Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  But one group of men was singled out for particular opprobrium. Immigrants – particularly of Maltese and Sicilian origin – were seen as particularly responsible for the burgeoning of vice in post-war London. The popular press whipped up a great deal of scandal about the Messina brothers, a focus of police attention since the 1930s, who were finally forced out of Britain in the 1950s.49 But it is difficult to know how representative the Messina enterprises were. Most of the women in the Messina network seem also to have been immigrants, often with Maltese or Italian connections, a fact which undermines any stereotypes claiming that the Messinas preyed on English girls who had run away from home.50

  In 1958 the film Passport to Shame claimed to expose the evil of girls trapped into prostitution by pimps with Italian-sounding names. The film began with a spoken introduction by Robert Fabian warning of ‘the terrible methods used to trap innocent girls into prostitution’.51 The film trotted out all the clichés of 1900s white slavery: drugged cigarettes, blondes writhing on beds, a girl caged in by a grille of iron bars. A young Diana Dors added filmic interest, trussed up in a basque and suspenders. In the 1950s, lurid stories of London vice and criminality filled the pages of the People and the News of the World.52 Any evidence of white girls consorting with immigrant or ‘coloured’ men continued to provoke horror, and often predictably stereotyped reactions, in the press.

  The real situation could be very different. Just before the end of the Second World War, for instance, social investigator Phyllis Young investigated conditions in the Stepney area. She found that local cafés served as rendezvous for meetings between coloured male immigrants, often seamen, and white girls.53 Reversing common stereotypes of girls as victims, Phyllis Young described how these girls were often opportunistic, bent on seeking a livelihood. She suggested that they found ‘the coloured man an easy prey’. Other girls were genuinely attracted to foreigners, finding them more passionate, or charming, than the ‘average Englishman’. Mixed marriages were becoming more common.54 Edith Ramsay, who battled for many years as a community worker in the East End, noted that runaway girls often met with a warm welcome in the ‘counter-society’ of the café world. In her opinion, forced prostitution was rare. But the high wages obtainable in the sex trade were to her a worrying incentive.55 After the war, Inspector Fabian’s confident assertion that London was the vice capital of the world, full of foreign pimps on the prowl for innocent girls, unsettled parents further.56

  Nevertheless, most girls lived lives very distant from all this. The delinquent adolescent female, the reform-school girl who loomed so large in the popular imagination after the war, was something of a rarity. Between five and eight times as many boys as girls came before the courts, charged with indictable offences in the 1950s.57 Around six times as many boys as girls were admitted to approved schools between 1952 and 1957.58 There were fewer approved schools for girls than for boys in Britain (39 for girls, 88 for boys) because they simply were not needed. In 1958, for instance, only 766 girls in the whole of England were sent to approved schools.59

  One journalist who was well aware of the extent to which moral panic had distorted the picture of youthful femininity was Picture Post’s reporter Hilde Marchant. In January 1951, Picture Post published a feature written by Marchant and entitled ‘Millions Like Her’ which described the life of Betty Burden, a young working-class girl in Birmingham.60 Betty’s life was described as typical of Britain’s young girls. She was introduced as ‘The real thing – not the imagined creature the sociologists theorise about, novelists write about, and moralists deplore.’ Betty lived with her family in what could only be described as a slum: back-to-back housing in an area scarred by industrial waste and bomb damage. But behind the squalid interior the inside of the house was gleaming. Her family was close-knit and caring. Betty worked as a children’s hairdresser in a Birmingham department store. She had a boyfriend and enjoyed dancing. She didn’t smoke, rarely drank alcohol, and dressed modestly and neatly. A great deal of her time was devoted to helping her mother with housework, Sunday dinner and the weekly family wash. The feature was illustrated with a series of photographs by Bert Hardy celebrating Betty’s love of her family, her modest aspirations and her unimpeachable respectability. Both text and captions make it clear that Betty and young girls like her were the hope of post-war Britain.

  4.2 Betty Burden, a young hairdresser in Birmingham in 1951, helping her mother with the weekly wash. Picture Post journalist Hilde Marchant wanted to reassure readers that girls were family-minded and sensible, unlikely to be swept off their feet by teenage culture (photograph © Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images).

  The research organisation Mass Observation carried out a survey of ‘teen-age girls’ in London in 1949 which painted a similar picture.61 Two hundred girls were interviewed. Most were reported as fairly happy and satisfied with their lives. Their leisure activities focused around cinema, dancing and going shopping. Most got on well with their families and felt no great urge to leave home. Friends were important, and going out with boyfriends was particularly so after the age of around fifteen. The majority of the girls looked forward to getting married and having children. The writer of the report judged that this was less to do with romance than with the desire for independence and a home of their own. Other surveys drawing on larger samples came to similar conclusions. Leslie Wilkins’s study of some 450 adolescent girls in 1955 showed that most girls wanted to be married by the time they reached their mid-twenties.62 Thelma Veness’s study of another six hundred girls, a few years later, showed that 90 per cent expected to marry and saw home making as their vocation, although over half of these expected to combine work with marriage at some point.63 A home of one’s own was a particularly important component of many girls’ dreams for a better future. Getting married was seen as the first step to securing a home. Somewhat disconcertingly, researchers found that many girls’ expectations of husbands petered out once the latter had provided them with a home and children.64 When asked to imagine their lives as adult women, large numbers of girls fantasised about their husbands dropping dead in middle age, leaving them with a new freedom.

