Girl Trouble (24 page)

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

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.