From Britain's leading social historian, a lyrical look at the changes to women's lives since 1940, told with examples from her own life. The book provides an intimate, brilliant account of feminism over the last six decades.

'A young woman wearing a navy-blue duffle coat stood shivering in the vaulted Victorian booking hall of Temple Meads station in Bristol looking uncertainly around her. It was 1st January 1960, and the woman was me. I was 16 years old, and I had run away from home.'

Over the next 10 years, the world changed around young Juliet Gardiner - as it did for most women in Britain. It was the start of a decade that was to be momentous for Britain's history - politically, economically, socially and culturally.

As one of Britain's best-known social historians, Juliet Gardiner writes here about the span of women's lives from her birth during the Second World War to the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. Using episodes from her own life as starting points to illuminate the broader history in society at large, she explores changing ideas towards birth and adoption, the importance of education for girls, the opportunities offered by university and expectations of work and motherhood, not to mention her generation's yearning for freedom.

Everyone has his or her history and at the same time is part of history, as this book so perceptively and beautifully demonstrates. As a work of living history, both lyrical and personal, Joining the Dots is an accessible and empowering story of how one mid-20th-century woman grew into a world so different from the one into which she was born. It is a story of bed-sits, sexual choice, motherhood and marriage, feminism, family planning and professional ambition.