Sources on Oxbridge life life during the 60s/70s for a female academic.

[sian_shoe]

The era I am setting my story in is vaguely 70s and vaguely Oxbridge, and my main character is a post PHD researcher stuck in a small museum similar to the Pitt Rivers, doing grunt work and going through that awful “so what now” grey dirge that happens post education in your mid 20s.
There's a discovery of 112 letters set in a psuedo medieval land,

Comments

[syntinen_laulu]

I'd argue eugenics was very much still a thing in the 70s, thanks to forced sterilizations etc

In the USA, yes; in the UK, no. Over here, even in 1945 there were still eminent men like the economist John Maynard Keynes who were prepared to push for legislation to allow compulsory sterilisation (something that was never overtly legal in Britain as such, though it had been done on various medical grounds), but their efforts were defeated. And as the ghastly record of the Nazi eugenicist policies started to be uncovered, eugenics as a principle and forced sterilisation as a policy became wholly discredited. There would be occasional legal and parliamentary wrangles about individual mentally-disabled girls whose parents or carers felt that the risk of their being sexually exploited and impregnated, an event they might not understand and which would leave them with a child they couldn't possibly be competent to rear, was so great that they needed to be sterilised for their own good. But the notion of it being done 'for the good of society' just didn't arise.

I was thinking of old dons who believed in that waffle for a character.

I advise you to un-think it. Trust me, I was at a British university in the mid-1970s reading archaeology and history, and as far as the entire academic community was concerned eugenics was in the dustbin of history along with witch-finding and phrenology. (We really had no idea that the USA was still practising it. I did learn that in America the state required an official blood test in order to be legally married, and this struck me as inexplicable and barbarous.) More so, in fact, since it was so strongly linked with Nazism. An Oxbridge don who could still believe in and voice it by that date would have to have been settled in his university career well before WWII, and have been in an intellectual coma ever since. Certainly his field of study would have to be wholly unrelated - Greek Comedy, perhaps, or mycology.

[philo7]

My thoughts entirely, syntinen_laulu, which is why I posted below at the same time as you!

The OP is British from their profile, though, which is why I was even more surprised and asked for clarification/info...

[sian_shoe]

Have clarified above and below, if you haven't seen already.

*ETA holy shit my profile is old as balls, why does it say I went to Birkbeck? Odd.

[sian_shoe]

I'm English and have lived in Sweden for five years now, and do this thing where I tend to muddy which country does what now, mainly because to me neither is now the foreign: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Sweden (and TBH mainly because my brain is apparently a sieve.)

If I am completely honest, the eugenics comment is completely throwaway and more to illustrate the point of "it was a bit shit in the 70s if you weren't white or a bloke, despite the counter culture and/or disco" more than anything else. I'm not going to use it for a major plot development.

Another honest aside: the world I am setting this in is low fantasy similar to the Harry Potter/ Dark Materials worlds, so it doesn't have to be 100% accurate for the True Oxbridge Experience, just ring enough bells for people to understand the cultural vacuum I am going for.