To Love and Obey Love and Marriage: A 20th Century Romance

# She walks like an angel walks... #

In '60s Britain, the popular ideal of a happy marriage

was still rooted in age-old beliefs about a woman's role in life.

It was a world in which women aspired to be beauty queens and brides of the year.

However, the next two decades would start to turn these traditional expectations upside down

as a new generation of young women began to question everything they had been brought up to believe in.

I knew I didn't want to end up like my mother.

I wasn't sure quite what I wanted to end up like because I didn't have a role model

and I didn't have anyone around that I could look at and think, "I want to be like her or her."

All I knew was that I didn't want to end up with my mother's boiling sense

of just not having had a fulfilled life.

Feminism challenged the belief that a wife's duty was to love and obey

and that her natural place was at home looking after her children while her husband provided for them.

To be a housewife, once a source of pride,

became a badge of oppression.

Women were taught to be in a certain position without freedom

and suddenly, we were going to explode that.

The genie was out the bottle.

We were not going to go back into marriage and the nuclear family

which did look to many of us like a prison.

Yet despite the furious debates that raged about feminism and the permissive society,

in the '60s and '70s, most young couples never lost their faith in marriage.

It was more popular than ever before.

And in the '60s, the romantic dream of married love

still involved a traditional courtship and a virgin bride.

Marriage is living together, sharing your life together,

and the sharing starts with marriage.

You don't take slabs of cake before the party has started,

so you don't take lumps of marriage before the marriage has started.

It's a serious commitment. It isn't something you just pop in and out of on a Sunday afternoon.

We really felt this was something important.

It's what we wanted to do and what we felt was going to make the best of our lives together.

# So, darling, darling

# Stand by me

# Oh, stand

# By me

# Oh, stand

# Stand by me

# Stand by me

# Whenever you're in trouble... #

In the early '60s, the young generation grew up in a world

defined by very different masculine and feminine roles.

In the mating game, there were clear rules of engagement.

A pretty girl was the trophy sought by every boy,

but for him to marry her, she had to resist his sexual advances.

London convent girl Maureen Flanagan was going out with the local gang leader.

He came from a family of seven brothers - the Flanagan brothers,

famous in Islington.

He wanted me because I was the prettiest girl out of our crowd.

Maybe I wanted him because he was in charge of his crowd.

# You can dance

# You can dance with the guy that gives you the eye

# And let him hold you tight... #

I was the fashion girl in Islington.

What I wore on one Friday night...

Up at Gray's or the Tottenham Royal

or the Lyceum in the West End.

What I wore on that Friday, the other girls wore the next Friday.

# So, darling

# Save the last dance for me... #

So that was OK because he was quite proud of that.

Nobody could come over and ask you to dance without asking him first.

In the courtship ritual, a girl's virginity was her most prized asset.

The only safe way to have sex was to marry young and many did.

There was absolutely no sex.

If I would have not been a virgin when he met me at 17, that would have been it.

I might have been a bird for the night, girlfriend for a week,

but never a proper girlfriend and never a wife.

Even to assure him...

I mean, I swore on my dad's, my mum's life that I had never had sex with the first boyfriend.

But to assure him, he even went and asked him,

and he assured him, "No, just kisses and cuddles. I never touched her.

"I never did anything. I never saw her bedroom. Never, ever."

That's how you had to be. You had to be a virgin.

The popularity of the '60s white wedding

was for most women both a fashion statement

and a hard-earned symbol of sexual purity.

My mother wanted me to wear a long, white wedding dress.

I'd seen a picture of Brigitte Bardot getting married in a magazine

in broderie anglaise, in a plain broderie anglaise, a little flared dress.

I had to have the same. I couldn't find one anywhere.

And so I went to Losners, the hire place,

and there was a little broderie anglaise, nipped into the waist,

flared out, so you could wear lots of petticoats, plain neckline, little veil.

The wedding had to be, of course, in a Catholic church, on the 14th of January, 1961,

a week before I was 20.

# Love and marriage, love and marriage... #

At the other end of the social scale,

well-bred daughters of Britain's aristocracy met their marriage partners in the London season.

It used to begin with an exclusive rite of passage - the presentation of debutantes to the Queen.

This marked the entry of a procession of virgins into the upper-class marriage market.

Fiona MacCarthy was one of the last debutantes to take part in a royal ritual that was phased out in 1958.

We all knew that this was ending, that we were the last of the debs,

so this gave it a kind of extra frisson of excitement,

but all the same,

I remember just having one of those little moments of thinking,

"This is a strange thing. What am I doing here?"

A debutante's virginity was vital to her reputation

and to her marriage prospects.

We were in this world where really sex wasn't talked about.

