The Sixties in short

Hunter S. Thompson, the bad boy of the Sixties, recently described the Nineties as being like the Eighties without the money. It's difficul...

Hunter S. Thompson, the bad boy of the Sixties, recently described the Nineties as being like the Eighties without the money. It’s difficult to argue with the inventor of the fear and loathing phrase but it does seem more appropriate to compare the Nineties to the Sixties – but without the smell of gunsmoke. It’s there in our revival of Thompson himself, the former copyboy in the underbelly of the establishment of Time magazine who has graduated to becoming a columnist. It’s there in our celebration of Che Guevara, the revolutionary leader turned fashion statement. And it’s there in our elevation of Mary Quant’s mini.

Thirty years ago, what was a personal statement off the streets of swinging London, has become part of the power-dressing phenomenon. Women who burnt their Bras and popped the Pill, like Bharati Mukherjee’s Iris Clearwater Daughter, also showed off their minis. It did not have to be accompanied by sheer tights, smart jackets and aerobicised bodies. But now the love beads have been replaced by a string of pearls, the batik tops with silk shirts, and jute backpacks with filofaxes. In the 30 years since Quant decided to shake a little leg, has much changed for the global woman?

Perhaps not. At least, Germaine Greer who called for a revolution with The Female Eunuch around the same time that Quant was stirring the fashion pot along with Terence Conran and the Beatles, doesn’t seem to think so.

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“Thirty years ago,” she wrote recently, “I fought for women to say yes, yes, yes. Now we’ve forgotten how to say no.” Quite. What was once spontaneous combustion has become a marketing mantra. Look at the Spice Girls with their brand differentiation and their neatly timed political statements. Their by-products are soon going to rival another plastic phenomenon, the Barbie Doll, recently in the news for having been given sexual overtones by a Dutch pop group. Are Spice Girls about Girl Power because they made more money than the all-male Oasis this year? Was Diana all about Feminine Mystique because she divorced the Prince of Wales while continuing to live on the Queen of England’s property? Is Hillary Clinton a phenomenon because upon turning fifty, she is more popular than her besieged albeit, constitutionally elected, spouse? Whatever happened to Woman Power?

Nearer home they’ll tell you, it was time it disappeared. Instead of the dynastically-designated Indira Gandhi, we have the Grassroots Grasper Mayawati and the Pistol Politician Phoolan Devi. We’re told it’s progress for women even if it means each is hanging on to a man’s coat-tails – as long as they’re not family. Is that what women’s liberation has come to? It’s all right to manipulate a man as long as he’s not related? Or that it’s all right to be anorexic as long as you’re paid a million dollars to strut your stuff and be called a supermodel for it? Or that the mini is fine only if you have Chairman-of-the-Board legs to go with it? The mini as a celebration of liberation, of the freedom to just be, a typical Sixties ethos, is gone. In its place is the Mini as Mammon would have loved it, not with former hippy Mary Quant as its godmother but post-modern feminist Naomi Wolf.