Style-reading wasn’t straightforward, though. Well into the early 1960s, candyfloss hairdos could signify a taste for old-fashioned adult glamour, as well as rebellion. Female musicians such as Dusty Springfield or the American girl group the Ronettes exemplified this. But the newer fashions for whitish lips, black-rimmed eyes and a boyish body in jeans or miniskirt tended to put conservatives on their guard.
The social observer Peter Laurie, writing about youth in the 1960s, insisted that ‘The real dynamo behind the teenage revolution is the anonymous adolescent girl from twelve to sixteen, nameless but irresistible.’48 Laurie’s book on The Teenage Revolution, published in 1965, carried a frontispiece photo of a fifteen-year-old girl with pale lips and a fashionable ‘urchin-cut’ hairstyle. The author wasn’t sure what to make of her, but she certainly made him feel uneasy:
Look at this face.…
These Mod lips are almost painted out. Her body is straight and resistant as a plank. Her eyes, hedged by spiky lines, are watchful, alert, not to be taken in. Whatever she is going to be, she is not going to be a woman in the traditional sense. At least, not for the moment …
To me she seems the face of the teenage revolution.49
Laurie compared this girl’s appearance with the way most women had looked in the 1940s. Back then, he reminisced, girls looked like ripe fruit ready for the plucking – unlike this stroppy teenager who looked as if she didn’t give a toss. We are told that the girl was photographed on her way to a pop concert in Slough. Laurie pelts her with insinuations. She is accused of being disdainful, of taking the welfare state for granted, of looking uncompromising, even menacing. She didn’t look like a potential mother (‘you cannot imagine her pushing a pram; she makes sure you cannot’). Worst of all, he didn’t fancy her at all:
5.5 Police struggle to contain young girls outside Buckingham Palace, as the Beatles are honoured with MBE awards in 1965 (© Central Press/Stringer/Getty Images).
She despises a lot of things … It is difficult to imagine finding her sexually attractive. In fact, she makes sure that she is not.50
What crimes! There can be little doubt that Laurie would have approved of his nameless girl being subjected to the Beatnik Beauty treatment that had turned Stephanie Beaumont into a Stepford Wife. But his casual assumption of male objectivity together with his personal sexual judgements, in what sets out to be a serious sociological text, make troubling reading today. They remind us of the ease with which young girls could be represented as folk devils. We know nothing at all about this fifteen-year-old girl except that Laurie didn’t take to her, and that his interpretation of her appearance triggered all his nervous anxieties about contemporary social change.
In the early 1960s, pop concerts joined jazz, jukeboxes and rock ’n’ roll on the list of things widely seen as responsible for leading girls off the rails. Swooning over crooners proved just the beginning. Falling in love with Paul Anka, Tommy Steele or Elvis was a common enough state among girls at the end of the 1950s. But ‘Beatlemania’ was something on a different scale. The Beatles’ path to fame began with club performances in Liverpool and Hamburg from 1960. Their first recorded single, ‘Love Me Do’, was released in 1962, the album Please Please Me in the following year. From then on there was no stopping the Fab Four, either in terms of their commercial success or their success in winning the hearts of the majority of teenage girls in the UK and indeed in many other parts of the world.
