Hawley, S., 2024.

"It hasn't gelled: it hasn't taken on". The Family Way in the 1960s.

The latest in our series of guest posts is by artist, professor and experimental film maker Steve Hawley from the Manchester School of Art. Professor Hawley writes about the Boulting Brothers' The Family Way (1966), a film which seems indeterminately poised between the Swinging Sixties and the kitchen sink. Historians are often apt to see the sixties as an era of contradiction - a time when intense social change in some parts of Britain clashed with more old fashioned, traditional values in others. Professor Hawley's work shows that these attitudes are very much reflected in a film like in The Family Way, released at the height of Swinging London and yet espousing as it does traditional sexual mores and values at a time of sexual and social revolution.