The tone of press reports on Marianne Faithfull’s personal trials was often generous: journalists saluted her courage in battling addiction, and male reporters continued to be disarmed by her looks, frailty and vulnerability. Young women’s perceived misdemeanours did not always elicit this degree of tolerance and sympathy. Contributors to The Times regularly fretted over whether the ‘free and easy’ attitudes to morality which they saw around them were encouraging licentiousness.10 Muriel Box’s film Too Young to Love, based on the American play Pick-up Girl and released in 1960, had been an early stimulus to the debate over parents’ responsibility for daughters.11 The film featured a fifteen-year-old girl who, left alone too much, lapsed into sex delinquency. Adverts capitalised on the film’s erotic charge, of course: ‘Love-hungry girls on the loose!’ proclaimed the lobby cards. Nevertheless, the message was taken seriously. Teenage girls needed a firm hand, argued psychologist Dr Elizabeth Radford in 1963; too much money and too much freedom and they would almost always go to the dogs.12 In 1966, another psychologist, Phyllis Hostler, reported ‘hair-raising stories of necking and petting parties in quite ordinary homes’. Boys were badgering girls into sex, she asserted, and parents needed to stand firm and keep an eye on things.13 In the early 1970s, Ivor Mills, a professor of medicine at the University of Cambridge, took up the same theme, asserting that his own research showed that more than 90 per cent of the teenage girls who had sexual intercourse had it in the parental home while their parents were not looking.14 Parents needed to watch out, he argued: they had become altogether too tolerant.
Of course, not all parents were in a position to watch their daughters’ every move. A growing number of girls were escaping parental surveillance by going away to university. After 1969, as recounted in Chapter 6, eighteen-year-olds became classed as adults, and university authorities were no longer deemed to be in loco parentis. But this didn’t put paid to anxieties and scandals over permissiveness: if anything, the new freedoms brought a new wave of fretting. Simon Regan, a muckraking journalist with the News of the World, set out to exploit this in 1968, in a series of articles designated as ‘shock surveys’ of what went on in universities. Hard-working taxpayers were supporting student protests, political disturbances and sit-ins, he asserted.15 Plus sexual promiscuity.16 The past five years had seen a sexual revolution in Britain’s universities, Regan continued. Sociologists had shown that ‘percentage-wise, there are fewer virgins in universities than in any other section of society’. Promiscuity was rampant on campus, he alleged, and so was drug taking.
The political unrest in higher education in the late 1960s met with little sympathy from those who considered students to be long-haired layabouts with dubious morals. In 1971, a nineteen-year-old female student was expelled from Margaret Macmillan College of Education in Bradford after admitting that her boyfriend had been living with her, in her college room, for some weeks. ‘A Girl with a Man in Her Cupboard’ ran the headline.17 The case went to appeal, where Lord Denning ruled in favour of the authorities, finding that the student had flagrantly broken the college rules. The case generated a great deal of controversy.18 Some expressed satisfaction with Lord Denning’s judgment, asking why the girl’s boyfriend should have thought it acceptable to live in the girl’s room at taxpayers’ expense, and insisting that student grants should not be used to subsidise ‘immorality’. Student teachers, it was argued, needed to show respect for the kind of rules that they would later be responsible for enforcing. Rather fewer voices were raised in protest, although the Guardian published one letter suggesting that the girl had been victimised and that her morals were her own business. Did people want educational qualifications reduced to a ‘Mrs Whitehouse Certificate of Godliness and Cleanliness’? this writer asked.19
By 1971, Mrs Mary Whitehouse had become the figure in Britain most associated in the public mind with the backlash against permissiveness. A schoolteacher and evangelical Christian, she had been active from the mid-1960s in a campaign to ‘clean up TV’, founding the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in 1965. In 1971, Whitehouse co-operated with a number of other campaigning individuals and groups to organise the Nationwide Festival of Light, which aimed to show that the vast majority of respectable British citizens – ‘ordinary responsible people’ – thought that the permissive society had gone too far.20 Also involved were Lord Longford, at the time conducting a personal campaign against pornography, the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge and the young Christian pop singer Cliff Richard. A mass rally in Trafalgar Square on 25 September 1971 attracted an estimated 25,000 people, keen to demonstrate against obscenity and pornography. Beacons were lit across Britain to signify opposition to what campaigners identified as moral breakdown, and there was an attempt to evangelise among young people.
