| Summary: | This thesis is based upon interview and participant observation data from seventy women, of the boomer and preboomer generations resident in south Cumbria. They have all lived through the sixties revolution but were brought up in an age when it was taken for granted that Britain was a Christian country and Christianity was the only religion people were likely to follow, if they were religious at all. Various commentators on the sixties (Brown, 2001,2006,2010; Marwick, 1999; McLeod, 1997,2003,2007) point out that this period had a significant effect on women but differ in their interpretation of eventual outcomes. The author engages with two of these commentators in particular, Brown and McLeod, and concludes with McLeod that, while the sixties had a lasting impact on the lives of the women who lived through them, they did not necessarily cast off all their religious and domestic commitments to become secularists, as Brown's thesis implies. Some women have continued as committed churchgoers all their lives, some have returned to churchgoing, some have changed affiliation, while others have disaffiliated but retain residual connections to Christianity; others have disaffiliated but have, in due course, turned to the holistic sacred, not necessarily rejecting all that is Christian in their new repertoire of beliefs and practices, while the secularists sometimes only became so, relatively recently, while others had become so, before the advent of the sixties. While few women now perform their commitments, either religious or domestic, out of a sense of duty, confirming Brown's view that the notion of duty belongs to a bygone age, most continue to pursue 'homely virtues', contra Brown, either in the form of voluntary commitments or at least in what Kittay (1999) has called non-voluntary but non-coerced forms of commitment. Casting off this kind of commitment has not found favour with any women in this study, even those who would consider themselves completely committed feminists and/or secularists.
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