Girl Trouble (16 page)

4.2
Betty Burden, a young hairdresser in Birmingham in 1951, helping her mother with the weekly wash.
Picture Post
journalist Hilde Marchant wanted to reassure readers that girls were family-minded and sensible, unlikely to be swept off their feet by teenage culture (photograph © Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images).

The research organisation Mass Observation carried out a survey of ‘teen-age girls' in London in 1949 which painted a similar picture.
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Two hundred girls were interviewed. Most were reported as fairly happy and satisfied with their lives. Their leisure activities focused around cinema, dancing and going shopping. Most got on well with their families and felt no great urge to leave home. Friends were important, and going out with boyfriends was particularly so after the age of around fifteen. The majority of the girls looked forward to getting married and having children. The writer of the report judged that this was less to do with romance than with the desire for independence and a home of their own. Other surveys drawing on larger samples came to similar conclusions. Leslie Wilkins's study of some 450 adolescent girls in 1955 showed that most girls wanted to be married by the time they reached their mid-twenties.
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Thelma Veness's study of another six hundred girls, a few years later, showed that 90 per cent expected to marry and saw home making as their vocation, although over half of these expected to combine work with marriage at some point.
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A home of one's own was a particularly important component of many girls' dreams for a better future. Getting married was seen as the first step to securing a home. Somewhat disconcertingly, researchers found that many girls' expectations of husbands petered out once the latter had provided them with a home and children.
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When asked to imagine their lives as adult women, large numbers of girls fantasised about their husbands dropping dead in middle age, leaving them with a new freedom.

4.3
Young women working on an assembly line in a clothing factory in Leicester, 1948. Many girls were keen to leave school as soon as possible and looked forward to early marriage (photograph © Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).

Most girls' lives were shaped by the fact that their schooling ended in very early adolescence: at fourteen, most commonly, in the war years. The school leaving age was not raised to fifteen until 1947. Secondly there was the trend to early marriage. This had been evident before the Second World War, but became more marked afterwards. In 1921 only about 15 per cent of brides had been under twenty-one years of age. By 1965 this proportion had risen to 40 per cent.
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Early marriage was more common among working-class girls. Formal education was often experienced as a somewhat unreal interlude in their lives, and they might be impatient to leave school and start earning. The older elementary schools were often bleak and unattractive places, and it was not always easy to see the point of lessons. But some middle-class girls could be equally keen to leave school as soon
as possible. They often resented having to wear uniform and being treated as children. Early school leaving and marriage at a young age meant that jobs could be seen as short-term, stop-gap experiences. The mathematician Kathleen Ollerenshaw, writing about girls' education in post-1945 Britain, commented that it was increasingly the fashion ‘for a girl to step from the school choir to the church altar, and to discard her prefect's badge for a wedding ring'.
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The slaughter of young men during the First World War had made it impossible in the years that followed for many young women to find husbands. This encouraged some to take education – and career opportunities – seriously. Things looked different after 1945. Following the Second World War, young women's chances of marrying were excellent. Women teachers feared that the rush to marry young would undermine their pupils' commitment to scholastic achievement. Parents entering daughters as pupils in some of the more academic girls' secondary schools were sometimes required to sign a pledge to keep their daughter at school at least until her sixteenth birthday. These signed commitments cannot have been legally binding, but headmistresses nevertheless hoped to exert moral pressure.

The girls' schools of the 1950s became battlegrounds. There had probably always been a tendency for women teachers to see girls' interest in boys as a distraction from intellectual pursuits. In the 1950s this led to regular conflict over uniform regulations, for instance, or girls' interest in cosmetics.
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Issues around institutional regulations and personal autonomy became particularly vexed in a context where there was so much ambiguity around being grown up. Girls who were legally able to marry at sixteen (albeit only if their parents consented) didn't always warm to the idea of regulation underwear. What business was it of teachers
to insist on the colour of bras and pants? Skirmishes over nail varnish and skirt length became endemic.

4.4
Schoolgirls in a domestic science class show off their cake-making skills(early 1960s) (© Fred Morley/Hulton/Getty Images).

