Feminism came too late for me. By the time The Female Eunuch was published in 1970, I was 26 and had already gone through all the conflicts and double-binds that made being a girl, and especially a clever girl, so difficult in the Fifties and Sixties. It was fine being clever at school - at any rate if you were at a girls' school, as I was - but being clever outside, when there were boys around, made you a social leper. If anyone wanted to do real damage they would call you a swot - no boy would ever go out with a swot. So that was the first problem - how to be clever at school and stupid outside - which in turn was part of the larger problem that you were expected to behave differently with boys than you did with girls. Boys were the enemy but they were also the goal. You had to catch one eventually or you risked being a spinster like your teachers, and no one wanted that.

In order to catch a boy you had to be feminine, a concept that caused me endless grief. Being female was not the same as being feminine and I could see that I was a total failure in the femininity stakes. I never liked dolls or gonks or soft toys. I didn't want to be Wendy in Peter Pan, or Anne in the Famous Five - sickly little 'home-makers' the pair of them - I wanted to be Peter Pan or George, the proto-dyke. I was never 'moved to tears' by poetry. I didn't cry when people were horrid to me. I didn't ever faint in class or moan because it was 'my time of month'. I didn't devote whole evenings to trying out new hairstyles, nor did I paint my nails on Friday night and scrub it off on Monday morning. I wasn't as excited by cotton wool balls as most girls seemed to be and I never knew what you were meant to do with ribbon. And, thank God, I never kissed a picture of Cliff Richard.

Above all, I didn't have any hope of looking like Doris Day. She was, by universal agreement, the perfect woman - cute, feminine, immaculately groomed, pointy-breasted, wasp-waisted, popular and pert. She was the mistress of 'feminine wiles', could 'wrap men round her little finger' (how do you do that?) and ran absolutely no risk of ever being called a swot. Everyone in my school aspired to look like Doris Day and quite a few succeeded. I was handicapped by being thin, dark and sullen.

We had no sex education. We had a lesson on reproduction in the frog - not a very helpful role model - followed by a lesson on periods (when we were 14, so already too late) followed by a lesson on venereal disease. Apparently we were meant to deduce some connection but I certainly never did and was left with a lifelong unease around frogs. Luckily there were girls at school who knew more, and we all contributed what little factoids we could find, but it was patchy and generally useless knowledge until Di, aged 15, actually went all the way with a boy and came back and told us about it. We listened eagerly to every detail and then went away and whispered, 'Dirty slut!'

Calling other girls sluts was one of the things we learnt at our nice posh girls' school. Girls who went all the way were 'cheap' and we, of course, were meant to be expensive. (That's why the idea of free love was so potent in the Sixties, and why I cherish Fiona Pitt-Kethley's line, 'I'm not cheap, I'm free' - free in this context is the antithesis of cheap.) There was effectively a tariff of what boys had to spend on you before they were allowed to do anything - a couple of trips to the cinema earned a kiss, more trips to the cinema plus meal meant a French kiss with tongues (yuk!), months of meals and cinema meant hands on boobs and in theory, if they went on spending long enough, they might get to take your bra right off. But no one apart from that hussy Di ever went that far. Essentially, we were taught to think like high-class hookers, grudgingly doling out sexual favours in return for dosh. Which in turn relied on, and inculcated, the notion that no girl could ever want to have sex. That was what made Di so unspeakably beyond the pale - the fact that she admitted to enjoying it. Only dirty sluts did that.

So I was brought up to believe that (a) girls hated sex and (b) if they ever did indulge, even a little way, would only do it in return for some socking great material reward. The best reward, and the only proper reward for going all the way, was a wedding ring. I think a lot of the girls I was at school with actually were virgins on their wedding day. I wasn't. I 'experimented' but kept very quiet about it, and in truth the experiments were never very successful. And of course in those days the great looming fear behind sex was pregnancy. We had only the haziest knowledge of contraception - basically we had to rely on a boy having a condom and knowing how to use it. If we were very silly, we believed boys who said they knew how to withdraw in time, or who told us that you couldn't get pregnant if you made love standing up.

Inevitably, I did get pregnant at Oxford, but luckily my boyfriend had a rich older brother who paid for a 'proper' abortion in Harley Street. Even so, it was a nasty business - I had to use a false name and then couldn't remember what it was, and had to hand over £300 in cash, which a nurse discreetly counted in the corner. I had other friends, not so lucky, who tried pills and gin-in-the-bath and ended up in hospital. After the abortion, I took contraception seriously and sucked up to the one girl in college who was known to own a diaphragm. We all took turns borrowing it, and had to pre-book it, so it meant we could have sex on, say, Thursday but not on Friday. It wasn't until my second year at Oxford (1964) that salvation arrived in the shape of the Pill but even then we had to say we were engaged before we could be prescribed it.

All this fear around sex made for great tension in boy-girl relationships. On the other hand, I never for a minute gave up the difficult search for a mate. I was brought up to believe, and still believe, that who you marry is the most important choice you make in life. Does that make me anti-feminist? I don't think so, because I believe it's as true for men as it is for women. You can't be happy if you're married to the wrong person.

Being older and already married, I could only watch with bemusement as feminism went through its florid evolutionary stages in the Seventies - the 'all men are rapists' phase, the Andrea Dworkin compulsory boiler suit phase, the bra-burning, picketing Miss World phase, the sitting-in-a-circle-inspecting-your-vagina-in-a-mirror phase. But I was very aware in the Eighties of the 'having it all' phase when women were supposed to 'juggle' career and motherhood. I was aware of it because I was actually doing it at the time but I never thought juggling babies was a good idea. What it actually involved was permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.

The problem for young women is, as it always has been, an economic one - that just when they need to be pushing ahead with their careers and earning decent money is also when they need to be having babies. It worries me that so many young women now choose to defer the babies, thinking they can somehow magic them up by IVF when they are in their forties. Often they can't, so they have no children to console them when their much-vaunted careers end in redundancy. In an ideal society, I believe, couples would have children young, preferably in their early twenties, when they're energetic and flexible enough to live on little money, and then start the serious career-building in their thirties when the children are at school. The present recession might actually make that easier - if there are no careers for 20-somethings to pursue, they might think it is quite a good idea to have babies instead.