You never really spoke about it. It was a completely mysterious world.

And I think a very, very high proportion of those girls

who curtsied to the Queen in 1958 would have been virgins.

A very high proportion.

During the course of the season,

most of the young debutantes found an eligible young man to marry,

but Fiona was the exception to the rule.

I was one of the very few girls who had actually got a place at university at this point.

I had got a place at Oxford

and I didn't want to get into the marriage market too early.

I was very excited about going to university.

Fiona met her future husband Ian while studying at Oxford.

I got married almost immediately after Oxford

and I married someone in my predictable social circle

who was at Oxford with me.

He was from a very similar background to my own.

He was different because he was very, very intelligent,

much cleverer than most of the men that I had met during the season.

And we married when I was only 21.

In the '60s, there was a new honesty about the problems faced by young, middle-class courting couples

who were saving up to get married and start a family.

In 1966, the documentary series Man Alive told the story of Alan and Judith Ketley.

It's difficult to imagine when you're that age that you're going to buy houses,

have children, have a career,

but somewhere in your mind,

you've got that sort of thinking going on and when you meet somebody like Judith,

you know that's the sort of person you could develop the foundations to do that.

I was only happy when I was with him.

I realised that what I really wanted to do was to be with him

and very, very quickly I realised that.

We sat on the settee quite often some nights and I put my arm round Judith.

I'd think nobody's looking, lean over and give her a kiss.

He doesn't like that at all.

Living at home, courtship could be sexually frustrating.

Alan and Judith found an ingenious way to be alone together, but didn't go all the way.

Judith had her own transport

which was our passion wagon,

a little Mini van that she'd managed to buy, which was pretty impressive.

It meant she was good financially if she could afford to buy a vehicle.

I was a teacher at the time and the staff at school, when I arrived with this car, they laughed

and said, "Judith's got a passion wagon." So this name caught on.

When Alan won a scholarship to study at Kew for a year,

being apart was so frustrating for them, they decided to bring forward their engagement.

I remember saving up because when you're only on £5 or £6 a week, you have to do an awful lot of saving.

It was a big event because we went down Manchester and bought the ring that Judith wanted.

My ring has got a ruby in the middle and a diamond at each side

and Alan always described it as "no smoking in the middle

"and six months' overtime at each side" because he had to save up for it,

but it's very, very special and very precious.

Alan and Judith planned a one-year engagement strictly without sex.

If you think it's worth fighting for,

the struggle for virginity is maybe the hardest of a long engagement.

It may be a self-inflicted hardship, but that doesn't make it any more bearable.

It gets a bit hard to bear at times.

Obviously.

A certain amount of restraint.

If you're going to believe in white weddings,

then it's a bit hard waiting, isn't it, sometimes?

If you got married in a white dress,

then the white dress stood for the fact that you were still a virgin.

And that's what I wanted. That's really, really what I wanted.

Our point of view was that if you were going to enter into marriage,

sleeping together first didn't really fit in with the idea of a lifelong commitment and marriage.

Alan and Judith have been happily married for 45 years

and have two children and four grandchildren.

The taboo on sex outside of marriage

was reinforced by the beliefs of the churches,

all of which remained very influential in the '60s

and continued to teach that sexual pleasure could only be safely enjoyed in marriage.

The heroic struggle to control sinful sexual instincts through a life of devotion to God

was one which attracted some idealistic teenagers into the priesthood, like Richard Holloway.

I was trained by a monastic community

and I conceived this grand idea

that I would give myself away to God

in a life of poverty, celibacy and obedience.

I always felt that a real man of God or a priest would not have sex.

And I had a highly libidinous nature, so I found this a particular struggle.

I don't recommend hitting puberty in a monastery. It's not the best place to negotiate that.

Richard gave up his vows of celibacy

to become a curate in the Glasgow Gorbals

where he dedicated his young life to bringing Christian compassion

into one of the most impoverished, yet exuberant communities in Britain.

Then after a holiday to Manhattan, he met Jean

and in 1962, invited her back to the Gorbals to join him in his work.

Whilst working together, they fell in love,

but Richard was confused and consumed by guilt.

I suppose I had interiorised very strongly this church notion I had inherited

that the first-class life was the single, celibate life.

That's what the real, heroic Christian did.

And I had fallen in love with Jean

and I wanted her to be part of my life,

and yet I was ashamed...

When we were out together and I had a clerical collar on, I wouldn't hold her hand.

It took me a wee while to admit even that we were engaged

because...because of that strange kind of tug back to that particular ethos.

How she stood it, I don't know.

Despite this, Richard and Jean decided to get married

and she returned from New York for the wedding,

but it was such a big decision, they worried they were doing the right thing.

