Girl Trouble (26 page)

The developmental psychologist Valerie Walkerdine recorded dialogue in a nursery school in the late 1970s, snippets of which were published in an article which was widely read, provoking both horror and recognition among feminists.
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A three-year-old girl (Annie) resisted two four-year-old boys' attempts to grab a piece of Lego off her. One of the boys, Terry, told the girl, Annie that she was a ‘stupid cunt', while the other, Sean, messed up another child's model. The teacher, Miss Baxter, tried to intervene, and then the dialogue proceeded as follows:

Sean: Get out of it Miss Baxter paxter.

Terry: Get out of it knickers Miss Baxter.

Sean: Get out of it Miss Baxter paxter.

Terry: Get out of it Miss Baxter the knickers paxter knickers, bum.

Sean: Knickers, shit, bum.

Miss B: Sean, that's enough, you're being silly.

Sean: Miss Baxter, knickers, show your knickers.

Terry: Miss Baxter, show your bum off.

      [They giggle]
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There was more in this vein, with Sean and Terry continuing to make all sorts of rude suggestions to the hapless Miss Baxter while she helplessly admonished them not to be silly. More effectively than acres of academic discourse, this exchange illustrated how gender politics seeped into the language of (even) the nursery classroom.

Feminist researchers addressed themselves to exploring all dimensions of educational sexism. Much, but by no means all of this work took place in universities. Many organisations
and ‘initiatives' designed to conquer stereotyping mushroomed outside academia. These included groups producing newsletters such as
Cassoe
(Campaigning against Sexism and Sexual Oppression in Education), WedG (Women and Education Group), producing a magazine called
Gen
, and an astonishing array of local teachers' and pupil organisations.
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Many of these were regularly listed in
Spare Rib
, which in October 1978 gave addresses for local Women and Education groups in London, Brighton, Manchester and Sheffield and further recorded a group called Schoolgirls against Sexism.
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The [then] Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) was particularly active, publishing for instance a compendious Anti-Sexist Resources Guide for teachers. Funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission and the School Curriculum Development Committee,
Genderwatch!
was a fat pack of self-assessment schedules through which teachers could monitor their own practice in schools with a view to eliminating ‘sexism'.
79

Feminists both inside and outside academia generated a huge and impressive literature on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s. Sue Sharpe's
‘Just Like a Girl': How Girls Learn to Be Women
was published by Penguin in 1976. In a preface, the author recorded her thanks to ‘all the members of the Arsenal Women's Liberation Group' for their support.
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The book was wide-ranging, paying attention to both social class and race. Most of the girls studied by Sharpe were working class, and at school in the London borough of Ealing. Some of the girls from Asian families found school particularly challenging. Their parents were often anxious about their daughters becoming tainted by Western permissive values. This was a theme explored further in Amrit Wilson's ground-breaking study
Finding a Voice
, which focused on the experiences of Asian women in Britain.
81
Ideas about
sharam
(‘modesty', or ‘shame' in Urdu) and
izzat
(‘family
pride and reputation') could complicate girls' relationships with boys and hence their behaviour in a mixed classroom. On the other hand, sometimes a parental embargo on free and easy relationships with boys encouraged girls to concentrate on their schoolwork.

Sharpe found that most of the girls in her study expected to be married by the time they reached twenty-five years of age. Their occupational ambitions were limited. Her finding was in line with those of researchers in the 1960s, who had similarly emphasised that the majority of adolescent girls saw their futures as entirely bound up with home making.
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Educationalists observed time and again before the 1980s that while girls leapt ahead in the early years of schooling, their performance dropped off dramatically when they reached adolescence. The revival of feminism stimulated important new studies of female adolescence. Up until the 1970s, with a handful of exceptions, studies of ‘youth' had been of boys. Now Angela McRobbie, Jenny Garber, Valerie Walkerdine and other scholars turned their attention to the girls.
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New questions were asked about the impact of popular culture on girls, and their involvement in teenage subcultures. Was girls' apparent loss of interest in school as they reached their teens simply a consequence of their interest in boys and romance?

