Growing Up
  • Published: 17 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781847924285
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $69.99

Growing Up

Sex in the Sixties

Formats & editions
EBook
4 Nov 2021
Paperback
25 Jun 2023
Hardback
17 Nov 2021
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Was the 1960s really that great time of liberation, joyful experimentation and celebration of youth? Growing Up takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution.

Was the 1960s really that great time of liberation, joyful experimentation and celebration of youth? Growing Up takes an unflinching look at the dark underbelly of the sexual revolution.

No era in recent history has been both more celebrated and vilified than the 1960s. For some it was a time when music, fashion and drugs enabled young people to express their individuality and freedom, their hopes and dreams of a different, perhaps better, world. For others, the decade marked the advent of the permissive society, with its undermining of authority, family values and common decency. At the heart of this continuing controversy is sex.

For this wide-ranging and eye-opening survey of the sexual landscape of the 1960s Peter Doggett has assembled a dozen little-known stories that reveal how the sexual revolution transformed people's lives. Growing Up provides an honest, often disturbing portrait of a constant battle between two forces: the urge to free the body from guilt and restraint; and the desire to control, cannibalise and exploit that liberation for profit or pleasure. It is a battle that divides opinion to this day.
  • Published: 17 November 2021
  • ISBN: 9781847924285
  • Imprint: Bodley Head
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 368
  • RRP: $69.99
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About the author

Peter Doggett

Peter Doggett has been writing about popular music and social and cultural history for more than thirty years. His books include the acclaimed There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and the Rise and Fall of '60's Counter-culture, The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie and the 1970s and Electric Shock:From the Gramophone to the iPhone - 125 years of Pop Music.

portrait photo of Peter Doggett

Also by Peter Doggett

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
Electric Shock
The Man Who Sold The World
See all

Praise for Growing Up

The case to rethink our assumptions about the period is one Doggett makes with verve and controlled passion ... An excellent book

David Aaronovitch, The Times, *Book of the Week*

An important reappraisal of a decade that changed us, for good and ill

Christina Patterson, Sunday Times

I very much enjoyed the ride. Growing Up's strengths lies not so much in it being an expert guide to the seedier side of the 1960s (which it certainly is) but in the question Doggett has woven in every chapter, but just manages to leave unsaid: just how much has changed?

Kate Lister, Daily Telegraph

[A] fascinating...new book about the decade [the 60's]

Rachel Cooke, Observer

Peter Doggett's fascinating new book Growing Up shows rather conclusively that the sixties was not a sexual paradise

Tomiwa Owolade, Evening Standard

In rich and playful prose, Growing Up knits together material from newspapers, women's magazines, films, television and pop music to create an account of the 1960s that, unlike most popular histories, does not edit out the grim bits

Louise Perry, Mail on Sunday

Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

David Kynaston, Spectator