The Season of the Witch: Women, Parties and Pop Culture in 1960s St Ives

Sinclair, Jeanie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-9823-7235 (2025) The Season of the Witch: Women, Parties and Pop Culture in 1960s St Ives. In: British Popular Culture(s) 2025, 5th-7th June 2025, Falmouth University.

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Abstract / Summary

Described variously as bohemians, bluestockings and beatniks, women came to St Ives in the years after the Second World War because of the towns’ reputation for utopian bohemianism, and the freedoms this promised. This paper uses gossip as a framework to explore the gendered experience of 1960s popular culture in Cornwall. By looking at how women performed countercultural femininity in 1960s St Ives, I will show how this community created a sense of both individual and collective identity as a form of resistance to patriarchal capitalism, and how this identity was expressed and shared through parties.
As somewhere that was both remote from, but connected to, urban centres, St Ives was a place where women were able to transgress heteronormative gender roles. The creative community in St Ives offered women support networks, pedagogical frameworks and social spaces that made it somewhere women could live independently and be part of the creative economy. The party was the locus for women’s social and cultural exchange; a social space in which women came together to create and define their community. The party was a social sculpture, that developed, defined and maintained these social and cultural identities, and brought people together to gossip, and in doing so, defined and strengthened a sense of community and place. This paper explores the party as a form of cultural and countercultural practice where women got together and formed cohesive communities as a form of resistance.
Drawing on oral histories from the St Ives Archive, gossip is a powerful tool that can unearth hidden and alternative queer and feminine narratives of modernities. (Rogoff, 1996) Using gossip as a methodology reveals the importance of feminine sociability, the party as an alternative, feminine creative practice, and the complex relationships and vital support networks that developed between women in St Ives' postwar art community.

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