I met her at Prestwick Airport and I could see that she was distressed, very distressed.

And we got up into the flat in 10 Abbotsford Place

and she burst into tears and said she didn't think she could go ahead with it -

this cultural shift from Manhattan to Gorbals

to marry a man she didn't know very well.

And a bit of me was...

She says... I can't believe it, but she says, um...

I said, "Well, I'm not bothered," or something horrible like that.

And, uh...I said, "OK, so the pressure's off."

We weren't... We were going to delay it, cancel it

and I said, "But can you help me find furniture because I'm going to have to move in here,

"because I'm going to become priest in charge of St Margaret's and St Mungo's?"

And so we kicked around the second-hand salerooms...

..in Glasgow and picked up bits and pieces,

and gradually doing it, she kind of relaxed

and we kind of fell in love again.

She decided, "Yeah, let's do it,"

so we did, we got married on a cold April day.

We were married by my bishop, whom I loved, Francis Moncrieff.

We wanted him in the wedding photograph and he said, um...

"If I come into the photograph, I have to be in the centre."

So there's our wedding photograph of me and Jeanie

with the bishop in a mitre in the middle of us,

looking very austere.

The '50s and '60s saw a wave of immigration from the Caribbean to Britain,

adding a mixed race dimension to the dating game.

Many of these newcomers also had strict codes of conduct on courtship and marriage,

shaped by their religious beliefs.

In the '50s, convent girl Ros Howells came from Grenada to London

to study and it was here she met John.

I was ice-cool, you know?

Now, I don't know whether John found that a challenge

because he was not...

I just knew we were going out, but we weren't going out, if you know what I mean.

You know, he would be there

and he would walk me home or he'd say, "Let's go for a coffee or something."

And my idea was I was going to be here for a while and go back to Grenada. You know?

It wasn't something that I was looking for a husband.

# Oh, won't you come home, Bill Bailey?

# Come on home She moans... #

Despite her misgivings, Ros fell in love.

There was never any doubt, though, she would remain a virgin.

# I know I done you wrong

# Yes, indeedy... #

By the time we had kissed, I was in love.

I wasn't in lust because I was brought up in the way that I know he wasn't going further than a kiss

and he probably knew that too.

But in Britain at this time,

those who loved across the racial divide were breaking a very powerful taboo.

If detected, they were likely to face prejudice and hostility.

And if they planned to get married, they could expect disapproval from both sets of parents,

so when John proposed, Ros saw disaster ahead.

I think the first time we had a serious conversation

was when he said to me, "We're off on Wednesday. Let's go and buy an engagement ring."

I said, "Are you mad? Are you out of your mind? What will your mother do?"

"It's nothing to do with anybody but me."

So he went, we went, we bought the ring.

One person can't fight this alone.

Prejudice won't always exist. It can't.

I shan't live to see the end of it and neither will you.

-You can't fight it alone.

-I can try!

This kind of deep-seated colour prejudice was an issue explored in feature films of the time,

yet despite receiving a letter from her father advising her that mixed marriages rarely lasted,

Ros married her fiance John after a one-year engagement.

He was much more interested in getting married.

I think I enjoyed being in love and having an escort and going places wherever we went,

but I knew that I didn't want to be with anybody else.

For me, that was the thing.

Would I like to have breakfast with this man for the rest of my life?

I knew that was OK, that was what I wanted to do.

You're worried about what the neighbours will say. Prejudice? You're riddled with it!

It's all over your face. All you can see is black, black!

I'm ashamed of you.

When I think of you and that man sharing the same bed...

Oh, Mum!

It's filthy, disgusting. It makes my stomach turn over and...

An incident happened to me in my early years of being married

where I came out of the cinema with my husband.

We'd had a really good evening. It was lovely. We only had a short walk home.

And suddenly, there was somebody in my space.

And I realised, I thought at first, you know, we would cross,

then she came right up to me and said, "You black bitch!"

And she spat in my face.

It was all over my coat. It was there.

And my husband suddenly woke up to the fact that I was by then shouting at her

and said, "What's happened?" I told him and I said...

"You know, this woman..."

And he said, "Leave her alone. She's ignorant. Let her go."

And I was so angry...

..with her, and by then, I would be getting angry with him.

Then in the late '60s came a challenge to every traditional idea of love and marriage -

the sexual revolution.

Its main target was the taboo on sex before marriage, its great ally, the Pill.

Swinging London was the trailblazer of the new permissive culture.

It attracted young women eager to break with convention and lose their virginity, like Rosie Boycott.

I desperately wanted to be cool.

I wanted to be a hip, swinging chick.

"Chick" was a word that was used a lot.

At that point, it was perfectly OK to be a chick.

