The conceptual focus of this chapter is generation. Generation brings into view the historical period in which a person grows up; in my case a child of Britain's post-war hardship, a young adult of the ‘swinging sixties’, and an activist in the 1970s Women's Movement. The popularity of the concept waxes and wanes, often coming to the fore in lay, policy and sociological discourse in periods of rapid social change. According to Mannheim, generations are formed in particular conditions: those ‘who share the same year of birth, are endowed, to that extent, with a common location in the historical dimension of the social process’ (Mannheim, 1952 [1928]: 290). In this conceptualisation temporality and social location are paramount. Mannheim further distinguishes between generation as actuality and as unit, ‘We shall therefore speak of a generation as an actuality only where a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic de-stabilisation’ (1952 [1928]: 303). A generational unit is formed not only when peers are exposed to the same phenomenon but when they also respond in the same way as a collective. A generation is not therefore only a matter of belonging to a particular birth cohort but the cultures, subjectivities and actions that it forges. The concept has therefore strong elements of agency and generational identity as a potential basis for political engagement.

As those of us in the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation in Britain have come to understand, what marks us out from later generations are the benefits reaped from the post-war welfare settlement – free university education, greater equality for women in employment and education, and a free universal health service. At the time of writing (2018), major socioeconomic and political differences between generations are evident, creating a significant gap between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials. The year 2016, in which the British people voted by a small minority in a referendum to leave the EU, revealed considerable divisions between younger and older generations, with acute educational divisions the clearest sign of profound societal cleavages (Richards, 2017).