Much of the adulation was harmless enough, and of the schoolgirl-crush variety. When the Beatles flew back to Britain from New York in February, 1964, for instance, girls from London’s East Ham were ready with a welcome banner crafted from massed daffodils, and a home-made cake, iced in their image.51 It was the sheer size of the welcome committee that turned the event into something troublesome. Some five or six thousand girls descended on the airport. Some were allegedly only twelve or thirteen years of age, and had hitch-hiked from home without telling their parents. In addition to managing the crowds, the police found themselves searching for lost daughters alongside distraught parents, in what soon began to look like a massive refugee camp. Scenes like this were to become common, both at airports and anywhere where tickets for the group’s performances went on sale. In 1965, when the Beatles went to Buckingham Palace to collect their MBE awards from the Queen, fans took their lives in their hands by scaling the spiked gates. The police had difficulty holding the swarming girls back. Photographs of the skirmishes show the police dishevelled, helmets on the skew, while the girls flail around like maenads.52
Henry Price, Tory MP for West Lewisham, owned himself worried about the ‘hypnotic’ effect of the Beatles on the young. They were behaving, he thought, like the hot-gospellers of a new religion. Fans looked like addicts: ‘Their eyes become glazed, their mouths gape, their hands wobble loosely and their legs wobble just as loosely at the knees.’53 This, Price concluded solemnly, is known as ‘being sent’. One could only hope that they would grow out of it. Some critics were much more harsh. Paul Johnson, warning of ‘The Menace of Beatlism’ in the left-of-centre New Statesman, retailed the clichés of class prejudice and a disturbing misogyny. Girl fans revealed a ‘bottomless chasm of vacuity’, he wrote, their faces
Bloated with cheap confectionery and smeared with chain-store make-up, the open, sagging mouths and glazed eyes, the hands mindlessly drumming in time to the music, the broken stiletto heels, the shoddy, stereotyped, ‘with-it’ clothes.54
Psychologists pondered the appeal of the four lads. Dr Frederick Cameron suggested that their appeal could be explained by their boyishness. They didn’t come over as adult males. They weren’t threatening in any way, and they appealed to their fans like ‘cuddlesome pets’: safe, and somewhat ambiguous sexually.55
Schoolgirl passions were evident in Bill Adler’s volume Love Letters to the Beatles, published in 1964. This was full of ‘I’ll never love anyone else’ stuff. ‘Daer Paul’ [sic] wrote Amy Roberts, for instance, ‘I have fainted for you six times.’56 Others begged their idols for relics, hair clippings, or even a bristle from a toothbrush. One girl growing up in the 1960s recalled the rituals of worship:
Girls would sit in class and write ‘Paul, Paul, Paul’ a thousand times in an exercise book, and every article of their clothing or their school satchels would have ‘I love John’ or ‘I love Ringo’ across it.57
In Wrexham, north Wales in 1963, girls smuggled bottles of port and rum into school at lunchtime in order to celebrate John Lennon’s birthday. ‘Fifteen Tiddly Schoolgirls on the Mat’, announced the Daily Mirror gleefully.58 Even in sedate Cheltenham, home to the famous Ladies’ College, girls were acting crazily at Beatles concerts, bombarding the stage with little notes beseeching the boys to telephone them and claim them as their sweethearts.59
There are cultural historians who have emphasised female passivity as the basis of ‘fandom’, pointing out that many girls enjoyed pop music in the company of one or two best friends, probably in their own bedrooms. Inexpensive portable record players made this possible: in the early 1960s a Dansette record player was a hugely popular birthday or Christmas present for a teenage girl. But Beatlemania was of course not just a passive condition; despite Dr Cameron’s assertions it was also an expression of desire. The American feminist and social scientist Barbara Ehrenreich has argued convincingly that Beatlemania constituted ‘a huge outbreak of teenage female libido’ which might legitimately be regarded as an opening salvo in the sexual revolution.60 Just as many observers in the 1920s had looked on female outpourings of grief over the death of film star Rudolph Valentino with total incomprehension, adulation for the Beatles confounded those adults who failed to understand their long-haired, androgynous appeal. Girls found the Beatles sexy. And teenage girls’ open expressions of desire were a challenge in a society keen to protect sexual innocence in the young. At the same time, as Ehrenreich and her co-authors emphasised, such overt abandonment constituted rebellion against the rules that defined female s
exuality as something ‘to be bartered for an engagement ring’.61
Helen Gurley Brown’s international bestseller Sex and the Single Girl, first published in the USA in 1962, has also been seized on by many social commentators as a harbinger of the sexual revolution.62 The book sold two million copies within three weeks. It has always attracted a mixed response from feminists. Some have recoiled from the ways in which its author encouraged women to market themselves to men, and to use sex as a vehicle for social advancement. Others have recognised the radicalism, in the early 1960s, of urging women to discard guilt about ‘premarital sex’ and openly challenge the double standard. Helen Gurley Brown exhorted women not to fade into ‘mouseburgers’. Up until the 1960s, books on office etiquette had advised women to look demure and to behave meekly, turning themselves into willing subordinates who silently anticipated their bosses’ every need. Sex and the Single Girl would have none of this. Instead, Gurley Brown saw women as taking a much more assertive role in office politics and acquiring confidence in their own sexuality. The book has often drawn comparison with the popular American television series of the 1990s Sex and the City. Helen Gurley Brown made being young, single and working in the city sound like fun.63 But this vision was far more radical in the 1960s than it was in the 1990s; the pressures on girls to marry young were so much greater in the earlier period. It wasn’t uncommon for girls to despair, thinking themselves ‘on the shelf’ if they reached the age of twenty-five before mating, they hoped, for life. Gurley Brown pooh-poohed this as nonsense, insisting that there was no rush to find Mr Right. Girls should take their time to look around and to try men out so as to be sure of getting the right partner.