I wanted to be... All those expressions, where it was at, where it was happening.

I wanted to be cool, so of course, I pretended that I had done this lots of times before.

# Let's spend the night together... #

This sexual permissiveness, however, came at a price, and it suited the men far more than the women.

It often led to deception, regret and heartbreak.

The glamorous world of rock stars, photographers and models was not all it seemed.

Take your hat over a bit.

On the surface of it, people would say, "This is great for everybody."

Bit further.

But actually, what was happening was that women were expected to favour free love all the time

and if they didn't want it, then they were regarded as straight and square

and those were the kind of words you used.

So you would be seen as uncool which was truly a bad thing to do,

so women had no manoeuvrability.

No, no. That's good like that.

Good. Then let your eyes come round to me.

Keep that hand where it was.

In many ways, I think women were in an even further bind.

I'm not saying this was like saying you need to preserve your virginity

in order to make yourself worth something to the person you marry,

but it was an exploitation and everyone was trying something out.

And in a way, for blokes, yes, it was like arriving in a sweet shop and the sweets were free.

Some of the young women in swinging London started to re-imagine a new role for themselves

and a new relationship with men.

It involved a fundamental rethink of what marriage and the family was all about.

Marriage and the nuclear family will carry on until a woman can survive alone, be paid as much as a man,

be able to have her children looked after during the day and have a job.

We'd all come from backgrounds where there was the same kind of story,

you know, which was the dad doing everything and the mum at home,

regardless of whether the mum was cleverer than the dad or more capable or whatever,

but a feeling that our mums had, on the whole, had narrow and frustrating lives.

And we didn't want those lives.

# If you want a do-right-all-day... #

Rosie and her fellow feminists set out to help create a more equal world

that would liberate women from lives of domestic drudgery, believing this could benefit men too.

To this end, she co-founded the feminist magazine Spare Rib

with Marsha Rowe in 1971.

We wrote the first editorial for the first issue of Spare Rib

and we said, "This is for men and for women."

We had this naive but... It's incredibly important to have those optimistic views.

Or I had it. I don't want to speak for Marsha. I thought, "This is going to be great.

"I don't know what it's going to be, but everyone's going to embrace this and love having this equality."

# Now, John Henry, he was a little boy

# He was sitting on his papa's knee... #

The late '60s and early '70s also saw the emergence of a counter-culture

that grew out of the radical student movement in the universities.

It embraced left-wing politics and workers' rights

and called for the creation of a more equal society,

yet ironically, the men were often unaware of their own very unequal attitude to women,

as Anne Geraghty discovered.

We went into one pub, it was in Sheffield, and we were told you can't serve women in here.

"Women can have a drink, but only in the bar next door."

And actually, they couldn't buy the drinks.

Only our men could buy the drinks in the bar.

It was like suddenly...

We'd just been discussing workers, the revolution and the rights of the workers

and suddenly, here we were about to walk quietly and sip Babychams in the lounge.

Suddenly, we looked at each other and we thought, "Hey, hang on a minute, this is a bit weird."

Suddenly, it was like, "Hey... We're not having this."

And we started having meetings, just the women.

# What you want

# Baby, I got... #

Out of experiences like these emerged a women's movement

that soon grew in strength and campaigned for women's rights.

At the heart of demands for change was a questioning of the power relationship between men and women

and the rejection of marriage and traditional family life.

We were discovering new freedoms in many different ways.

It was like, "Sexual freedom, why not have that?"

I mean, this was questioning one of the basic assumptions

in a way that society is organised upon

which is patriarchy, the rule of the father,

has to know that that woman is not going to go...

you know, go off and make love with somebody else because he doesn't know who his children are otherwise,

so by definition, patriarchy requires women to be sexually controlled.

And suddenly, we were going to explode that.

We were not going to go back... The genie was out the bottle.

We were not going to go back into marriage and the nuclear family

which did look to many of us like a prison.

The new consumer society of the affluent '60s

seemed to have created a glossy material world of egotism and excess

that was condemned by feminists and political radicals alike.

Some of these young men and women looked for an alternative way of life

like Martin Gerrish who, as the eldest son,

was expecting to have to enter his family's manufacturing business.

The expectation on me was quite subtle.

I was the eldest son, I had the same name as my father,

my grandfather and my great-grandfather.

The eldest son always had the name William, so my name is William Martin

and my father's name is William Jack and my grandfather's name is William Ewart Ebenezer,

so we all have this first name

which is kind of like the Gerrish kind of stamp for the eldest son.

To escape this inheritance, Martin got as far away

from marriage and traditional family life as he could.

Like many others of his generation, he dropped out

and set off on the hippie trail to India on a journey of self-discovery.

