United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, the new generation growing up after World War II had grown tired of the rationing and austerity of the 1940s and 1950s and the Victorian values of their elders, so the 1960s were a time of rebellion against the fashions and social mores of the previous generation.
An early inkling of changing attitudes came in 1960, when the government of the day tried unsuccessfully to prosecute Penguin Books for obscenity, for publishing the D. H. Lawrence novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had been banned since the 1920s for what was considered racy content. The prosecution counsel Mervyn Griffith-Jones famously stood in front of the jury and asked, in his closing statement: "Is it a book you would wish your wife or servants to read?" When the case collapsed, the novel went on to become a bestseller, selling two million copies.
The Pill became available free of charge on the National Health Service in the 1960s, at first restricted to married women, but early in the 1970s its availability was extended to all women.
In 1967 laws prohibiting abortion and homosexuality were repealed.
Read more about this topic: Sexual Revolution
Famous quotes containing the words united and/or kingdom:
“Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“In the whole vast dome of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom: as soon as you leave the inanimate kingdom you find the decree of violent death inscribed on the very frontiers of life.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)