That this was a message that appealed to many was evident from the book’s success and also from the success of the magazine Cosmopolitan, which Brown went on to revamp and edit from 1965. Cosmopolitan targeted young women and prided itself on its sexual openness; a UK edition was launched in 1972 and the magazine went from strength to strength. ‘Cosmo girl’ became shorthand, internationally, for the young, independent city types who were seen to constitute a core readership.64
How independent were these girls? There were indeed signs of a new independence among young women in the 1960s. They were the first generation to grow up taking secondary education for granted. Jobs were available, and they were (independently) relatively affluent and well-fed. Teenage spending patterns were the subject of a great deal of contemporary comment by social observers (notably by the sociologist Mark Abrams)65 and also in the popular press. ‘Call them Spendagers!’, quipped the Daily Mirror in 1963, affecting astonishment at what a nineteen-year-old shorthand typist spent on looking ‘with it’.66 More girls were leaving home to live in bedsits. Journalist Katharine Whitehorn’s Cooking in a Bedsitter was first published in 1961. Five years earlier she had been photographed by Bert Hardy for an article in Picture Post on loneliness in the city.67 In one photograph she was shown pensive, sitting in front of a gas fire in what was obviously a cramped bedsitting-room. There was a milk bottle on the table and her smalls were drying on a clothes-horse beside her. Readers were clearly supposed to see her as lonely and miserable. By the 1960s, however, living away from home had acquired a certain glamour. There was fun in contrivance: making coffee in a jug, or what could be rustled up on a single gas ring. Working in the city, living in digs or lodgings, could spell freedom. Similarly, studying at university, living in a hall of residence or student hostel, opened up spaces for sexual experimentation away from the supervision of parents.
5.6 The young journalist Katharine Whitehorn photographed for Picture Post alone in a bedsit warming her toes by the gas fire (1956) (© Bert Hardy/Getty Images).
The image of the ‘dolly bird’ in ‘Swinging London’ became emblematic of Britain in the 1960s. Girls began to dress differently from their mothers, in Quant-inspired dolly-dresses, high boots and miniskirts. The writer and publisher Alexandra Pringle described the ‘Chelsea girl’ of the sixties as having ‘confidence, and it seemed, no parents’.68 New kinds of magazines appeared, catering for these younger women: Honey in 1960, followed by Petticoat and Flair.
5.7 Miniskirted dolly birds shopping in a boutique on London’s fashionable King’s Road, 1960s (© Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).
Sex and the Single Girl was widely read in Britain before the contraceptive pill became generally available. Girls still went in fear of unwanted pregnancies and the social shame that continued to be associated with single motherhood. Nevertheless, studies of teenage sexual behaviour pointed out that in spite of these fears, more young people were experimenting with pre-marital sex, whether ‘heavy petting’ or ‘going the whole way’. G. M. Carstairs, a professor of psychiatry and regular commentator on teenage sexual behaviour, estimated that 11 per cent of sixteen-year-old boys and 6 per cent of sixteen-year-old girls had some experience of pre-marital sex.69 Among eighteen-year-olds, the proportion rose to 30 per cent of boys and 16 per cent of girls. Carstairs took his figures from Michael Schofield’s study The Sexual Behaviour of Young People, carried out in the early 1960s. Such studies showed widespread acceptance of the idea of pre-marital sex among the young, even though a double standard persisted in that many still professed to believe that a girl should be a virgin as she went to the altar.70
Schofield emphasised the ‘tremendous prominence of marriage as an immediate goal in the lives of many teenage girls’.71 In the first half of the 1960s, the age of marriage was still falling, especially among working-class girls. This was a period of transition. The rise of ‘permissiveness’ – a newly tolerant and relaxed attitude to sexual mores – brought difficult adjustments. Girls might find themselves in a quandary about sexual behaviour, not sure how to square risk with reward, how to embrace experience without falling victim to double standards and the often unforgiving strictures of traditional morality.
