20th century 60s

The 1960s are presented as a turning point in the book’s account of women’s sexuality, but not as a simple advance toward liberation. The sexual revolution altered the expected answer from refusal to consent, yet the narrator argues that it chiefly made more women available to more men. The decade’s promise is therefore measured against the continuing absence of women’s own language, knowledge, and authority concerning their bodies.

Sexual Change and Its Limits

The narrator contrasts the sexual revolution of the 1960s with the 1950s, when women were expected to say no. In the new climate, that refusal was replaced by a constant, eager yes. The change is not described as a straightforward enlargement of women’s freedom: in the narrator’s formulation, it made more women sexually available to more men. The contrast exposes a gap between sexual permissiveness and sexual self-determination.

That critique belongs to a broader account of how women learned to understand their bodies. The narrator recalls that she never heard the word “clitoris” and was not taught accurate, prideful language for every part of her body. The omission left her exposed to schoolyard shame and dirty jokes, and later to the assumption that male lovers or physicians knew more about women’s bodies than women did. Against this background, the decade’s new sexual expectations do not themselves resolve the older imbalance in knowledge or authority.

Before and After the Decade

The book places the 1960s between two different social climates: the 1950s prohibition on women’s sexual yes and the feminist activism of the 1970s. The later activism began to offer alternatives to patriarchal religions, Freud, and the sexual double standard. In this chronology, the sexual revolution changes the terms of sexual availability, while the next decade opens a more direct challenge to the systems shaping women’s choices and self-understanding.

The distinction is important to the book’s wider emphasis on women speaking from their own experience. The narrator’s later project of interviewing more than two hundred women—from different generations, sexual orientations, professions, and racial and ethnic backgrounds—turns private accounts into material for monologues. Women were initially reluctant, she recalls, but once they began, they had much to say. That practice of listening and gathering women’s accounts offers a contrast to a sexual culture in which a changed expectation of consent could still leave women’s bodies and knowledge defined from outside.

Place in the Book’s Argument

The decade functions less as a self-contained historical episode than as a measure of incomplete change. Its movement from no to yes is set beside the narrator’s childhood lack of accurate bodily vocabulary and the later emergence of feminist alternatives. Together, these contrasts distinguish sexual availability from the ability to name, understand, and speak about one’s own body.

The book’s account does not claim that every woman experienced the period in the same way. Its later attention to women’s varied ages, racial and ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, and economic circumstances underscores why a broad label such as sexual revolution cannot stand in for a single shared experience. The decade’s significance rests in this tension: expectations changed, but the work of creating women’s own terms for knowledge and expression remained unfinished.