1968

Annika such a sad memory for you. My baby brother died just before Christmas (cot death it was called then) and the funeral was at the beginning of January 1968. I was a teenager and he had been sharing my bedroom, but I'd complained about being woken up to feed him every night so on the night of his death he was sleeping in another room. I felt guilty every Christmas for years after.

Annika and grannyactivist they are really sad memories.

grannyacyivist I am so sorry about your sad memories you must not feel guilty , unfortunately babies do die from cot death. As you say you were a teenager all of this would not be known to you, its not we be come much older do we become aware that there are so many things that can go wrong that is no one's fault at all .

GA, how horribly sad for you! Elaine Morgan's book The Scars of Evolution (pp130-132 in my OUP copy, ISBN 0-19-509431-X) has a very interesting description of what causes 90% of cot deaths. Now that this is understood, the numbers of cot deaths have fallen dramatically, but it was not understood until the late eighties. It may not relieve your sadness about your baby brother, but as Annika says, you should not feel guilty. How tragic for your parents too. With love, baggy.

grannyactivist how awful that such a tragedy happened and that you, who was totally innocent of any wrong doing, should have carried the additional burden of feeling guilty. You must have asked yourself a million times - "if only..." but nothing you did, or didn't do, brought about the death of your baby brother. I am sending you a warm cuddle across the net. XXX

You are such a wonderfully kind group of people.

In 1968 I was 22 and had been going out with my future husband since I was 18. We married in 1969. I was never a militant activist in my youth, but as I grew older (and the children also grew older) I became involved in local politics and about 15 years ago I was elected a Tory councillor. I only stood for one term as I developed breast cancer and couldn't take the long hours of evening meetings .

Sympathy to Grannyactivist and Annika.
I had a friend whose sister died about then, of a blood clot on the lung....I still have the letter she wrote me then, found it when moving house, and we are recently in touch again by phone.

About the actual year, we were in London, the thing I remember is trying to get to a demonstration at the American Embassy; with 2 kids and a pram to get onto the Tube....my (now long ex) husband had gone on ahead, but I missed most of it!

I can see why he is your EX Oxon70.
I was still in school - so it was a year or two later for me. The Stop the 70s Tour demo in Swansea. We were demonstrating outside the rugby ground trying to prevent the South African cricket tour. Peter Hain was organising, that young liberal as he was. The police formed a line, linked arms and pushed us all back against a wall, which was pretty scary, being crushed. They then started arresting random individuals inside and outside the ground. My boyfriend of the time (ex husband) was arrested outside the ground. A policeman picked him out in the cells and he was accused of running onto the pitch and "assaulting a policeman" - i think there was about 70 arrests, mainly students. A jewish solicitor offered to handle the cases and most were eventually acquitted. There was an official police enquiry/whitewash. Changes your view of the establishment that kind of experience. I suppose that political side of me is mainly channelled into being a governor in a school in a very deprived area. I've always been a labour member but rarely felt able to be a member. Blair....
And what happened to feminism... my tea is getting cold... we will continue

I think feminism made big strides but then opposers fought back with the think pink brigade and that is still dominant. I can't decide whether the current trend in cleavage exposure is liberating for women or not. Given your average male response, I don't think it is liberating at all. Because we are herd animals there is also the "one size fits all" attitude to overcome. For instance, it must be quite hard to choose to be a stay-at-home mum for educated young women because of pressures to follow the pattern and yet bringing up your own kids can be extremely rewarding. I've had a number of jobs with varying degrees of challenge/stress but all-in-all, although it is unrewarded financially, I have to admit that "being a mum" is the job I've enjoyed most. I never found it boring so I'm always baffled when people say it is. It's always possible to do interesting things with kids and, when they're asleep, without them. Boringness and boredom are a product of the people being bored. My dad used to say: Nothing is boring; people are bored.

Yes I agree feminism did make big strides but seems to have stalled. One of the biggest strides is that women now enter a much greater range of jobs and more management roles. There is still a lot of gender division in the workplace though with few british women, for example, becoming computer programmers (far more in some other countries - e.g. India) and legislation to protect women in the workplace. And very few female directors. But when I contemplate the pressure on women to dress like whores from the age of 8... Not to mention the pornography-inspired pressure to remove every single hair below the eyebrows... Not to mention the pressure on young teenagers to have sex. And the huge amounts of low self esteem amongst women. Oh where is that soapbox?
I think the feminist movement in the Uk lost its way - lots of political infighting, Spare Rib folded. What did happen do we think?

JessM - dead right. Of course his attitude had a lot to do with my feelings later, in the 70s........I could say a lot more here, but maybe not on this thread!

My daughter doesn't understand when she says she wishes she had a daughter she could have dressed up - and I get cross. I too have looked at the young girls' clothes in shops and been disgusted.

Women's Liberation, to me, lost its power when the big conferences stopped - (- the centre cannot hold?-) and this I think is where the local squabbles started. And of course the media portrayal of 'Women's Lib' ran us down all the time, and still does.

Yeah, Spare Rib was good too, even though people never got used to the name, and I got, when asking for it in a newsagents - 'Is it a knitting magazine?'........

Happy to join a new thread on this topic if you want to start one, oxon70.

Will do, but what's the title? Exes, their attitudes, or our changing feelings? Or all of these? Suggestions?

Oxon, I could understand them thinking it was a cooking mag...

Oh yes! Rib! I get it.

I thought meant start a feminist thread. Maybe we should all do homework first and read the feminist threads on Mumsnet and then report back from the front. Brace yourselves for those 4 letter words ye of delicate sensibilities.

Oh.... but why not both? They are surely interconnected, though!

.....I don't do four letter words except when things happen like I broke my wrist at Xmas on the ice. I did then.

I hope wrist fully recovered.
The only time I said in front of my v religious MIL was when a certain bad man got murdered in the Maze one Christmas (remember?) and that was because I had some connections to his family.

Perhaps our children are more likely to use the internet for campaigns. My son managed to save a local historic building through his facebook campaign & both kids do a lot through AVAAZ and similar.
In 1968 I was at Cambridge and observed the student sit-ins but I'm ashamed to say was too scared to join them. I kept all the tracts, news sheets and & circulars exhorting us not to sit the exams so at least I could contribute years later to my College archives. My active awareness of inequalities came later but I preferred to be active in strategic ways, rather than on demos etc. My last big campaign was a community epidemiology study to prove the high incidence of cancers in young people in our area (10 miles from several nuclear establishments) after our daughter's death from leukaemia. This and most recent local campaigns have left me exhausted & cynical because of bureaucracies that pretend to listen but don't.

so was I "gally"and I'm still struggling to get a pension from the Fr. government because i was teaching....

I meantGally and i hadn't read about the other posts with sad memories-very sorryfor you two