Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  So, were young women the casualties of permissiveness or its beneficiaries? It is certainly possible to argue that girls benefited less than boys from the softening of conventional standards of morality in the 1960s. But ultimately they gained a great deal. Sexually active young women in the 1950s had lived in constant fear of pregnancy. A whole clutch of novels and autobiographical accounts of the period have attested to this. The novelist Penelope Lively, reflecting on her student years in Oxford in the 1950s, described how the fear had inhibited contemporaries:

  in those pre-Pill days grim tales of clandestine abortion haunted us all. There was much scared and private counting of days and watching of the calendar. Each of us knew, or knew of some girl to whom it had actually happened: that awful realization, the nausea, the panic. This was no climate of sexual liberation – it is strange now to think that the sixties were only ten years off.82

  As the sixties progressed, student demands for more easily available contraceptive advice grew more vocal.83 Discussions about unwanted pregnancy became much more open. Pressure for reform of the law on abortion also mounted nationally.84 The Abortion Law Reform Association had existed since 1936. In a landmark case, two years later, gynaecologist Aleck Bourne had tested the then legal ruling that abortion could only be justified if the life of the mother was in danger by terminating the pregnancy of a highly distressed fourteen-year-old who had been gang-raped by a group of British soldiers. Bourne was tried and acquitted, thereby establishing a precedent for abortion in cases where a woman’s physical and mental health was considered to be at risk. Reliable statistics on abortion in this period are difficult to come by. However, in most post-1945 discussions of the subject there was agreement that whereas middle-class women might find access to ‘legal’ and hygienic abortion, albeit at a price, working-class women had to rely on self-help, or ‘backstreet’ practitioners. The toll of suicides, botched abortions and septicaemia was alarming. Home Office statistics suggested that annually, thirty to fifty women were dying as a result.85 In 1967 the Liberal MP David Steele introduced a private member’s bill which succeeded in getting abortion law reform through parliament: several previous attempts had failed. The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal, under certain conditions and with the signatures of two doctors, up to twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy.

  By the end of the sixties, then, young women had more control over their own fertility than ever before in history. The pill was widely adopted as the preferred contraceptive choice for young, unmarried women as well as wives. Abortion was no longer inextricably associated with illicit transactions involving fistfuls of pound notes and seedy rooms in backstreets. These choices were by no means universally available, of course: much depended on social class, education, and where one lived. But the number of women benefiting from such changes has led historians such as Hera Cook to conclude that we should think in terms of a sexual revolution.86 From the end of the 1960s, sexuality became increasingly separated from reproduction. Girls could experiment, sexually, without the constant fear of pregnancy. This undermined fatalism, and gave much more scope for personal development and career planning. In the universities before the end of the sixties, female students had tended to be looked upon as a class apart. They were seen as needing special supervision and disciplinary arrangements lest they get pregnant and cause trouble for the authorities as well as themselves.87 These fears began to recede from the early 1970s on.

  If young women were coming to enjoy a greater sense of independence and control over their lives, this was in part also a result of more general trends. There was a great deal of discussion in the 1960s about the age at which young people could be considered adults. Teenagers were maturing physically at earlier ages: girls were reported as reaching puberty on average at thirteen and boys at fifteen years of age. They were better-educated and better-off than teenagers in previous generations. They were increasingly independent and inclined to get stroppy when treated as children. And yet the law of the land, in England (though not in Scotland), defined young people under the age of twenty-one very precisely as ‘infants’.88

  This law was causing trouble in a number of areas. The trend to early marriages was exacerbating the situation. With the consent of their parents, young people could marry once they had reached sixteen years of age. Without parental consent, they had to wait until they had reached twenty-one. As ‘infants’, young men who married before the age of twenty-one could not enter into contracts. This meant that they might be husbands and fathers, but could not enter into hire-purchase agreements or take out mortgages.

