Growing Up

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

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.

© Peter Doggett 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

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

    The Times, *Book of the Week*

  • [A] fascinating…new book about the decade [the 60’s]

    Observer

  • Refreshingly undogmatic, well-researched and highly readable

    Spectator

  • 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?

    Daily Telegraph

  • 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

    Mail on Sunday

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