People believed this was a good change as it was seen as a for equal opportunity for all of the people in Britain. However these changes had a bigger affect on some people more than others. Everyone was affected but it was mostly the lower class that gained the most out of the attack on authority, lower class people now had equal opportunities, in fact some of the most famous people from the 60's#£uch as the Beatles and twiggy were from lower class families another blow to the church, and to traditional values was homosexuality. In 1967 parliament voted to legalise homosexual relationships that took place in private,
however despite the apparent freedom, homosexuality was given little or no tolerance. It was only very brave men and women who admitted they where gay in the sixties due to widespread fear and anger about the subject. This in many peoples opinions was a great change and is why they liked the sixties but to other homophobic people it was not.
Not only were people changing on the inside they were changing on the outside too. The fashion was changing to it went from plain and simple to short and bright. Music was also changing, it was now aimed at all ages and classes, and varied from classical music to pop and rock, which appealed to many different groups also causing many different styles of fashion for instance, Mods, Rockers, Hippies and Beatniks. As well as this television was changing-there were now programmes aimed at children and at there parents. There was more than one TV channel and there was more adverts encouraging children to buy certain products. All three of the above are linked together because they all influenced each other for instance if someone in a band was famous and always wore a certain make of trousers, if they went on television or radio and advertised the trousers ail of the shops would want to sell because they were now fashionable. The fashion of the sixties was mainly influenced by Mary Quant. At the time fashion meant women had to force themselves into corsets or girdles to achieve a particular shape this was painful and not very practical but Mary Quant did away with all that her clothes were described as "childishly young and naively unsophisticated".
Some people loved the clothes because it was another form of rebellion and a great way of expressing themselves, however some people believe that certain groups took advantage of this, like hippies for example. Because skirts and dresses were becoming shorter and more revealing, some hippies took it as a chance to overthrow all traditional values and rules, and just refused to wear clothes or went out in long floaty skirts and tight trousers. Music was also a controversial subject, it encouraged people to split into there different groups. This was good because people became friends with others interested in the same things as them but it also caused different social groups to fight. Depending on what group someone is in there views about the sixties would be different. For instance if someone was a mod or a rocker, they would remember all the fighting between the two and would see the opposing side as wrong. But someone on the outside would possibly see it as a time when, because of the music and fashion, there were lots of fights between the youth, showing up the rest of the country and making themselves a pain. The social groups of the sixties still exist today but with different names. If the sixties hadn't given so much freedom there would be less social disagreements as there are today, and we could possible still be leaving the same way as we did in the 50's.
Television and Fashion also changed the way women were perceived. The "normal" family was still the most common, but women were given more choices. For example the pill and abortions were legalised meaning that women had a choice now in child birth. However the sixties did not bring about a great revolution in motherhood. It did start off a change in the way men and women were perceived and there equalisation in rights, but at the time there were to many problems and difficulties ,such as few nursery places, for women to just give up being a mother. Of course if you were rich you could. This was seen as a good thing because the pill meant a woman could control how many children they had which did in a way give them better freedom but to some men and even some other women it made life harder.
If the women's husband did not want her to take the pill or have an abortion she was still stuck it isn't until quite recently women have had exactly the same amount of freedom as men. The position of men and women did change, for some, in a good way it did mean that women had more control over there own lives but for others it was just another way for men to control there wives. However there were some good changes like the 1964 Married women's property act which allowed a woman to retain half the money they saved from any house keeping and in 1967 men and women had the same right of occupation to the family home. This was good because it meant that the had equal shares but was bad because housekeeping was meant to be the woman's part of the marriage and she would still have to give half to her husband.
The pill and the legalisations of abortions were changes in the law. Others stated half of the money saved from housekeeping's was a women's to keep this lead in the 1970's to women being given an equal share of the families assets in divorce and it also gave them a right to claim a share on of the financial assets of the financial assets. These were made to provide women with equality before the law but to some men ,who liked traditional ideas,this was seen to encourage the breakdown of marriage . Most of the legal changes in the sixties were for equality of the country. This was good to all lower class people but to some upper class people it was bad because they lost many of the privileges that they had enjoyed for the majority of there lives.
So to some people, like lower classes, teenagers and same women, the sixties was the best of times with the changes In society, brake down of class system giving people an opportunity to make a decent living, the relative freedom of speech and better rights for women but to some it was a period when things went wrong. For the upper classes it was a time when the social classes broke down an important barrier between rich and poor. For women it gave them near equality and more freedom to decide what they wanted to do with their lives. Most importantly the 60’s gave freedom to the youth movement. Allowing them to express themselves and change the way they wanted things to be.