It is difficult to establish how much impact the Festival of Light had.21 The organisation it brought into being soon faded from the public view, although it continued to exist, alongside smaller campaign groups which were also founded in the early 1970s with similar objectives, such as The Responsible Society, headed by Valerie Riches.22 Mary Whitehouse was to remain the scourge of permissiveness (and of the BBC) for another couple of decades.
At root, critics of permissiveness shared concerns around what they perceived as moral decay brought about by misguided progressives, pornography and pressure groups such as the Abortion Law Reform Association. Beyond these, they tended to express disquiet over a catalogue of contemporary social phenomena, ranging from swearing on television, through nudity on stage, to the way young people dressed and wore their hair. Long hair on young men was suspect, as was too much exposure of flesh by young women, whether via midriff or miniskirt. Some of the most vocal opponents of the permissive society had grown up in what they thought of as an era of clear-cut gender distinctions. Single-sex schooling was considered normal, especially for the middle classes, and boys went on to do National Service, which was thought to make men of them. A short-back-and-sides haircut indicated a well-disciplined personality. Those who had imbibed these values were often disconcerted by the 1960s fashion for ‘unisex’. To them, young men floating around in Mr Freedom velvets and florals or girls in sharply cut trouser suits were anathema. As a result, there were many attempts at sartorial policing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Girls in offices and law courts in the 1960s were often banned from wearing skirts above the knee, for instance. The year 1971 saw the famous London Oz trials. Three editors (Richard Neville, Felix Dennis and Jim Anderson) of the satirical underground magazine Oz were charged with obscenity and conspiring to corrupt public morals after the publication of a special ‘Schoolkids’ issue in 1970.23 There was something carnivalesque about the proceedings, which frequently descended into farce. Neville, Dennis and Anderson dressed up as schoolgirls during the committal hearing. But once the trial was over and the young men were taken to prison, they were punished by having their hair forcibly cut off: a harsh expression of authority getting its own back.
The more focused concerns of those who deplored permissiveness included sex education, promiscuity, contraception, abortion and pornography. These were all subjects which generated controversy over the position and protection of young women. In the minds of the moral right, girls tended to appear as either victims or sluts. They were chaste or they were promiscuous. They needed supervision and protection and should not be left alone. The average, sexually curious young girl simply did not appear in their imaginings. The spectres of schoolgirl mothers, or feckless young hussies bent on one-night stands and expecting abortion on demand when they got into trouble, loomed large. So did fears of sexually transmitted disease among young girls.
