Girl Trouble
Page 18
The modern generation of young women are not content to be sex objects whose role is to provide satisfaction for the men merely as a favour. They are much more aware of the possibilities of female sexual arousal … Furthermore, girls now demand a higher standard of sexual performance from their partners.44
‘Would you let your teenage daughter go to a birth control clinic?’ Daily Mirror journalist Audrey Whiting had asked in 1963, reporting on what she described as ‘the boldest and most dramatic step ever taken in the field of sex education’, that is, the decision of the Marie Stopes clinic in London to provide contraceptives to girls under the age of sixteen without their parents knowing about it.45 By 1971 there were thirteen Brook Advisory Centres providing advice on contraception for single girls: they were seeing around 10,000 new clients each year. Paul Ferris, writing in the Observer, reflected on ‘Teenage Sex: The New Dilemma’, which he described as ‘an increasingly disturbing family problem’. How were parents to react if they learned that their teenage daughters were sexually active? What if they were under sixteen years of age?46 Professionals and politicians were as confused as parents: it seemed that no one was sure what the guidelines were. Controversy and confusion mounted in 1971 when Dr Robert Browne, a GP in Birmingham, took it upon himself to inform the parents of a sixteen-year-old girl that the local Brook Advisory Centre had supplied their daughter with oral contraceptives. He was accused of misconduct, though subsequently cleared by the General Medical Council of the British Medical Association. Browne, a religious conservative, had argued that ‘it was not God’s will’ that young people should indulge in pre-marital sex.47 The whole question of whether it was legal and ethical for doctors to prescribe the pill to young girls without their parents’ consent remained highly controversial.
Even more explosive was the issue of abortion, of course, both before and after the Abortion Law Reform Act of 1967. Opponents of permissiveness saw ‘abortion on demand’ as a major social evil, although it was hardly an accurate description of what was available in the 1970s. In many parts of the country facilities for abortion were remote and difficult to access, delays and waiting lists were long, and unmarried pregnant girls might still have to negotiate hostility and contempt from medical authorities. Anti-abortionists spread scare stories. John Selwyn Gummer contended that even those with ‘the hardest hearts and the weakest heads’ must feel squeamish ‘when fully-formed children, able to cry, are thrown in the incinerator’.48 A full-scale moral panic erupted in 1974 following the publication of Babies for Burning, a book by Michael Litchfield and Susan Kentish.49 This purported to be a work of ‘dispassionate’ investigative journalism. It read like a gothic horror story. Young girls were depicted as haunting dark alleyways, ‘shopping for abortion bargains’. There were frequent references to butchery, abattoirs, and doctors with genocidal tendencies. One gynaecologist was accused of selling aborted foetuses to a soap factory. This Harley Street practitioner was made to sound like a cross between Herod and Bluebeard. He was said to have confessed:
Now, many of the babies I get are fully-formed and are living for quite a time before they are disposed of. One morning I had four of them crying their heads off. I hadn’t the time to kill them there and then because we were so busy. I was loath to drop them in the incinerator because there was so much animal fat that could have been used commercially.50
Diane Munday, active in the cause of abortion law reform and a spokesperson for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service, contacted the Sunday Times. An article headed ‘Abortion Horror Tales Revealed as Fantasies’, which appeared in this newspaper on 30 March 1975, effectively discredited most of the ‘evidence’ of Litchfield and Kentish. In April 1975, New Scientist reported that the BPAS had taken out a libel writ on the two authors and their publishers on twenty-three counts, and suggested that there were more challenges to follow.51 Neither the General Medical Council nor the Director of Public Prosecutions found any substance in the charges of Litchfield and Kentish.52 Babies for Burning, full of blood, gore and fevered imaginings, was nevertheless widely read and influenced many opponents of abortion. James White, the Labour MP for Glasgow Pollok, who in 1975 led a campaign to limit the terms of the 1967 Abortion Act, was said to have been much influenced by the book.53
Another subject guaranteed to needle moral conservatives was that of teenage pregnancy. The press regularly stoked controversy on the subject in the 1970s with headlines about ‘schoolgirl mothers’ or ‘gymslip mums’. In the 1960s, it had been widely feared that the raising of the school leaving age to sixteen would exacerbate the problem: however, the very perception of youthful pregnancy as a ‘problem’ was itself a product of changing social expectations. In a context where the age of marriage was falling, young brides and young mothers were looked upon with some indulgence: ‘young love’ could be celebrated along with roses in springtime. As the 1960s progressed, such sentimentality was rather less in evidence, particularly when there was no engagement ring in the offing and the fruits of young love might equate with single mothers on benefits. Unmarried mothers still attracted social disapproval.54 In 1974, the twenty-two-year-old Helen Morgan, newly crowned as winner of the Miss World beauty competition, was forced to resign, four days after her victory, when it was discovered that (unmarried) she had an eighteen-month-old son.55 The moral right was in a particular quandary over teenage pregnancy, which may have accounted for some of the virulence often expressed in discussions of the subject. There were regular attacks on young mothers who ‘sponged’ off the state at a cost to taxpayers. But this often went alongside opposition to sex instruction, contraceptive advice and easier access to abortion.56
In the 1980s there were endless disputes in Britain about the figures for teenage pregnancies: were these rising, stabilising or falling? What proportion were ‘wanted’ pregnancies? One study estimated that between 83,000 and 104,000 teenage girls became pregnant, annually, in England and Wales. Births to teenagers had increased during the 1960s but the numbers had fallen in the 1970s. In 1980, 61,000 teenage girls became mothers, compared with 81,000 ten years earlier. The numbers of abortions performed on teenage girls, in the meantime, had doubled, from around 15,000 in 1970 to 36,000 in 1980.57 It was hard to generalise about young women’s experiences, but there was rarely any shortage of hostile social commentary.
A research report for the Department of Health and Social Security, carried out by Madeleine Simms and Christopher Smith in 1986, found that teenage pregnancy was still a political football. They pointed out that the majority of teenage mothers came from rather deprived backgrounds, but they emphasised, nevertheless, that the majority of those they studied ‘were delighted with their babies and their way of life and would not have [had] it otherwise’.58 There was a complicated relationship between social deprivation and teenage motherhood, Simms and Smith suggested. For some girls, pregnancy seemed like the only route to self-respect and adult status. If society wanted to discourage teenage motherhood, better opportunities for girls and easier access to contraception and abortion were the obvious way forward.59
The question of whether doctors should prescribe the pill to sexually active girls under the age of sixteen remained difficult. Most doctors felt that withholding contraceptive advice, or insisting on involving parents against the daughter’s wishes, would do more harm than good. Victoria Gillick, a Roman Catholic mother of ten children, thought differently. When in 1980 a DHSS circular gave guidance on the subject which confirmed that the prescription of contraceptives to under-sixteen-year-olds without parental consent should be a matter for a doctor’s discretion, Mrs Gillick sprang into action. She objected that doctors who prescribed contraceptives to under-sixteens would be encouraging sex with minors, and, further, that only parents could give consent to medical treatment.60 After temporary success with an appeal court ruling, Gillick lost her case in the House of Lords, but went on battling against what she believed to be the social encouragement of promiscuity among young girls.61 But
the reaction against permissiveness could only go so far. The government and medical authorities charged with dealing with sexual health issues could scarcely ignore the importance of sex education, birth control and other public health issues. By the 1980s, panic over HIV and AIDS had added to this agenda. And so had feminism.
What is often referred to as ‘second-wave’ feminism really took off in Britain in the early 1970s. The first National Women’s Liberation Movement conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford in the spring of 1970. Four demands were originally formulated: equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. Second-wave feminists saw themselves as building upon the achievements of the suffrage movement. Where suffragists, or ‘first-wave’ feminists, had concentrated on fighting for the vote, this new generation would question wider social structures, including the family.
Women’s reproductive rights – the right to choose whether or not to bear children – were high on the agenda of second-wave feminists from the beginning. Over the next few years, the political edge of the WLM in Britain was sharpened by a fight against attempts from the moral right to undermine the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act. Anti-abortionists often resorted to deeply misogynist language, which helped to provoke the ‘them and us’ mentality that suffused the pages of the feminist newspaper Spare Rib in the 1970s. In 1975, for instance, mobilising support against James White’s restrictive amendment to the 1967 Act, Spare Rib quoted Alan Clark, then Conservative MP for Plymouth, as having suggested that White’s projected amendment would reduce ‘the numbers of au pair girls and sundry slags’ from the Continent drifting through the country to have abortions.62 Readers were given a list of MPs ‘who voted against us’ on this issue and urged women to start lobbying them.
Our Bodies, Ourselves, produced by the Boston Women’s Health Collective, was first published in the USA in 1971. It quickly established itself as one of the most influential texts of second-wave feminism. A British version, edited by Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen, was published by Penguin in 1978, and reprinted in 1980, 1983, 1984 and 1986. Praised in the British Medical Journal as ‘well-researched, informative and educational for both men and women’, this compendious volume soon established itself as ‘a bible of the women’s health movement’.63 The book covered a wide range of subjects pertinent to women’s health and well-being, including sexual health and reproduction. It gave direct, no-nonsense advice on contraception and abortion, with directions about how to find a clinic appropriate to the reader’s needs. It was a mine of information for young women unsure of their sexual preferences and orientation, explaining a diversity of lesbian and heterosexual practices in a completely non-judgemental and helpful way. The tone was never condescending or patronising. The authors recognised that male doctors could be intimidating. Women should not allow themselves to be controlled, they insisted: they should look upon their GPs as partners and advisers. When first meeting a male doctor, they suggested, a woman should introduce herself and shake him firmly by the hand. This should bring him to his feet. Contact on the level, eyeball to eyeball, was preferable to a situation in which a woman patient approached her doctor ‘as supplicant, when he wearily raises his eyes from writing his notes to give you the once-over’.64
Charlotte Greig, who studied at the University of Sussex in the 1970s, drew upon her experiences for her novel A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy, published in 2007.65 The book conveys something of the difficulties experienced by young women in the era of permissiveness and rapidly changing values. Susannah, the central character, is pregnant and agonises over whether to have an abortion. Her friends urge her to visit the university health service. One points out that the doctors on campus are likely to be sympathetic, and even if they are not, the friends can get their women’s group to exert pressure. After all, it is a woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby or not. ‘This is about control over our lives,’ insists the friend. ‘Haven’t you read Our Bodies, Ourselves?’
‘No I bloody haven’t’, said Cassie, ‘and I’m not going to. It’s all about getting the clap and looking up your fanny with a wing-mirror and a bike torch, isn’t it?’66
Ideas about young women not relying on lovers for contraception, taking responsibility for their own bodies, even to the extent of wresting control from a male-dominated medical profession, and making their own choices, were radical at the time. Autonomy wasn’t always easy: a message which emerges strongly from Greig’s novel.
There was also the question of continuing double standards. Feminism was less than gung-ho about the joys of permissiveness, although there were differences of viewpoint here.67 In the United States, Gloria Steinem had declared (in the first issue of the magazine MS), that the sexual revolution ‘was not our war’. The sexual revolution, she insisted, was a revolution for men, but not for women. Some feminists believed that men proclaimed the joys of sexual freedom to get women into bed with them, and that women, comparatively powerless, found it hard to say no. Others emphasised that for women, sex could never be the emotionally neutral, noncommittal exercise that it was for some men; nor was it ever completely cost-free. Sexual adventure was still riskier for girls than for their male peers: a boy might gain a positive reputation as a Don Juan, or ‘a bit of a lad’, while girls were apt to be labelled ‘sluts’ or ‘slags’. But while some feminists counted the cost of permissiveness for women, few would have wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s. More reliable contraception and easier abortion had certainly been liberating. And feminism supplied the opposition to double standards, and the concern for women’s well-being, that would challenge the more ‘sexist’ aspects of permissiveness. In addition to this, feminist writing opened up discussions about sexual orientation and the sources of women’s sexual pleasure.
At root, the WLM, like first-wave feminism, encouraged women to speak for themselves. This was easier in a sympathetic context, which is why small ‘consciousness-raising’ groups were a mainstay of the early stages of the movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Participants often recorded a thrill of recognition when they realised that other women shared their experiences and concerns. In this way, the personal was redefined as political. Mary Kennedy, who attended the Ruskin College conference in 1970, remembered that
there was a real buzz of excitement. As a child I had been very angry about being a girl, in terms of the way that I was treated, because the boys and the men had all the power. Then here came this turning point, and we were all able to speak up.68
Feminism blossomed in the 1970s. Simone de Beauvoir’s Le Deuxième Sexe, originally translated from the French in 1953, was much more widely read in Britain fifteen years later. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a dissection of the frustrations of the American housewife, appeared in 1963 and made a strong impact on both sides of the Atlantic. Most influential of all was probably Germaine Greer’s brilliant, belligerent polemic The Female Eunuch, first published in 1970.69 This spoke to women of all ages, but its richly witty account of how girls are conditioned to fit ‘the feminine stereotype’ probably had particular resonance for the young. No one who read it could forget Greer’s advice to girls to try tasting their menstrual blood as a measure of the extent to which they felt comfortable with their own bodies. Forty years later, the journalist Laurie Penny recalled reading her mother’s copy of The Female Eunuch as a young girl in the 1980s: ‘at the time, it felt like a striplight had been switched on in my mind’.70
The resurgence of feminism helped bring about the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. These battles for equal pay and equal opportunities for women had a long history, going back (at least) to the early years of the twentieth century. But ideas about, and indeed, the very concepts of ‘sexual discrimination’ and ‘equal opportunities’ were being expanded and reinterpreted at this time. In 1968, Edward Heath, as leader of the Conservative Party, had asked Anthony Cri
pps QC to head a committee to investigate the legal status of women. This committee had produced a report, rather quaintly entitled Fair Shares for the Fair Sex, in 1969.71 In 1968 the MP Joyce Butler made the first of her four attempts to get an anti-discrimination bill through Parliament. In 1971, anti-discrimination bills were introduced in both the House of Commons (by William Hamilton) and the Lords (by Baroness Seear). Both bills were referred to select committees.72 Both Lords’ and Commons’ committees collected ample evidence relating to sexual discrimination. In 1973 the Conservatives committed themselves to legislative intervention. The Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) of 1975 outlawed both direct and indirect discrimination.
The massive amount of investigation, research, discussion, lobbying and controversy which surrounded these developments revealed a variety of viewpoints. Margaret Thatcher, for instance, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, had confessed that she found ‘great difficulty in grasping the practical element of discrimination in education’.73 Others were convinced that schools and universities were riddled with sexist practices. Some of these were pretty overt kinds of discrimination, such as the ‘quotas’ limiting the numbers of girls who could be admitted to medical or veterinary schools. Others – such as the existence of single-sex schools and colleges – were more complex. In the strongly male-dominated elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the existence of single-sex colleges in combination with quotas and practical limitations on women’s entry came to look increasingly discriminatory. The processes by which historically all-male colleges came eventually to accept women students (and conversely, previously all-female colleges came to admit men) were extraordinarily tortured and troubled. But this dismantling of centuries-old traditions happened very quickly.74 There can be no doubt that the introduction of the SDA acted as a powerful stimulus and catalyst. Twenty years after the passing of the SDA, there were hardly any single-sex colleges left.