He planned to join the Orange People in an ashram set up by Bhagwan in Poona.

The aim of this experimental community was to bring peace and love to the world

by finding an alternative to marriage.

The nuclear family would be a thing of the past.

Martin couldn't wait to get there.

We got two buses together, two 25-seater buses,

and 50 of us got in a bus, two buses,

and drove overland to India.

We got to Poona eventually after six months

and Bhagwan who was there was really creating an amazing experiment.

He was really saying, you know, "Be yourself."

"Thou art that" was the word that was across the top of the ashram. "Be whatever you are."

Live it. Live what you are. And find out from living it

rather than from some theoretical knowledge. Live it.

Live your sexuality. Live your emotions. Live your feelings.

Live your truth. And see where that takes you.

And I jumped in. I loved it. I loved the ashram.

I loved what it was about, that we were there collectively really trying to change the world.

SINGING "Jerusalem"

The legend of the Swinging Sixties is one of a mass sexual rebellion inspired by the pill

and the permissive society, but the true picture is very different.

Britain remained, for the most part, a conservative nation in which lifelong marriage was still

one of the foundation stones.

In 1969, there were still only four divorces for every 1,000 married couples.

Nevertheless, there was a restlessness and a spirit of change, especially among women.

I was getting a little restless with the role of the executive wife

and I was incredibly bored with the whole social ritual that I was still involved with

because my husband was very much part of an Essex county set.

Then, one evening, as everyone started to let themselves go, came the defining moment of Fiona's life.

I do remember my moment of revelation, of thinking I just cannot go through with this life.

It actually happened at a dreadful, dreadful hunt ball.

Fiona had begun a career as a journalist for the Guardian

and the huge gulf between life as a county set wife and an independent journalist was a bridge too far.

The whole ambience of the Guardian unsettled me, really.

The sort of work that I was doing, the sort of people I was meeting.

Within two years, Fiona had her own Guardian column,

writing about all the big changes in Sixties Britain in politics, the arts, fashion and design.

I went to interview a young designer called David Mellor.

He was one of the Swinging Sixties' coming figures.

He was based in Sheffield. He was a silversmith, a metal worker.

David Mellor was one of a group of young, working-class designers who broke with convention.

In his workshop in Sheffield, his iconic cutlery designs were emblematic of Sixties innovation.

For Fiona, it was love at first sight.

I shocked a lot of my family, a lot of my friends

because I think that the whole class thing was very mystifying to them.

Why would I give up such a suitable marriage?

Everyone thought this was a perfect marriage for me.

But dissolving a seemingly-perfect marriage in the mid-Sixties wasn't easy.

The law demanded irrefutable proof of adultery. Someone had to be guilty.

Everything hinged on evidence of a matrimonial offence

and, to get it, private detectives stalked the land.

I remember we were visited by an inspector

who wanted to make absolutely, em, sure that we were living together,

which meant that he poked around in the bedroom and found that my clothes were in the wardrobe.

It wasn't such an alarming thing as you might think.

He was quite a sweet, bumbling, old man and because I was a journalist,

I actually was really interested in his story.

We sat down and had a cup of tea afterwards and he told me about his road in life

and his extraordinary career of snooping about in people's bedrooms.

Fiona married David in 1966.

She felt liberated by the creative freedom she could enjoy in her new marriage

and developed her career as a successful writer, alongside bringing up their two children.

It was a very exciting time

and I felt really glad that the children could have a sort of different upbringing

because my upbringing had been so closed.

Sending our children to comprehensive schools,

they were mixing with children from all backgrounds and nationalities

and I thought that this was a much, much better kind of basis

for living a proper, fulfilled life.

# How sweet it is... #

In the Sixties, Maureen Flanagan's career as a fashion model took off,

but she was married to a traditional and very possessive working-class husband.

The pride he'd once felt at marrying the prettiest girl in the neighbourhood and a virgin bride

was turning to resentment.

I started appearing in newspapers. Swimming costumes, bikinis,

lots of leg work because I always got the leg work on any job. I just had those legs.

Whereas a lot of girls I was going on auditions with just went home to their boyfriends or their mum,

I was going home to a man who was coming in at six o'clock

from having worked very hard on an asphalt gang. It is very hard.

He wanted a bath, but he was Irish and he wanted a dinner.

-#

-How sweet it is to be loved by you...

-#

And that's when the rows really started.

He'd want to see the pictures, ask me about the photographer, how many people were in the room.

Sometimes you'd get home at eight o'clock, nine o'clock. Oh! And then the rages.

And with me being a bit feisty, I'd say, "Why didn't you ring the studio and find out?"

"You can't be going out of here at nine o'clock and back at nine!"

