Looking Back: ‘1968’, Women’s Liberation and the Family

For those of us with young children in the late 1960s the theoretical reframing and political centre-staging of ‘the family’ was probably the most distinctive and liberating aspect of the early women’s liberation movement. I was influenced by and played a part in these developments. In this article I reflect on the period and debates, specifically on the denaturalisation of ideas about childcare, communal living and the notion of the personal as political, by using as historical sources my own publications of 1972 and 1983. I go on to reconsider the family question from the perspective of current sexual and parenting politics. Inevitably my views have been influenced by transformations in wider cultural practices and by memory, forgetting and the passage of time.