not a sexual paradise' Evening Standard

'Creates an account of the 1960s that, unlike most popular histories, does not edit out the grim bits' Mail on Sunday

Reviews

  • The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book
    David Aaronovitch, The Times, *Book of the Week*

About the author

Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett first wrote about feminism and gay liberation in There's a Riot Going On, his 2005 history of the collision between rock music and revolutionary politics. Since then, he has published a series of books about the death of 1960s idealism, and its aftermath, as viewed through the life and work of the Beatles in You Never Give Me Your Money, David Bowie in The Man Who Sold the World and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young in his 2019 biography of the same name. His other books include a panoramic cultural history of popular music, Electric Shock. He lives in Sussex with the feminist artist and film-maker Rachel Baylis.
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