And I got a few clumps. Never, ever, in the ten years I was married to him, never touched my face.

Never punched me in the face or anywhere it would show.

You'd argue together and I'd turn round and walk away and got punched in the back of the head.

-#

-How sweet it is to be loved by you...

-#

Then, of course, I was asked to do some what I call glamour shots. Sexy shots.

They were topless shots, but you were holding your arms across you, or a side-on shot.

And then I was asked to do some topless shots for The Sun.

I got strangled, I got thrown into this bedroom, he broke a mirror throwing me against the wall.

I fled the marital home with these strangulation marks around my neck

and I think I'd a bruise on the side of my face here. He hadn't hit me there. I knocked against something.

Anyway, I fled to my friend, another model friend, in Knightsbridge.

Maureen's escape from her husband was her first step to freedom.

The 1969 Divorce Reform Act made it easier to get out of an unhappy marriage.

No longer did partners have to prove the other was at fault. A period of separation was sufficient grounds.

At last I felt wonderfully free

and I felt as though I was in charge of me, other than being somebody's wife,

somebody that I had to be home for, somebody I had to peel the potatoes and make dinner for.

I just was me and I was in charge of my destiny.

And I intended it to be good.

Five years after her divorce, Maureen fell in love with Terry,

a successful businessman and a free spirit.

He encouraged her to continue her career and made her feel as sexy as she looked.

It was carefree. All inhibitions flew out of the window.

I knew what I looked like. I knew I was pretty and he'd fancy me,

but I never thought I was sexy. I could never be sexual. I'd never done anything sexual.

In my ten years of marriage, I'd gone to bed and there wasn't any foreplay.

It's kisses, cuddles, touching of boobs and then sex.

So I'd never had to maybe dress up

and look beautiful. I'd never had to put a pair of stockings on.

I'd only done it for a photo shoot, never for my husband

because I didn't feel sexy. He never made me feel sexy.

I'd never had an orgasm. Never had an orgasm in ten years.

I know I didn't because at that time, when I had that orgasm, I thought, "Jesus! What is this?!"

-#

-Now that I have found you...

-#

After the birth of their son in 1976, Maureen and Terry married.

Maureen's modelling career has continued to this day.

Richard Holloway's marriage was also tested. His passionate campaign as a priest in the Glasgow Gorbals

to fight poverty and improve housing put a huge strain on his young family.

But in the end it made his marriage stronger.

It hasn't been easy trying to be a kind of...

a person who is there mainly for others,

but, you know, we kind of soldiered through it all,

and, of course, bringing children into those circumstances is quite a privilege, too.

It's the opposite of a cloistered nuclear family.

You're sharing your home, your relationship's with everyone

because in a sense you're kind of married to a parish as well.

So it brings riches as well as challenges and difficulties.

The church was very apprehensive about the more liberal and permissive atmosphere of the '60s,

especially the marriage and divorce law reforms.

So it continued to enforce the marriage vow, "'Til death us do part," in a literal way to mean

a couple who divorced could never remarry again in church.

As marriage breakdown increased, this was a rule that caused some great distress.

I didn't abide by that particular rule.

It always struck me as a bit odd that it was the only human failure

that the Christian church was particularly intransigent about.

It didn't offer any recourse to people who'd made that promise

and it had failed. Most people mess up. Most mess-ups get forgiven.

Divorce couldn't get forgiven because of this absolute vow.

Richard secretly defied church law to marry divorcees.

I'm not a natural rule keeper, so it might have been a mistake getting into a job

in which the rules were supposed to have been dictated by God.

But I didn't agonise very much about it. It just seemed that when these people came - not floods of them,

but a significant trickle - it was the same when I married gay people.

I did my first gay marriage in 1972 and again it was...

It seemed to me that when people came to you, humbly and searchingly,

and just somehow wanted some... grace in their lives,

some blessing on trying to make a relationship work,

and relationships are difficult enough, to say no...

Richard still remembers the first gay couple he married.

After Evensong one Sunday, the three of us stood in the little Lady Chapel at Old St Paul's

and I read the Prayer Book wedding service over them and they took the promises.

That was a very quiet, intimate little ceremony. It had no status, legally.

Didn't sign any certificates,

and the church would say it had no status theologically or religiously either.

It had status in their eyes.

They came to me again

and they said, "We've been together now 25 years.

"Will you come as Bishop of Edinburgh and celebrate our..." I don't know what jubilee that is.

And so I did.

And I went and celebrated a high mass as Bishop of Edinburgh

and the church was full of gay men celebrating this 20-year-old gay marriage.

They were together until the end.

Wilt thou have this woman...

In the Sixties, the taboo on mixed race marriage seemed to be breaking down

as the size of the immigrant population increased.