  4.3 Young women working on an assembly line in a clothing factory in Leicester, 1948. Many girls were keen to leave school as soon as possible and looked forward to early marriage (photograph © Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).

  Most girls’ lives were shaped by the fact that their schooling ended in very early adolescence: at fourteen, most commonly, in the war years. The school leaving age was not raised to fifteen until 1947. Secondly there was the trend to early marriage. This had been evident before the Second World War, but became more marked afterwards. In 1921 only about 15 per cent of brides had been under twenty-one years of age. By 1965 this proportion had risen to 40 per cent.65 Early marriage was more common among working-class girls. Formal education was often experienced as a somewhat unreal interlude in their lives, and they might be impatient to leave school and start earning. The older elementary schools were often bleak and unattractive places, and it was not always easy to see the point of lessons. But some middle-class girls could be equally keen to leave school as soon as possible. They often resented having to wear uniform and being treated as children. Early school leaving and marriage at a young age meant that jobs could be seen as short-term, stop-gap experiences. The mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw, writing about girls’ education in post-1945 Britain, commented that it was increasingly the fashion ‘for a girl to step from the school choir to the church altar, and to discard her prefect’s badge for a wedding ring’.66

  The slaughter of young men during the First World War had made it impossible in the years that followed for many young women to find husbands. This encouraged some to take education – and career opportunities – seriously. Things looked different after 1945. Following the Second World War, young women’s chances of marrying were excellent. Women teachers feared that the rush to marry young would undermine their pupils’ comm
itment to scholastic achievement. Parents entering daughters as pupils in some of the more academic girls’ secondary schools were sometimes required to sign a pledge to keep their daughter at school at least until her sixteenth birthday. These signed commitments cannot have been legally binding, but headmistresses nevertheless hoped to exert moral pressure.

  The girls’ schools of the 1950s became battlegrounds. There had probably always been a tendency for women teachers to see girls’ interest in boys as a distraction from intellectual pursuits. In the 1950s this led to regular conflict over uniform regulations, for instance, or girls’ interest in cosmetics.67 Issues around institutional regulations and personal autonomy became particularly vexed in a context where there was so much ambiguity around being grown up. Girls who were legally able to marry at sixteen (albeit only if their parents consented) didn’t always warm to the idea of regulation underwear. What business was it of teachers to insist on the colour of bras and pants? Skirmishes over nail varnish and skirt length became endemic.

  4.4 Schoolgirls in a domestic science class show off their cake-making skills(early 1960s) (© Fred Morley/Hulton/Getty Images).

  The desire of some women teachers to keep girls in a state of sexual hibernation (or denial) for as long as possible was undermined by pervasive cultural trends. Nabokov’s Lolita was published (in Paris) in 1955, although the book was banned in the USA and the UK until 1958.68 In Lolita, the novel’s narrator, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with and then abducts a twelve-year-old girl. He threatens her with reform school if she tries to run away and leave him. Baby Doll, the controversial film with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams, was released in 1956. It starred Carroll Baker in the role of its lubricious, thumb-sucking heroine, married at seventeen but planning to hold on to her virginity until her twentieth birthday. The sexualisation of young girls in the 1950s was hardly new, but it provoked new tensions. Most literary representations of ‘the nymphet’ came from men.69 But women’s fashions also took a disconcertingly regressive turn. There were ‘baby doll’ nightdresses and pyjamas. And even Paris began to show a leaning towards little-girl dresses and coats. Grown women started to wear Alice bands with girlish bows perched on the top of their heads.70 In her essay Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome, written in 1959, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir expressed ambivalence. The child-woman might be a new force of nature, free from conventional feminine artifice, she judged. Her appeal was based on both challenging and reinforcing desire and confidence in men.71

  Among educationalists, the question of what – and how – girls should be taught yet again became increasingly vexed. Did they need more sex education, or less? More might offer protection, but equally, might put ideas into their heads. If the majority of girls left school at the earliest opportunity and got married as soon as they could after that, conservatives insisted, shouldn’t their education show more emphasis on courtship and married life? There was a growing tendency to divide girls into two categories: the ‘normal’ majority, who looked forward to lives centring on marriage and family life, and a deviant minority of intellectual girls who likely as not wore spectacles and would end up as spinsters. John Newsom (later Sir John) was County Education Officer for Hertfordshire when he published his controversial polemic The Education of Girls in 1948.72 He suggested that girls’ schools, run by bookish women teachers, had got their mission wrong. Girls needed fewer books and should be taught more cookery so that they could cosset their future husbands. Men cared very little for erudition in women, Newsom pontificated, but they did enjoy a good dinner. Experience had taught him, he added snidely, that those who disagreed with this view were ‘normally deficient in the quality of womanliness and the particular physical and mental attributes of their sex’.73 In other words, intellectual women could be justifiably dismissed as freaks and made poor role models.