The desire of some women teachers to keep girls in a state of sexual hibernation (or denial) for as long as possible was undermined by pervasive cultural trends. Nabokov's
Lolita
was published (in Paris) in 1955, although the book was banned in the USA and the UK until 1958.
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In
Lolita
, the novel's narrator, Humbert Humbert, becomes sexually obsessed with and then abducts a twelve-year-old girl. He threatens her with reform school if she tries to run away and leave him.
Baby Doll
, the controversial film with a screenplay by Tennessee Williams, was released in 1956. It starred Carroll Baker in the role of its lubricious, thumb-sucking heroine, married at seventeen but planning to hold on to her virginity until her twentieth birthday. The sexualisation of young girls in the 1950s was hardly new, but it provoked new tensions.
Most literary representations of ‘the nymphet' came from men.
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But women's fashions also took a disconcertingly regressive turn. There were ‘baby doll' nightdresses and pyjamas. And even Paris began to show a leaning towards little-girl dresses and coats. Grown women started to wear Alice bands with girlish bows perched on the top of their heads.
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In her essay
Brigitte Bardot and the Lolita Syndrome
, written in 1959, the French feminist Simone de Beauvoir expressed ambivalence. The child-woman might be a new force of nature, free from conventional feminine artifice, she judged. Her appeal was based on both challenging and reinforcing desire and confidence in men.
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Among educationalists, the question of what – and how – girls should be taught yet again became increasingly vexed. Did they need more sex education, or less? More might offer protection, but equally, might put ideas into their heads. If the majority of girls left school at the earliest opportunity and got married as soon as they could after that, conservatives insisted, shouldn't their education show more emphasis on courtship and married life? There was a growing tendency to divide girls into two categories: the ‘normal' majority, who looked forward to lives centring on marriage and family life, and a deviant minority of intellectual girls who likely as not wore spectacles and would end up as spinsters. John Newsom (later Sir John) was County Education Officer for Hertfordshire when he published his controversial polemic
The Education of Girls
in 1948.
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He suggested that girls' schools, run by bookish women teachers, had got their mission wrong. Girls needed fewer books and should be taught more cookery so that they could cosset their future husbands. Men cared very little for erudition in women, Newsom pontificated, but they did enjoy a good dinner. Experience had taught him, he added snidely, that those who disagreed with this
view were ‘normally deficient in the quality of womanliness and the particular physical and mental attributes of their sex'.
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In other words, intellectual women could be justifiably dismissed as freaks and made poor role models.

These ideas made an impact. Government reports on education such as the Crowther Report,
Fifteen to Eighteen
(1959), and Newsom's own report on the education of children of average and less than average ability,
Half Our Future
(1963), made constant reference to the need to adjust girls' education to the needs of young brides. The curriculum, Crowther urged, should reflect girls' interest in dress, personal appearance, and human relationships.
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And they needed lessons in housewifery. The writers of the Newsom Report admitted that some girls found domestic science a waste of time because they already had their fill of housework at home. But these girls, it was ventured, had even
more
need of domestic training – so that they could learn to appreciate just how fulfilling home making could be.
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Views like this cut little ice in the more academic girls' schools, where many teachers maintained an aloof detachment from domestic subjects.
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Needlework and cookery sometimes had a token presence in the curriculum, but it was tacitly understood that these were low-status subjects only to be taken seriously by the less academic girls.

Germaine Greer's celebrated feminist polemic
The Female Eunuch
was first published in 1970. It contained a memorable image of the schoolgirl: ‘Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform, making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching bag of civilisation.'
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The description is vivid because conflicting social expectations for women were indeed fought out in the classroom, and girls found themselves caught in the crossfire. Grammar-school girls might be seen by
Newsom and his supporters as in danger of becoming defeminised, but in less academic institutions (or the lower streams of grammar schools) the concern was often the reverse. Here girls' behaviour might be seen as troublesome because they were
too
interested in their appearance, boys and sex. Caroline Brown, whose book
Lost Girls
was an account of her experience of teaching difficult girls in a remand home in the 1950s, remembered that art lessons often came to grief because the girls would steal the materials. Depressed by institutional garb and desperate to look feminine, they would improvise with art materials as makeshift cosmetics. Paintbrushes were snipped into false eyelashes, and red paint was used as rouge or lipstick.
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Too feminine or not feminine enough? It was hard to get it right.

Autobiographical and personal stories bear this out. Girls' experience of schooling in the 1950s was strongly shaped by social class, but conflicts over femininity were nonetheless present at every level. Emma Tennant was the privileged daughter of a wealthy family (her father was the second Baron Glenconner) with estates in Scotland and the West Indies, grand houses and servants. She was a pupil at St Paul's Girls' School in London, a school with an excellent reputation. She insisted on leaving at fifteen. Like many of her class, Emma expected to marry soon after ‘coming out' and a season as a debutante. This was what happened. She married at nineteen and soon became a mother, but the marriage proved ephemeral and she was left rudderless. Emma came to regret her lack of learning and embarked on ambitious if not always successful schemes for self-education.
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Tennant's semi-autobiographical account of this period in her life is entitled
Girlitude
: her conception of girlhood alludes to servitude in the sense of feeling imprisoned and defined by others, in spite of her wealthy background. Journalist Jill
Tweedie's middle-class background, though comfortable, was less elevated than Emma Tennant's. Jill was educated in south London at Croydon High School for Girls. A clever girl, she stayed at school long enough to pass her School Certificate at sixteen, but at that point her parents suggested that she should go on to a finishing school in Switzerland. The idea was for her to acquire feminine graces. Jill's teachers shook their heads disapprovingly and suggested she consider university instead. Her domineering father – with whom she had a charged and difficult relationship – poured scorn on this idea. There was no more talk of university.
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Off she went to an expensive establishment in Switzerland where the girls were ‘polished', talked to each other about sex, and learned the art of
repassage
(ironing).
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