..comfort her, honour and keep her...

Nevertheless, many underlying tensions hardened and the Sixties are also seen as the decade

when anti-immigration sentiment peaked in Britain.

I will.

The racist attitudes which were present when Ros and John Howells married came more to the fore

as their daughters were growing up.

It was a potentially explosive issue that Ros and John viewed very differently

as they revealed in documentaries at the time.

They've got to know that the problem exists and be prepared to deal with it.

I can't accept John's, "It exists."

I think that it's unfair on the children. We chose this life.

We wanted to get married to each other. We can't plead ignorance.

We knew. Well, I knew very definitely that my children would have problems.

In those days, it was seen more as a prejudice.

People were prejudiced. It hadn't got the big word - racism,

which was the power plus the prejudice.

And he just ignored it.

Totally ignored it.

If I thought of it at all, I thought she'd be somewhere between these two

and it should be quite a nice colour! And that's all I thought.

As it happens, I was wrong.

I used to try and nag him into doing it. I'd say, "Did you...?"

And he'd say, "Oh, God. You're on that subject again?"

Because he was so comfortable with my family, with his family.

If you came here and you saw a black man,

or a woman or a family, if you don't like it, you can go.

Same with black people if they didn't like the white people here. They could go.

We had that sort of home.

# Lean on me When you're not strong... #

Ros was determined to get involved in campaigns that were being organised to fight racism,

but this disrupted her family life in many ways.

My daughter used to say, when she had to have badges on things,

"My dad will do it, Mum."

They didn't trust me to have a needle

and when I'm in the house I wanted to pretend that I was that sort of person.

You know, you come to your mum to do things with.

So I'd start making the cake with them and then the phone will ring

and then I'd be gone. You know, so he would have to do it.

I think he had a lot to put up with, but he accepted that's how I was.

Ros knew her involvement as a campaigner against racism would provoke suspicion and hostility

and also cause tension with her husband.

The more I got into being involved with race,

there was a distance.

We didn't grow out of each other, but our paths took us in different directions.

# Lean on me... #

Ros's ceaseless work promoting greater racial equality led to her becoming a prominent figure

in local and then national politics and she was made a life peer in 1999.

But her marriage to John never faltered.

John was not somebody who would deliberately want to hurt anyone.

So, if you like, I would say in spite of me he was a very nice man.

While I was out there

telling...priests,

policemen, how they should behave,

he didn't. You know. But he was the rock that was there. I knew he would be there.

In the early Seventies, many young people challenged old taboos and experimented with new identities.

This was reflected in a flourishing disco culture, where self-expression was everything.

# Oh, you pretty things

# Don't you know you're driving your mamas... #

It was in a disco in Leeds that a chance encounter turned Anne Geraghty's world upside down.

There was a guy dancing on the dance floor and he was really dancing

in a completely different way from how I'd seen dancing.

The DJ, who was this big, black, dead cool DJ,

came out and these two began this incredible dance.

The floor cleared, we all watched and I've never seen two people dance like it.

# Oh, you pretty things Don't you know... #

One of the people that was standing on the side was Anne. We'd never met.

But she saw me doing this outrageous dance with this guy.

And at the end of it, she saw that I was a sannyasin.

I was in orange with this mala.

And I met her that night, the first night I ever met her.

Martin had returned from India a sannyasin, one of Bhagwan's growing community of disciples in Britain.

They all dressed in the colour of the sunrise,

were given a new name and wore a picture or mala of their guru.

Meeting Martin convinced Anne, a feminist activist,

that she wanted to be a disciple, too.

I dyed my clothes orange

and I put on my mala with the picture of Bhagwan.

And I happened to go into the feminist bookshop in Leeds,

which was run by my friends, my sisters.

And I walked in and they came out from behind the till and faced me

and they said, "Anne, you are not welcome in here with that man around your neck."

And I tried to explain that this was a journey, I was going beyond the mind, going to follow my energy.

And as I spoke I began to realise

that I had gone, I had drifted further away from my old life than I had planned.

Bhagwan taught that enlightenment was achieved by casting aside social and sexual inhibitions,

something that Anne and Martin explored during an encounter group session they attended in Wales.

We put a mattress outside and we slept out under the stars in Wales.

And I remember that night when I slept with her

that I just felt like I'd come home.

There was this deep sense in me that something... I felt met.

At a very, very deep level.

That nobody else that I had been with or seen touched me in that way.

Somehow I felt with him, Sujen, as he was then,

that I was meeting someone

who was...

..running as blindly, but as totally into life as me.

I felt a match.

I could feel a profound meeting,

which...hadn't happened before.