‘More girls in London have VD,’ announced The Times medical correspondent in 1970.24 He reported that the proportion of teenage girls attending the venereal disease department at Guy’s Hospital had quadrupled over the previous fifteen years, whereas the level of teenage boys’ attendance had remained stable or even declined over the
same period. This change was attributed by the authors of the study to the ‘emancipation’ of women. Although both the actual figures and the proportions in studies of this kind were small, critics on the moral right tended to exploit them as evidence of social decline. Those who sought to reassure and to encourage young people to come forward for testing to ensure sexual health were in danger of sideswipes from Mary Whitehouse and her ilk, who accused them of treating VD ‘as no more serious than the common cold’.25 Researcher Michael Schofield emphasised that conservatives were prone to exaggerate the dangers of contracting venereal diseases in the 1970s as a way of frightening young people out of sex. He cited Germaine Greer’s dry observation that this was rather like trying to persuade people not to eat as a precaution against food poisoning.26
It was partly concern over unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease among teenagers that led the British Medical Association and other public health organisations and groups to lobby the government to improve sex education in schools. Schofield lent his support. His 1965 study The Sexual Behaviour of Young People had found little evidence of promiscuity among teenagers.27 What he had found was an alarming state of sexual ignorance, and he urged that the schools needed to do something to remedy this. But the whole issue of sex education in the early 1970s became entangled in the conservative backlash to the permissive society.28 The subject became a political nightmare. Mary Whitehouse and moral-evangelists who saw themselves as standing for family values, such as Valerie Riches and The Responsible Society, insisted that control over children’s sex education was a parental right.29 They maintained that schools had no authority to usurp this. Their bête noire was a body of ‘trendy teachers’ whom they condemned as wishy-washy liberals undermining family values. Shock headlines in the popular press of the ‘Sex Lessons for Tiny Tots’ variety only exacerbated this explosive situation, which detonated in 1971 over Martin Cole’s sex education film Growing Up.30
Dr Martin Cole (inevitably dubbed by the tabloids ‘Sex King Cole’), was a lecturer at Aston University in Birmingham. His controversial views on sex therapy and abortion rendered him suspect in the eyes of moral conservatives even before he unveiled his film. Growing Up was intended for use in schools. Some 550 viewers were present at its screening in London’s Conway Hall in 1971. Scandal erupted because the film showed short scenes of masturbation and sexual intercourse, with a reassuring-sounding commentary suggesting that these activities were normal. The film’s frankness enraged many, including large numbers of people who hadn’t actually seen the film. Secretary of State for Education Margaret Thatcher expressed her distaste and Lord Longford described it as pornographic. There was particular outrage over the suggestion that girls engaged in masturbation. Jennifer Muscutt, the young woman seen to touch herself (briefly, and little more) in the film was a teacher in Birmingham. She was immediately suspended from her post.31
The anti-permissive lobby objected to sex education not least out of a conviction that it would encourage young people to experiment. Their vociferousness brought results. In July 1971, for instance, the Family Planning Association felt obliged to cancel discussions on sex education aimed at young people which had been planned to take place at London’s Festival Hall. Attractions were to include pop groups and the release of ‘ten thousand gas-filled balloons discreetly donated by the London Rubber Company’. According to an article in The Times, the event had been welcomed by teachers and youth leaders, but the organisers got cold feet when confronted by hostile publicity in the tabloids and warnings that discussions might attract ‘too many girls under the age of consent’ (‘Yobbos, teeny-boppers and Lolitas’, according to one report).32
Sex education for girls was a particular minefield because conservatives wanted to preserve chastity and innocence. Most of the sex education books used in schools underplayed girls’ interest in sex and suggested that they were more interested in love and romance.33 Boys were represented as driven by adolescent hormones; male sexuality was shown as urgent and difficult to control. Girls’ sex drive, on the other hand, was supposed to be mild and diffuse. It was often suggested that it remained dormant until aroused by actual experience of intercourse (when it might suddenly become worryingly voracious). In addition to this, a girl was supposed to take responsibility for a boy’s continence, by not egging him on or letting him get carried away. Mary Hoffman, an educational journalist who despaired of this prejudice in the 1970s, poured scorn on typical descriptions of adolescent girls’ sexuality. Pauline Perry, for instance, in Your Guide to the Opposite Sex instructed her (boy) reader with the following:
You should not for a moment think that girls have no sexual physical sensations at all. These sensations are different from yours in that they tend to be rather vaguely spread throughout the body and seem to most girls just general yearning feelings – rather like looking at a beautiful sunset and wanting to keep it but not knowing how.34
W. B. Pomeroy, whose primers Boys and Sex and Girls and Sex circulated widely in the early 1970s, insisted that sex was less important to girls than ‘public image’. ‘Girls in fact seldom talk about sex as sex,’ he asserted, ‘and even when they do, they don’t talk about it as boys do.’35
In 1970 the National Secular Society published a booklet entitled Sex Education: The Erroneous Zone, written by Maurice Hill and Michael Lloyd-Jones.36 The authors aimed to cut through some of what they saw as the contemporary confusion over sex education. A preface was written by the novelist Brigid Brophy, who commended the authors for their wit and for their belief, following Freud’s dictum, that ‘to inhibit a child’s sexual curiosity is to inhibit his capacity for intellectual thought’. Brophy also approved the authors’ attitude to girls. Hill and Lloyd-Jones believed that sex education should stop suggesting that motherhood was the sole and sufficient satisfaction life offered to women, she noted. There was a pressing need ‘to educate girls to think and earn for themselves’.37
Sex education should embrace more liberal objectives, Brophy continued, warming to her theme. Adolescents with homosexual inclinations should be reassured that they wouldn’t necessarily ‘grow out of it’ and they should not be made to feel in the least guilty or disadvantaged. Girls as well as boys should be reassured that there was nothing wrong about masturbation, and indeed they should be encouraged to enjoy it. Addressing the girls, Brophy wrote:
Your masturbating is no-one’s business but your own, so privacy is appropriate. Make the most of it. You might find it useful to practise coming quickly, in case you take as your lover a boy who hasn’t been fortunate enough to read Maurice Hill and Michael Lloyd-Jones. If your lovers are to be girls, the need to hurry is one minor nuisance, among several others, which you will luckily avoid. If you turn out bisexual, you will want to practise both speediness and prolongation, which should make for admirably varied masturbatory experience.38
This was dynamite enough, but Brophy ran gaily on. She suggested that sexual contentment could bring peace of mind and free girls up for independent thinking and living. Current social arrangements reduced too many girls to seeking economic dependence in marriage. Autonomy was infinitely more desirable, and indeed neither true love nor even celibacy could flourish in the absence of personal independence and freedom.
Such ideas were of course anathema to the moral right, who predictably pounced on the pamphlet as offensive and liable to corrupt. Brophy’s views were trounced and denounced as beyond the pale. The Conservative Party politician John Selwyn Gummer, whose book The Permissive Society: Fact or Fantasy? was published in 1971, quoted her in a tone of sarcastic incredulity, commenting: ‘Now there’s a fine preparation for any girl setting out in life! No wonder parents are not entirely happy about the prospect of some kinds of sex education in schools!’39 ‘We must of course feel very sorry for Brigid Brophy,’ he continued, insultingly, ‘What a deprived and sad person she seems from this.’40 In the event, the National Secular Society withdrew The Erroneous Zone.41 Yet Brophy’s robust defence
of young women’s sexual orientations and choice was routinely sneered at by Mary Whitehouse, Valerie Riches and other critics of permissiveness over the next few years.
Along with sex education, contraception was a major bugbear of the right. If contraceptive advice was too easily available, they warned, the young would abandon chastity. The fear of illegitimacy was considered a valuable safeguard against ‘vice’. Sir Brian Windeyer, as Chancellor of the University of London, threw his weight behind such views in a public address, declaring that
In our increasingly permissive society, the pill has taken away an important constraint, and has contributed to a greater laxity in sexual morals and to greater promiscuity.42
In the late 1960s, and particularly in the early 1970s, the pill became much more generally accessible to unmarried girls. Researchers such as Michael Schofield continued to emphasise that it was the more responsible, and often the least promiscuous girls who sought contraceptive advice. In his opinion, it was important to make it much easier still to get hold of prescriptions for the pill in order to help the less responsible and more feckless type of young girl to avoid unwanted pregnancy.43 In addition, he deplored the way that moral conservatives linked the pill with the idea of promiscuity because he thought that this would discourage shy young girls from asking for it. Like Brophy, Schofield was heartened by what he saw as the ways in which more reliable techniques of birth control were increasing girls’ sexual confidence, suggesting that
Girl Trouble Page 17
