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I
The idea that Britain witnessed a 'sexual revolution' in the long 1960s is a recurrent feature of recent historiography, but it is also a cultural invention, which is older than the phenomenon it purports to describe.1The first major declarations that 1960s Britain was experiencing a swift, widespread, inexorable, post-religious, and anti-authoritarian 'revolution' in sexual mores appeared in 1963, and this five-propertied narrative rapidly rose to prominence.2From 1965, 'the so-called sexual revolution of our times' was widely discussed in the mainstream press, and by 1967 its inevitability had entered conventional media wisdom.3In 1970, no less than 80 per cent of National Opinion Poll's (NOP) respondents agreed that 'people's attitudes towards sex in the last ten years have changed a lot'.4These narratives invented a revolution that had not yet happened. As the near-consensus of historical opinion now attests, the large-scale transformation of British sexual behaviour did not begin until the very last years of the 1960s, if not actually in the early 1970s.5That transformation was especially aided by the pill, which was not widely available to the unmarried until 1968.6Illegitimacy statistics are not a safe basis for asserting a mid-1960s sexual revolution, since the proportion of babies born to married parents in England and Wales declined by only three percentage points during the relevant period, from 94 per cent in 1960 to 91 per cent in 1967.7For the vast majority of Britons, 'the golden age of marriage' and of courtship persisted throughout the 1960s: the trend towards early marriage did not peak until 1971.8Although subcultures of sexual experimentation did exist, such as in central London, and possibly at Oxford and Cambridge, these were highly atypical, and were often valued by their participants partly for that reason.9Neither Michael Schofield's The sexual behaviour of young people (1965) nor Geoffrey Gorer's Sex and marriage in England today (1971) found evidence of a behavioural revolution.10Nor had there been a revolution in attitudes: ironically, widespread belief in dramatic sexual change was accompanied by significant dislike of it. In 1968, Gallup found that 49 per cent of its respondents disapproved of unmarried couples even using contraceptives, outnumbering the 37 per cent...