  More women than men were marrying before they reached the age of majority. All too frequently this was leading to conflict with parents, who either thought their daughter too young to know her own mind, or who themselves disapproved of her choice of partner. In such cases, parents were increasingly referring the situation to the courts. The aim was to make an unbiddable daughter a ward of court in order to prevent her from marrying or from running away to Gretna Green, just over the border into Scotland, which had long been the resort of runaway lovers.89 Scottish law had traditionally allowed boys to marry at fourteen, girls at twelve years of age. Since 1929, both parties had to be at least sixteen, but could still marry without their parents’ consent. Elopements from England (and from Europe) were given regular coverage in the press. Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, applications for wardship had risen to such a level that the courts claimed to be overwhelmed by the demand. Lawyers complained that the system was unenforceable and unworkable. The High Court judge Sir Jocelyn Simon contended that

  A not untypical situation is where the parents come to the court saying that their daughter is out of control and associating with some thoroughly undesirable man; at the suit of the parents the court makes an order forbidding the association: the next thing that happens is that the parents appear before the court saying that their daughter is now pregnant and joining in a prayer that their prospective son-in-law should not be sent to prison.90

  Another area of social life where there were problems relating to the existing law on adulthood was higher education. The universities had long accepted something of the responsibility of standing in loco parentis in relation to undergraduates. In practice, university authorities’ sense of moral guardianship and protection was extended more fully to girls than to male undergraduates. Women students were often obliged to live in halls, hostels or ‘approved’ lodgings. They were subject to rigorous ‘gate-hours’ and markedly more supervision than their male peers.91 Disciplinary arrangements could be strict, and female students regularly grumbled that they were treated like schoolgirls. Widespread student dissatisfaction among both sexes in the 1960s often led to outright revolt against what was experienced as ‘paternalism’. Students insisted that they should be treated as adults. The demand was by no means new in itself, although the extent of student protest in the 1960s was distinctive.

  The setting up of a committee to consider and to report to Parliament on the ‘age of majority’ was instigated by the Lord High Chancellor, Gerald Gardiner, in 1965. As a student at Oxford after the First World War, Lord Gardiner had learned something about students coming into conflict with university authorities. In the 1920s he had been disciplined for supporting a student of Somerville, Dilys Powell. The future film critic had been in trouble for climbing into college after hours.92 There had been even more trouble when Gardiner chivalrously helped her to publish a cogent indictment of the infantilising rules and restrictions in the women’s colleges of the day. Gardiner had left Oxford with an undistinguished (fourth-class) degree in jurisprudence. He was to prove himself an outstandingly effective champion of liberal causes.

  Under the chair of Mr Justice Latey, the Parliamentary Committee on the Age of Majority set out to consider whether the law needed changing. It consulted widely, and concluded that it did. To begin with there was little clarity or consistency. A whole hotchpotch of different laws, customs and regulations had grown up, s
ome of them over centuries, about when the young should be considered grown up. There were glaring inconsistencies, for instance, in when one might vote, marry, die for one’s country, or buy tobacco or liquor. That twenty-one had established itself, in the main, as the age at which young people were considered adults the committee regarded as historical accident. Before the Norman Conquest, the young were deemed adult at fifteen. By the time of Magna Carta, however, young men weren’t thought ready for knightly service until the age of twenty-one. This was allegedly because armour was extremely heavy and it took strength to lift a lance or sword while wearing it.93 The committee maintained that modern conditions demanded different rules. Its report, penned by Katharine Whitehorn, adopted a distinctively jaunty, iconoclastic tone. Young people were growing up faster and demanding respect. Their elders didn’t always know better. Above all, the trend to early marriage looked set in and unlikely to change. The majority of the committee thought that young people should be allowed to make their own decisions about marriage at eighteen.

  This did not mean that the members of the committee thought youthful marriage a good thing. They were ruefully aware that early marriages often ended in divorce. However they were influenced by the judiciary, by social organisations and even by the agony aunts presiding over the problem pages of popular newspapers.94 The general view was that the existing situation, requiring parental consent and so often leading to conflict and wardship preceedings, was unworkable. The committee concluded:

  We, like many of our witnesses, think that young marriages are especially vulnerable, and not to be encouraged, but the fact that they are on the increase shows that the requirement of consent does no more than play Canute to the rising tide of young marriage.95

  The Latey Committee recommended that the overall age of majority, covering full legal capacity, contracts and marriage should be reduced from twenty-one to eighteen. This recommendation was effected by the Family Law Reform Act in 1969. The most immediate impact was felt by the greetings card industry. The traditional twenty-first birthday card, with its silver-paper-covered ‘key to the door’, was no more. Eighteen never had quite the same ring to it.

  Not everyone was happy about the change. Wealthy parents worried that their eighteen-year-old sons and daughters would come into their inheritances too soon for their own good and might become vulnerable to sexual opportunists and gold-diggers.96 But there had always been the possibility of carefully drawn up trust funds to guard against this.

  The 1969 Act had a strong impact on higher education. Students were now adults and could not be expected to submit to ‘moral tutelage’ and the kinds of surveillance over their private lives which had caused so much trouble in the past. Since these systems of moral surveillance had fallen so much more heavily on girls, they were particular beneficiaries. Stories of having to move beds into corridors when visited by male guests, of having to climb into hostels after hours, or of hiding men in cupboards while the domestic bursar (housekeeper) snooped around, receded into legend. Moral tutors who had veered towards nervous breakdown trying to police gate-hours and dress codes must have felt a profound sense of relief.

  Young women, then, gained a great deal of autonomy as a result of the social changes of the 1960s. Personal stories attest to a new expansiveness and a widening of horizons. It became less exceptional to travel alone, in America or Europe, as a kind of ‘gap year’ or simply to get away from home. There is a certain irony in the fact that just as the Latey Committee was arguing that society had to adjust to the tide of teenage marriage, this tide began to turn. As opportunities opened up and sexual behaviour changed, the idea of falling in love with, and committing for life to, a first sexual partner became seen as questionable. Was it prudent to be so carried away by romance? Girls’ magazines began to discuss the pros and cons of ‘trial marriage’, or just living together with boyfriends for a time to see how things worked out. In Honey, the young singer and career woman Cilla Black mused on the ways in which the 1960s had altered her outlook on life:

  When I was at school I thought that if I was not married by the time I was eighteen I’d kill myself.

  Now I think I’d be mad to marry before I’m thirty-five. Money changes a girl’s attitude to romance, I can tell you.97

  Looking back on the 1960s, the writer and feminist Sara Maitland judged that most of all, they had been ‘transforming times, the beginning of the transforming time for almost all women in Britain’.98 Linda Grant, a pupil at an academic girls’ school in Liverpool in the 1960s, recalled that during that decade she had led something of a double life: ‘During the day I scrambled to keep up with my notes on the English Civil War. At night, in my PVC mac and mod mini-dress I sneaked down to a pub where I hung out with people who drank pints and said they were poets.’99 Much of this was concealed from her parents. The confidence which sustained her through all this was a sign of the times. In retrospect, Linda concluded that although she had experienced the sixties as ‘a series of shocks’, ‘It was apparent that the entire country was behind me in rejecting my parents’ values. It was a superb vote of confidence in a teenage girl.’100

  6 | TAKING LIBERTIES: PANIC OVER PERMISSIVENESS AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION

  Almost inevitably, some people feared that the challenges to traditional authority and the rise of more tolerant, ‘permissive’ attitudes to sexual behaviour in the 1960s had gone too far. Liberty, they proclaimed, was in danger of becoming licence. Young people were in danger of losing their moral compasses. It was suggested that young women, particularly, might need less freedom and more protection, if they were not to come to grief. Those who deplored what they saw as the increasing addiction of the young to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll could point to well-publicised stories of excess and misbehaviour. These stories carried a particular charge when girls were involved.

  Marianne Faithfull’s career in the media first took off when she established herself as a singer of lilting folk-songs at the age of seventeen. Convent-educated, she had grown up in Reading, with colourful forebears. Her mother claimed aristocratic roots as a baroness of Viennese origin, whose great-uncle had been Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of the erotic novel Venus in Furs, and progenitor of the word masochism. Marianne Faithfull’s looks were as alluring as her ancestry: a blonde with bee-stung lips, she suggested a cross between an angel and a milkmaid. The Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, seeing her for the first time, famously reported that he had seen ‘an angel with big tits’. As she was still a teenager, the tremulous tones of Marianne Faithfull’s first hit, ‘As Tears Go By’, had their counterpart in a winsome diffidence: in press interviews she confessed to worry over her A levels and uncertain ambitions about whether to apply to university.1 But after the birth of a son and the collapse of her marriage to John Dunbar, Marianne’s halo of innocence became somewhat tarnished. Her relationship with Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones brought notoriety, punctuated by a series of incidents involving drugs and nervous exhaustion. By 1970 the Daily Mirror commented that her love life was ‘almost as public as the weather forecast’.2 After a drugs raid on Keith Richards’s house in West Wittering, Sussex, in 1967, the press had a field day. Police officers were said to have been treated to the sight of Marianne, a modern apotheosis of Venus in Furs, naked and nonchalant under a fur bedspread. Represented as having been coolly unperturbed, she later described the experience as having been difficult and very damaging.3

  6.1 A young Marianne Faithfull looking innocent, 1967 (© Stanley Sherman/Getty Images).

  Speculation about the details of Faithfull’s love life was wild. A story about (unspecified) sexual practices involving a Mars bar circulated widely. This was too risky for most journalists to write about. Consistently denied by those implicated, the rumour nonetheless achieved the status of an urban myth and has proved ineradicable. The press developed a complex relationship with Marianne, who tended to give mixed messages in interviews. ‘I really do want to be good,’ she told Don Sho
rt of the Daily Mirror early in 1969, lamenting that she felt helpless in the grip of events which had entangled her. In the previous year she had continued to take drugs, conceived a child with Jagger, horrified critics of permissiveness by refusing to consider marriage in spite of this pregnancy, and gone on to miscarry a baby daughter. ‘I am still happily sinning away with Mick,’ she was quoted as having reported.4

  Marianne Faithfull’s role as a leather-clad sex symbol in Jack Cardiff’s 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle (alternatively titled Naked under Leather) didn’t appeal to everyone. When she was not speeding along country lanes (minus a crash helmet) the film featured Marianne and her lover (played by Alain Delon) in a series of psychedelically rendered erotic clinches, or as reviewer Dick Richards in the Daily Mirror put it, writhing around ‘like octopuses in an acute state of coloured DTs’.5

  Richards was impressed by Faithfull’s performance as a lusty young girl who ‘clamours for attention as an amoral sexually greedy wanton young hussy’. But it was too easy to assume that the role was in character, and Marianne’s boast that she had slept with three of the members of the Rolling Stones before deciding that the group’s lead singer was her best bet didn’t exactly help her reputation.6 In retrospect, she saw herself as having been a victim of double standards which glamorised sexual adventure and experimentation with drugs in young men, while condemning women who behaved similarly as sluts and bad mothers.7 There was undoubtedly some truth in this. Faithfull’s open interest in sex, and her willingness to condone sexual relationships and pregnancy outside marriage, would attract little attention today, but appeared scandalous in the 1960s. At that time, as the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt Marjorie Proops pointed out, there was widespread belief that a refusal to marry suited men more than women.8 Confident young men might see marriage as a prison, but for young women it often represented a much-needed security. Moreover, given that there was still something of a stigma attached to illegitimacy, was a refusal to marry fair to the children? After her break-up with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull’s drug addiction got out of hand, she lost custody of her son and was reduced to living on the streets of Soho. For some, she was a walking lesson in the dangers of permissiveness. ‘I’m Miss Anti-Family Values,’ she confessed some years later.9