The Orange People were one of a number of groups that explored their repressed sexual desires.

Bhagwan encouraged his sannyasin to experiment with free love

as a way to break down bourgeois structures of marriage and family life.

It was an experiment that attracted much ridicule.

Yet the disciples believed they were involved in a very different mission, to create a better world

free from sexual jealousy and possessiveness.

For Martin and Anne, seen here in a discussion group,

the quest for enlightenment was a difficult and often painful undertaking.

'I couldn't be

'this...easy-going, free person that we were trying to be.'

That English middle-class boy was still in there!

Anne somehow let go in a way that I couldn't quite.

And...

And the great god of jealousy reared its head,

which was, for me, very, very hard. Very hard.

It just hit me in the core of me

that I couldn't... I felt so dark and bad.

I could not let her go and just be. It was torture for me, basically. It really was agony.

And I'd go off into the night and just howl and scream

and sort of...you know, be...enraged

that this beautiful woman that I loved was somehow able

to just go and have a good time with someone else. I had terrible dark moods.

One minute I was like flowing in the energy flow, practically enlightened,

next minute in the pits because Sujen was going off with somebody

and I was eaten up with jealousy and possessiveness. But I knew I had to work on this.

I was too attached, I was too possessive.

The Orange People's quest ended in disappointment and failure

and so, too, did Anne and Martin's relationship. They drifted apart

and then split up after leaving Bhagwan's community.

In breaking down the structures of the nuclear family

and in questioning everything about intimate relationships,

we were... At the time of the doing of these experimental ways of living,

you can't tell in advance what is going against something very profound that is real

and what is just old conditioning that needs to be broken down.

Then, 11 years after they first met,

Anne and Martin met again by chance on a London bus.

This time they decided to do it differently.

I felt like we needed to get married. It was almost like I needed to go into the ring.

This is what marriage was for me.

It was like going into a ring and there was no way out. I was not going to get out of that ring again.

I was not going to be with any other woman. I knew this was the woman I had to go on this journey with

and that marriage was a statement to myself and to her

and to the world that this was the woman that... I'm going to be with.

Martin and I realised this is it. It's here. We have to deal with it.

It's up to us.

And so marriage became, for us, a recognition of that,

that here it's up to us here to find what love is.

Love is not something over there to be found.

It's something that it's our responsibility to create here.

When Rosie Boycott met American journalist John Steinbeck Junior in London,

he represented everything she rejected as a feminist.

He was a macho man on a motorbike, dangerous, hard-drinking and a womaniser,

yet she fell madly in love with him.

I felt a very fraudulent feminist.

It was very complicated, actually, for me because suddenly this was more important.

That was quite frightening and I was prepared to do anything,

go anywhere, say anything, follow anything.

And it totally sideswiped me.

I would, at moments, pull back and think, "Hang on a minute.

"You've just spent quite a lot of your life trying to say that this is not what should happen."

You know, one should not be beholden to a bloke like this, but actually I was.

What Rosie's head and heart told her were very different.

Contradictions played out against a national debate about love, sex and marriage.

The question of relationships, sexual openness versus sexual possessiveness,

just never got resolved. I know when I met John

and I was very independent and cocky and buzzing around and having a very good time,

that he liked my independence, my independence from him,

that I wasn't a kind of doormat woman.

And we certainly experimented with...

I know once or twice there were one more person in the bed

and he slept with other people and I used to just bite my lip

because at that point I was kind of confident enough, I think, about how much he liked me,

but it was hideous and I hated it.

As the relationship started to nosedive, he having affairs,

I found it absolutely, totally painful.

I tried on one occasion having an affair myself, but it didn't help at all.

Actually, all one's feminist credentials were useless

against that level of unhappiness and misery about that.

I did think perhaps marriage would be an answer

and that, yeah, there was a wonderful little voice

or loud voice in my head saying, "This might really sort it out. Once you're married, it'll be OK."

Rosie and John Steinbeck Junior never did marry.

The Seventies feminist icon became a successful magazine editor

and the first woman in Britain to edit a national broadsheet. She is now happily married.

'It was like a social earthquake. And even though the earthquake itself didn't carry on,'

you think how far things have travelled from then. It was a brilliant moment to be young.

Absolutely brilliant.

Even though it had lots of pain and lots of heartbreak and lots of chaos,

it was unbelievably exciting. I wouldn't trade it for a day.

The effects of the sexual revolution, the empowerment of women

and the growth of a global consumer society were only fully realised

in the last decades of the 20th century. The divorce rate would increase dramatically,

yet the institution of marriage would survive.

And for many it got stronger.

What would it take to create a happy marriage and a loving family in the 1980s and '90s?

MUSIC: "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?"

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd