Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  8 | LOOKING BACK

  Historians often smile wryly at the idea of progress. Societies change, but it is not always easy to judge whether this is for better or for worse. Some Victorians thought that they had reached a high point of human civilisation; others, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century, were haunted by a despair that things were getting worse.

  The Victorian thinker Herbert Spencer judged that a society in which women were ‘freed’ from the labour force and ‘protected’ by men, so that females could stay within the home and rear children, was an excellent thing. Feminists who sought careers had got things wrong, he asserted, and it was a mischievous idea to think of educating girls to fit them for business or the professions.1 Feminism, in Spencer’s view, had probably only come about because there was a shortage of men, and it was unfortunate that some women had to reconcile themselves to the fact that they would never find husbands. The art critic and social reformer John Ruskin would have agreed warmly. In Ruskin’s vision, girls were tender beings, like plants needing protection from damaging frosts. They required shelter provided by fathers or husbands, and their main job in life was to sanctify and purify the home. Women who failed to appreciate and to carry out this mission were responsible for all manner of social ills. Young ladies all over the country were presented with prettily bound copies of Ruskin’s homilies, and particularly his essay ‘On Queen’s Gardens’, in Sesame and Lilies, for right-minded contemplation of their future as wives and mothers.2

  Feminists turned these ideas upside down. Some judged Ruskin sanctimonious drivel.3 The women’s movement stood for education, property rights, and what was often seen as an unwomanly involvement in work and politics. This struggle involved protracted battles. Gender politics were never completely straightforward: many men supported women’s claims to equal rights, and some women rejected the need for enfranchisement. But in the early twentieth century, as agitation for the vote was stepped up in the face of obdurate opposition, the conflict took on the complexion of a sex war. Around suffragette militancy and the force-feeding of women political prisoners, just before the outbreak of war in 1914, this battle between the sexes reached its most vicious stage.

  One of the skills historians can supply is perspective. Girls growing up in late Victorian Britain found their freedom and prospects extremely circumscribed. Experiences and opportunities varied, in the first instance, according to social class. Middle-class girls were often cushioned from the outside world. A young Molly Hughes, growing up in London in the 1880s, was certainly not encouraged to travel on a bus on her own.4 But this kind of ‘protection’ depended upon having a father, brothers or other male relatives who could provide. When Molly’s father died unexpectedly, she was thrown much more on her own resources. She had to contemplate earning some kind of living, possibly in teaching, and this required a more solid education than that hitherto provided for her by her mother, at home.5 Working-class girls usually had to shift for themselves from an early age, as well as shifting for others. Their childhood was often short: responsibilities for domestic work and the care of younger siblings intruded even before they had the chance of going to school.6

  Whatever their class background, girls in late Victorian and Edwardian times shared some experiences in common. They were brought up to think of self-sacrifice as a quintessentially feminine virtue, and to defer to fathers, brothers and male authority generally.7 They were brought up very differently from boys. Any idea that their education should have the same purpose as their brothers’ was unthinkable. Girls’ opportunities to support themselves were limited. And they had perforce to learn the lesson that as young women their rights, educationally, socially and politically, barely existed.

  Daughters who revolted against this situation were commonly regarded as a problem. But the system itself was under strain. There were, after all, the ‘odd women’, the ‘surplus women’ for whom a husband might never materialise. Both paternal provision – and patriarchy – had their limits: what was to become of those who could not be provided for? To equip daughters with some kind of education started to look like an insurance policy. It was frequently sold as such. But education could and did give girls ideas and self-respect. It might indeed make them strong-minded. Would the strain on the female intellect wreak havoc with girls’ reproductive potential? Many physiologists maintained that this was indeed a risk: girl graduates, they warned, might never become mothers. And even if their education hadn’t flattened their chests and shrivelled up their ovaries, strong-minded women were widely perceived as having ‘unsexed’ themselves.

  Women who unsexed themselves by fighting for their rights were regularly portrayed as ugly harridans with slatternly hairstyles: unbalanced, hysterical and devoid of judgement. A comic postcard industry throve on such imagery. Suffragists countered these representations with images of saintly martyrs, dressed in virginal white, often topped with academic robes and mortar boards to indicate trained intelligence and high-mindedness to boot. For some feminists, men in general became the enemy. Men were the brutish sex, who drank and whored and reduced all women to a state of sexual slavery, often infecting them with unspeakable diseases in the process. Votes for women and purity for men were the twin demands of the Women’s Social and Political Union. In this fevered atmosphere, a moral panic about white slavery spread like an epidemic. White slavers were imagined as stalking the streets and lurking around ports, railway stations and even theatre foyers, chloroform at the ready, looking for girls to kidnap and carry off. Urban myths flourished on the basis of endless lurid stories and journalistic exposés. Moralists, religious campaigners, feminists, social conservatives who deemed girls in need of even more ‘protection’, and a public ready for titillating scandal all wanted to read more about it.

  The First World War slackened constraints, and contemporaries worried about girls on the loose. Flappers and roaring girls replaced the revolting daughters and hysterical suffragettes in the minds of those who bewailed the loss of the old order, which now looked as if it might be gone for ever. Many observers were unsettled by the idea of uppity young women turning their backs on domestic service, painting their faces, and flocking into the cinemas and dance halls. Even worse was the spectre of these brazen hussies earning good wages at the expense of deserving ex-servicemen and the fathers of families with many mouths to feed.

  In popular demonology, the pleasure-seeking flapper was gradually replaced by the good-time girl. The good-time girl was seen as out for what she could get; she exploited men, was probably promiscuous, and certainly a danger to health, home and family. Social workers and medical professionals helped the media to construct a stereotype, so that there would be no mistaking her. This spectre of the good-time girl continued to haunt respectable society in the post-1945 world. Crimes committed by young women were comparatively rare, but when they did occur, they claimed disproportionate media attention and allowed for a great deal of public moralising. Young women who were judged to wear too much lipstick and ‘flaunt’ fur coats and nylon stockings provoked head shaking and muttered tut-tutting. A common moral judgement was that such hussies ‘had it coming to them’.

  In the 1950s and 1960s there was growing concern about new forces in society with potential to lead girls astray and turn them into rebels. These included American crooners, jukeboxes, coffee bars and jazz cellars, Teddy boys, and rock ’n’ roll. The Profumo affair troubled the establishment male: upstarts such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were disconcertingly eager to contact the newspapers and to speak up for themselves. They were apparently shameless and could bring a man down. In respectable middle England, even away from the excesses of the metropolis, a burgeoning teenage culture threatened to exclude parents altogether from any supervision of courtship: daughters were increasingly perceived as out of control and as running after the wrong kind of men. Bad boys with raw sex appeal gave middle-class fathers headaches: their intentions didn’t look particularly honourable. The
re was no National Service any more to knock them into shape, nor was it apparent that these youths had prospects. Films such as Beat Girl played on horror stories of an aimless generation of youngsters, the girls, like the boys, out for kicks, contemptuous of family values, and dicing with fast cars alongside their reputations.

  Pre-marital pregnancy and illegitimacy were still sources of great social shame. Young people were marrying at much younger ages than before the Second World War, and some of these unions were shotgun marriages, with pregnant brides. Social tensions arising from these new patterns of behaviour were reflected in a marked increase in the 1950s in the number of parents – largely fathers – who tried to have their daughters made wards of court. The courts complained that they could barely cope with this rise in demand for their services. Magistrates were further frustrated by the alacrity with which appellants tried to undo such arrangements for wardship once it became clear that a daughter was actually pregnant. Even a bad choice of son-in-law was seen as better than an illegitimate grandchild. Dissatisfaction with the way wardship cases were clogging up the courts was one of the main reasons why in the late 1960s there was reconsideration of the age of majority. After the Family Law Reform Act of 1969, young women were no longer classed as ‘infants’, and could marry even without parental consent, from the age of eighteen.

  By the time that the age of majority was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen, the pattern was again changing. Beatlemania had swept the country, and young people were caught up in the story of Swinging Britain. The contraceptive pill was allowing young women to experiment with sex without having to risk pregnancy. Legalised abortion meant that fewer of those who did conceive out of wedlock felt that they had no choice other than to marry. The seemingly relentless fall in the age of marriage which had characterised the 1960s halted, and even went into reverse. Young women grew more independent still, increasing numbers of them going off to university or living in flats and bedsits, away from the watchful eye of parents. This new, ‘permissive’ social ethos elicited a variety of responses: some girls experienced it as liberating. Others, particularly in retrospect, confessed that in some ways they had felt more pressured into sexual encounters with men. But by the 1970s, a flourishing women’s liberation movement made it easier to speak out and to share stories. It also provided support for young women’s views, of whatever persuasion.

  The 1970s were a watershed. Second-wave feminism threw its strength behind equality legislation, particularly equal pay and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. It can be argued that the women’s liberation movement took root in Britain not least as a result of changes in schooling after the Second World War. The 1944 Education Act introduced secondary education for all, and the first generation of girls who took this education for granted were often perplexed to encounter limited opportunities on leaving school, and a sexually segregated labour market. Second-wave feminists turned their attention to the structures of work and the family, which both came in for sustained critical analysis. A third area of concern was education itself. ‘Educational feminism’ was one of the most obvious achievements of the WLM. It took the form of a mass of projects and initiatives to combat stereotyping and to encourage girl-friendly schooling. In the 1970s and 1980s, schooling and higher education in Britain were transformed, in that the traditional assumptions which held that boys and girls should be educated differently were swept away. The feminist project was aided by the introduction of a national curriculum, which helped to erode gender differentiation through subject choice. In higher education, gender quotas, which had held down a lid on the numbers of girls who could study medicine or veterinary science, were deemed unlawful. After much heart-searching and tortuous politicking in the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all the formerly exclusively male colleges turned their backs on centuries of tradition and opened their doors to female students. This was a move of great importance, not all of it symbolic: the fact that there had been so few women’s colleges, all of them much poorer than the wealthy male foundations, had made it impossible to admit more than a minority of girls to Oxbridge in the 1960s. From the 1990s, the numbers began to equalise. With women students no longer confined to the hencoops, their proportions in universities all over Britain began first to catch up with, and then even to overtake, those of the men.

  8.1 Two pairs of twin sisters celebrate their A-level results at Putney High School, south London, in August 2011. Girls leaping with joy at their exam successes had become a photographic convention by this time (© Steve Parsons/PA Archive/Press Association Images).

  By the end of the twentieth century, girls’ performance had drawn level with that of boys at each stage of education. Indeed, in some areas they were doing markedly better than their male peers. The newspaper-reading public became accustomed to celebratory photographs of girls leaping in the air like spring lambs each year, when their GCSE or A-level examination results were announced. Feminist researchers whose careers had focused on girls’ underachievement were in danger of finding themselves sidelined, as public attention shifted to boys, who were increasingly seen as ‘losing out’ in formal education. There was something of a panic about boys in schools: were they bored, deprived of inspiring role models, perhaps, or maybe constitutionally unsuited to the constant demands of coursework? Lurking under the surface of such debates was a question about whether feminism had brought about some kind of imbalance in the natural order of things. Feminists in the 1970s had seen potential in single-sex classrooms as a way of increasing girls’ confidence. Now there were suggestions that boys-only groupings might focus on hard physical challenge or bring adventure back into the curriculum.

  The closing of the gender gap in education, together with marked changes in young women’s aspirations, led some observers to talk again about social and sexual revolution. A 1994 study by Helen Wilkinson for the think tank Demos popularised the idea of a ‘genderquake’. Entitled No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake, the study identified ‘a historic shift in the relations between men and women’, held to be particularly evident in younger age groups.8 For others, the 1990s witnessed the rise of ‘girl power’ as a cultural phenomenon, reflected in music, media, fashion and patterns of consumption. Some argued feminism had done its work and was no longer relevant: young women, it seemed, were shying away from ‘the f-word’. Others claimed that older forms of oppression – such as the violence towards women exhibited in some kinds of pornography – were intensifying, or they identified new sources of concern. Naomi Wolf saw what she defined as ‘beauty pornography’ as a form of ‘radiation sickness’, or as a virulent social disease. Others claimed that young women showed rising rates of depression, body anxiety and self-loathing. Girls were criticised for ‘laddish’ behaviour, and for drinking too much. Or they were represented as the victims of a ‘sexualised’ culture.

  Waves of anxiety, horror stories and panic, then, have accompanied social change affecting women since Victorian times. A particular unease over the position of young women seems to have been a concomitant of modernisation. It is not always easy for the historian to read what was going on in any particular period for a number of reasons. In the first place, strong cultural expressions about femininity or girlhood (such as those formulated by Ruskin or the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore)9 may be understood as prescriptions for – rather than descriptions of – contemporary social behaviour. In other words, Ruskin preached at schoolgirls precisely because they were increasingly dissatisfied, and bent on fulfilment outside the sanctuary of the home. Second, the image of girlhood innocence has always carried rich symbolic associations and emotional meanings: young women have had a hard time escaping these. In Victorian times, girls were either pure or they had fallen. Their chastity had a property value, especially if they were middle or upper class, and this property was vested in fathers and future husbands. Once she was ‘fallen’, a girl’s assets, or indeed her value as a person, were considered to have been lost. Innocent girls m
ight carry some kind of redemptive power. But once fallen, many predicted that there was no stopping them on the road to ruin, and they would most probably drag men into worldly perdition with them. Girls’ behaviour has regularly been judged as innocent or corrupt, white or black, with no shades of grey in between. A consequence of this has been the tendency to portray girls as either victims or villains, rather than ordinary, curious, fallible human beings.

  The social thinker and criminologist Stanley Cohen introduced the idea of ‘moral panics’ into academic sociology when he published his influential Folk Devils and Moral Panics in 1972.10 His book explored social reactions to youth subcultures in the 1960s, and in particular, the activities of Mods and Rockers. Cohen showed how the media could overreact to behaviour which was seen to challenge existing social conventions. The media response can amplify and distort: representations cannot always be read as reflecting social reality. In a later edition of his book, Cohen emphasises that calling something a ‘moral panic’ does not imply that the something didn’t actually exist, or that the reaction to any particular social problem is based purely on fantasy or delusion.11 It does, however, allow us to see social problems as socially constructed and selectively highlighted, and to ask questions about culture and power. How and why do some issues steal the headlines as urgent social problems while others, arguably more serious, fail to attract the attention they deserve? Cohen’s book did not deal centrally with girls, although he later signalled his awareness that there was more to be said about the social reaction to female Mods and indeed about moral panics around what was perceived to be socially challenging, ‘unfeminine’ female behaviour.12

  Since the early twentieth century, the lives of young women in the ‘Western’ world have been transformed. They have gained educational and political rights. Girls are no longer driven into domestic service in their droves in early adolescence. They are schooled along much the same lines as boys and are extremely successful in examinations. Female undergraduates outnumber men in higher education and they now have access to the most prestigious institutions. Girls have more opportunities for personal and sexual self-expression and more control over their bodies than ever before. Contraception and abortion are widely available and the terrible social shame that used to attach to illegitimacy has gone. Opportunities for work and employment have widened dramatically. None of this has come about without acute problems of adjustment. There has been a great deal of anxiety, generating regular crops of horror stories and panic. Indeed, a continuing vein of anxiety about girls has been a subtext of the twentieth century and more. Young women who deviated from convention in late Victorian times were often stigmatised and pathologised. Similarly, ‘the modern girl’ has regularly been seen as both threatened by and threatening to, a social order undergoing profound social change.