You don’t hear the word ‘petticoat’ much these days. It refers to the undergarment, full or half-length, which was designed to be worn under dresses and skirts for the purpose of ‘structure and modesty’. They are now usually called slips or control garments, and have a much sleeker look than the limp petticoats which were a staple of our wardrobes in the swinging decades when the concept of underwear as outerwear was yet to catch on. In fact, having your petticoat show beneath your hemline was such a crime against propriety that it was one’s duty to female solidarity to point out the malfunction by whispering the code ‘Charlie’s dead’ or ‘It’s snowing in Paris’.

The word was resurrected in the great title of the jukebox musical Dreamboats and Petticoats, a catchy phrase which brings to mind the starchy nylon slips which made your full skirt stick out in a pleasing bell shape. A good way to get optimum stiffness was to soak the garment in a thick sugar solution and hang it out to dry. Sometimes bees would cluster on it, creating quite a Daliesque effect.

Magazine mix of cultures

What an odd title, then, for the magazine Petticoat which was published weekly from 1966-1975, and was aimed at the ‘young and fancy free’ and ‘the new young woman’. What is even more remarkable is that the content of this unassuming mag illustrates the mix of cultures, the web of connections and the growing liberation of young women which characterised the era.
It’s actually quite hard to see at first. The featured fashions are trendy and accessible names such as Bus Stop and Clobber.

The adverts cover the familiar ground of cosmetics and beauty aids, with the occasional acknowledgement that young women have a working life. In 1969, there were full-page ads for nursing as a career, which highlighted its opportunities to combine a career and family as well as the salaries on offer (£1,000 by the age of 25). There’s also a page from the Midland Bank explaining how a chequebook works. What was that about wheels and circles…

Literary barriers knocked down

But just take a look at Petticoat’s literary content. There are no barriers or boundaries separating high culture and popular culture and the counter-culture. Jean Shrimpton writes about books. And so does Margaret Drabble.

Every issue has lengthy fiction in the form of single stories or serials, and these are highlighted on the front covers. Jilly Cooper’s stories were regularly published, including ‘October Brennan’ which Jilly later turned into the novel ‘Octavia’. After this, you might read with equal enjoyment a serialised novel by Diana Raymond, a literary figure whose 2009 obituary in The Independent spoke of her work being ‘infused with wit and metaphysics’.

And from the worlds of psychedelia and crime noir are two male writers most of us readers would never have come across outside the pages of Petticoat: Peter Draffin and Ted Lewis.

Draffin was an Australian whose ‘far-out’ novel Pop (1967) became a cult classic with the beat community. It was illustrated by his great friend Martin Sharp, pop artist, cartoonist and illustrator, and one of the editors of the counterculture magazine Oz. He wrote the lyrics to the Cream song ‘Tales of Brave Ulysses’ and was good buddies with Eric Clapton. Draffin stayed as a guest in Sharp’s flat in The Pheasantry on the King’s Road in Chelsea for a while, but was unceremoniously booted out when Clapton wanted to move in. Remember what was said about Swinging London being populated by a few hundred people, the influencers of their day, who inhabited the same orbit, their worlds constantly eddying, colliding and merging.

Ted Lewis was the author of the Petticoat serial ‘All the Way Home’, based on his seemingly autobiographical novel which describes the exploits of an art student who’s a jazz musician and womaniser, and whose personal demons, mainly booze, eventually ruin his life. Pretty strong stuff for the Petticoat demographic readership, but perhaps not quite as strong as Lewis’s later novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’. This became the 1971 film noir classic ‘Get Carter’, set in Newcastle’s gangster underworld and famously featuring a character being thrown to his death from the top of a multi-storey car park in the city centre.

Even potentially light-hearted fiction contained some strong stuff. The regular full-page account of flat-sharing in London, Life with Kathy, sounds as if it might be a what-am-I-like dive into the madcap world of boys and dating. And so it is, up to a point. That point is reached very quickly as Kathy and her flatmate Sara become involved with the same man, married with children, a situation which leads to Sara overdosing… and so it continues.

Petticoat had a robust approach to its treatment of sex and relationships. The redoubtable Clare Rayner was the agony aunt, whose sympathetic, realistic and forthright advice caused some controversy.

Resonating through the years: Could You Really Become A Nun?

Many of the magazine’s features relate to issues which are not just still relevant today, but which are the basis of books, articles, chat shows, podcasts. There’s a Petticoat article headed ‘Calm With Yoga’. Fancy that! Way back then, we knew about yoga! And features such as ‘Could You Be A Nun’ fit right in with today’s interest in mindfulness and meditation.

Petticoat readers were keen to explore complicated and troubled relationships of the type currently labelled ‘toxic’. ‘You and Your Mother’ covers very familiar territory, as does ‘How To Cope With Your Bitchy Friends’ and ‘Sisters, Sisters’. And the nature of the discussion and suggestions for ways to deal with difficult people? Not much talk of today’s ubiquitous ‘boundaries’, but what do we have here? Why, a piece on ‘The Art of Saying No’…

Petticoat’s approach to love and marriage illustrates a far from a starry-eyed, happy-ever-after approach. There were articles on sustaining long-distance relationships and the complications of ‘travelling jobs’, a concept not a million miles from today’s digital nomads. The challenges of adjusting to married life were explored, including the importance of attitudes to money and spending. (Not that much coverage of significant finance for single girls. Until 1975 you couldn’t get a mortgage without your husband’s consent or having a male guarantor such as your father.)

Perhaps more than we thought unites us with our petticoat-wearing sisters of half a century ago. Petticoat magazine gives an insight to a particular demographic at an exciting period of our social history. And who knows? Perhaps ‘Charlie’s dead’ will become a meme…