  These ideas made an impact. Government reports on education such as the Crowther Report, Fifteen to Eighteen (1959), and Newsom’s own report on the education of children of average and less than average ability, Half Our Future (1963), made constant reference to the need to adjust girls’ education to the needs of young brides. The curriculum, Crowther urged, should reflect girls’ interest in dress, personal appearance, and human relationships.74 And they needed lessons in housewifery. The writers of the Newsom Report admitted that some girls found domestic science a waste of time because they already had their fill of housework at home. But these girls, it was ventured, had even more need of domestic training – so that they could learn to appreciate just how fulfilling home making could be.75 Views like this cut little ice in the more academic girls’ schools, where many teachers maintained an aloof detachment from domestic subjects.76 Needlework and cookery sometimes had a token presence in the curriculum, but it was tacitly understood that these were low-status subjects only to be taken seriously by the less academic girls.

  Germaine Greer’s celebrated feminist polemic The Female Eunuch was first published in 1970. It contained a memorable image of the schoolgirl: ‘Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform, making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching bag of civilisation.’77 The description is vivid because conflicting social expectations for women were indeed fought out in the classroom, and girls found themselves caught in the crossfire. Grammar-school girls might be seen by Newsom and his supporters as in danger of becoming defeminised, but in less academic institutions (or the lower streams of grammar schools) the concern was often the reverse. Here girls’ behaviour might be seen as troublesome because they were too interested in their appearance, boys and sex. Caroline Brown, whose book Lost Girls was an account of her experience of teaching difficult girls in a remand home in the 1950s, remembered that art lessons often came to grief because the girls would steal the materials. Depressed by institutional garb and desperate to look feminine, they would improvise with art materials as makeshift cosmetics. Paintbrushes were snipped into false eyelashes, and red paint was used as rouge or lipstick.78 Too feminine or not feminine enough? It was hard to get it right.

  Autobiographical and personal stories bear this out. Girls’ experience of schooling in the 1950s was strongly shaped by social class, but conflicts over femininity were nonetheless present at every level. Emma Tennant was the privileged daughter of a wealthy family (her father was the second Baron Glenconner) with estates in Scotland and the West Indies, grand houses and servants. She was a pupil at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, a school with an excellent reputation. She insisted on leaving at fifteen. Like many of her class, Emma expected to marry soon after ‘coming out’ and a season as a debutante. This was what happened. She married at nineteen and soon became a mother, but the marriage proved ephemeral and she was left rudderless. Emma came to regret her lack of learning and embarked on ambitious if not always successful schemes for self-education.79

  Tennant’s semi-autobiographical account of this period in her life is entitled Girlitude: her conception of girlhood alludes to servitude in the sense of feeling imprisoned and defined by others, in spite of her wealthy background. Journalist Jill Tweedie’s middle-class background, though comfortable, was less elevated than Emma Tennant’s. Jill was educated in south London at Croydon High School for Girls. A clever girl, she stayed at school long enough to pass her School Certificate at sixteen, but at that point her parents suggested that she should go on to a finishing school in Switzerland. The idea was for her to acquire feminine graces. Jill’s teachers shook their heads disapprovingly and suggested she consider university instead. Her domineering father – with whom she had a charged and difficult relationship – poured scorn on this idea. There was no more talk of university.80 Off she went to an expensive establishment in Switzerland where the girls were ‘polished’, talked to each other about sex, and learned the art of repassage (ironing).81

  Lynn Barber, another journalist, has written an account of her girlhood and education at Lady Eleanor Holles School in London
in the 1950s.82 Barber’s background was different from Tweedie’s and Tennant’s in that her parents had raised themselves into the professional middle class through a fervent belief in education and social betterment. Lynn was born, bred and trained to achieve, and confidently expected to go to university. However, as a teenager she found herself sucked into a relationship with an older man who subsequently proposed to her. Initially attracted by his worldliness and sophistication, she was unsure about the situation and confidently expected her parents to object. She was shell-shocked when they didn’t.83 Not only did they approve of the idea of their daughter’s engagement but they immediately backtracked on their ideas of Lynn going to Oxford, suggesting that marriage was much more important for her future. The bubble of illusion popped when Lynn’s fiancé turned out to be a crook and a conman who was all set to embark on bigamy – he already had a wife and children. With some effort, Lynn was steered back on course for A levels and university. What is interesting about this story is that it shows the fragility of expectations around education and career success for daughters in even a bookish and professional middle-class family in the 1950s.

  Most girls learned that their education mattered less than that of their brothers. It was the old story: daughters were expected to marry and men didn’t like women to be too clever. Even in the more academic schools of the 1950s, girls were often steered into sitting for two rather than three A levels, since that would get them into teacher training college if not university. After all, teaching was probably what they’d end up doing if they didn’t get husbands. Better still, in the eyes of many parents, was secretarial college. Even girl graduates often followed up their degrees with a stint in a secretarial college. Hopefully they might marry the boss. There wasn’t much else. Hardly surprisingly, many intelligent girls in the 1950s experienced femininity as a form of belittlement. Jill Tweedie (a tall girl) remembered that