The cultural emphasis on the sexuality of young girls which had been apparent in 1950s representations of Lolitas, Baby Dolls and nymphets showed little sign of abating. Interest in sex and the single girl easily extended to an interest in sex and the schoolgirl. This interest was sometimes literary, sometimes social-scientific, sometimes prurient. James Barlow’s novel Term of Trial (1961) focuses on the story of a down-at-heel schoolmaster, one of whose young female pupils falls in love with him. She tries to seduce him. When he refuses to sleep with her she is peeved and accuses him of having attempted to assault her sexually. His career goes down the tubes as a result. This tale of masculine vulnerability in the face of schoolgirl precocity was turned into a film, starring Laurence Olivier, Sarah Miles and Simone Signoret, in the following year.72
If anything, the 1960s accentuated the association of schoolgirls with soft porn. Cartoon artist Ronald Searle’s hugely popular portrayals of schoolgirls at St Trinian’s school dated from the 1940s.73 Searle’s original drawings featured daemonic, calculating little monsters and subversives. The various film versions inspired by his original vision (1954, 1957, 1960, 1966 and later 1980, 2007, 2009 and 2012) show increasingly sexualised images of the schoolgirls.74 During the 1960s their skirts get shorter and their gymslips tighter with noticeably bulging bodices. (In the later versions we get stocking tops and cleavage.) The film The Yellow Teddy Bears (1963), alternatively titled Gutter Girls, took this further with a tale of schoolgirl promiscuity in the fictitious Peterbridge Grammar School, where girls signified and celebrated the loss of their virginity by wearing yellow brooches in the shape of teddy bears.75 One of the girls, Linda, fears she is pregnant as a result of a fling with the school’s window cleaner, Kinky, a would-be pop singer. Much more amusing, but scandalous at the time, was The Passion Flower Hotel, a novel by ‘Rosalind Erskine’, first published in 1962.76 This featured girls discussing breasts, men’s preferences for tarty types, and Lolita over packet soup in the history library at a posh girls’ boarding school. As narrated by the resourceful Sarah Callender, the girls demonstrate their entrepreneursh
ip and interest in widening the curriculum by forming ‘The Syndicate’, a venture designed to foster sexual experimentation with pupils at a neighbouring boys’ school. Like the boys, the girls admit to a healthy degree of sexual curiosity. Some prove skilful at striptease and adept in the construction of louche stage personalities (‘Miss Gaby de la Gallantine’ and ‘Princess Puma’). In general, individuals of both sexes prove rather too self-conscious to get up to very much. The Passion Flower Hotel became an immediate best-seller. It was, of course, written by a man. ‘Rosalind Erskine’ was in fact Roger Erskine Longrigg, educated at Bryanston and Magdalen College, Oxford, a graduate in modern history and the son of a brigadier.77
Given the pervasiveness of 1960s representations of teenage sexuality, it is not surprising to find that girls were often unsure about how to relate to boyfriends. In their investigations, Schofield and his colleagues were concerned to find that unmarried girls were often reluctant to use contraceptives. They preferred to leave the responsibility to male partners. But they weren’t generally insistent on their boyfriends using contraceptives either. Why was this? It was partly because such calculation was felt to look brazen and hence ‘unfeminine’: girls liked to look ‘innocent’ and didn’t want to create the impression that they were experienced, or too ready for sexual experience, in case it gave the wrong signals.78 There was a great deal of shyness and reticence. Equally, many girls feared that if they approached family doctors for advice on birth control, they would be interrogated about their morals instead. This was indeed often the case, even well into the following decade. The writer Janice Galloway described in the second volume of her autobiography, All Made Up, how she and her fiancé approached a doctor for contraceptive advice in the late 1970s only to be treated to a lecture on the importance of abstinence. Janice became pregnant, and had to endure an abortion, not long afterwards.79 Doctors in university health centres often took a liberal line on contraception. Even so, there were many ‘casualties’. In 1969, Anthony Ryle, of Sussex University’s health service, argued that unplanned pregnancies were the source of a large proportion of student casualties, estimating that around 10 per cent of women students became pregnant during their three years as undergraduates.80 Studies of female students at the University of Aberdeen in the early 1970s showed that a disturbingly high proportion of female students with active sex lives took no precautions whatsoever against unwanted pregnancy.81
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