Angela McRobbie's 1977 study of the teenage girls' magazine
Jackie
started out as an MA thesis in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Reproduced in a variety of forms over the next few years, it was very widely read.
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Jackie
was a publishing phenomenon. First appearing in 1964, its sales rose steadily from 350,000 copies per week to an impressive 605,947 per week in 1976. For over a decade it was Britain's top-selling teenage magazine.
Jackie
was a melange of cartoon
love stories, pop gossip and fashion: what McRobbie described as a claustrophobic and oppressive world of teenage romance. Girls were encouraged to practise looking doe-eyed, pathetic and helpless in order to appeal to boys. Attraction was represented as all about love: there was virtually no sex. The magazine's advice column, retailed by agony aunts ‘Cathy and Claire', had the tone of a sensible grown-up sister. Cathy and Claire were sympathetic and reassuring about many of the issues which troubled adolescent girls: pimples, periods and the like. Family life was acknowledged to be difficult sometimes, but always worth cherishing. Hearts and pink-sugary flowers proliferated. The steamier and grittier conflicts associated with the sexual double standard or the imperatives of adolescent lust rarely got a look in.

Feminists had a field day deploring
Jackie
and its supposedly pernicious effects on the minds of young girls in the 1970s. These attitudes softened slightly in the 1980s, as more scholars began to investigate the appeal of romance literature to women. Writers such as Janice Radway and Cora Kaplan rejected the idea of the woman reader as blotting paper, passively soaking up stories.
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Readers were in dialogue with what they read. The act of reading itself could give pleasure and be an expression of independence for women. However, by the time these new academic approaches were in vogue, the popularity of
Jackie
was waning. In the early 1990s sales fell to a point where the publisher, D. C. Thomson, decided to discontinue the magazine.

Jackie
lost its appeal because teenage girls were becoming more worldly, sophisticated and independent-minded. They wanted to learn more about sex. In 1975 Judy Blume, writing fiction for teenage girls, scored a massive hit with
Forever
, a sensitive portrayal of a young girl's first sexual experiences.
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In
Forever
there were no
dot dot dots
indicating tactful silences, and the bedroom scenes have been termed ‘as detailed as any clueless adolescent girl could hope for'.
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Girls smuggled the book under mattresses or hid it at the back of wardrobes. In spite of repeated attempts to get the book banned in America, over the next thirty years
Forever
went on to sell over 3.5 million copies worldwide.

In place of
Jackie
, in the 1980s girls turned to magazines such as
Mizz
or
Just Seventeen
.
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The editorial tone of these was less patronising than that of
Jackie
, and readers were assumed to have more grown-up tastes. There was less prevarication about sex. New magazines such as
Cosmopolitan
helped to encourage a more open attitude to sexual behaviour. In an issue of the magazine in 1973, for instance, journalist Irma Kurtz suggested that girls needed to experiment more, and that a certain amount of promiscuity should be considered ‘research' into what was conducive to personal happiness.
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It is almost impossible to imagine such a suggestion being made in a popular magazine for women before the 1970s. Encouraged by the success of
Spare
Rib
, some young feminists founded their own magazine,
Shocking Pink
, in 1979.
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This announced its intention to move away from the restrictive, ‘fluffy' formula of magazines such as
Jackie
,
Blue Jeans
and
Oh Boy!
in order to deal with real issues such as sexism and racism in schools.
Shocking Pink
aimed to give space also to issues around sexual identity, especially to young women's experiences of coming out, lesbianism and bullying. The magazine appeared sporadically between 1979 and 1992, the product of ‘collectives' on the
Spare Rib
model.

A collection of young women's writing which had originally appeared in
Spare Rib
was edited by Susan Hemming and published as
Girls Are Powerful
in 1982.
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The contributions were
wide-ranging. A poem by Sarah Hook began memorably ‘I'm a sexist adolescent/ Boys are all I want at present'. There were essays describing experiences of racial abuse, on the age-of-consent laws and on campaigns against John Corrie's anti-abortion bill. A piece by a young woman critical of her Orthodox Jewish upbringing caused a great deal of controversy. The editing collective felt obliged to insert a statement of concern from members of the London Jewish Feminist Group in all volumes sold from that point. To counter any unwelcome stereotyping, they also inserted an additional piece, written by a Jewish lesbian, describing her own family background as a model of liberalism. This kerfuffle was an example of the lengths to which the Spare Rib Collective would go in order to ensure fair-mindedness, or what some would label ‘political correctness', in the 1980s.

Second-wave feminism turned the spotlight on girls' experiences and opportunities at a time when these were undergoing rapid change. This means that it isn't always easy to distinguish cause from effect. To what extent was feminism
responsible
for these changes? Deep-rooted social and economic change in post-Second World War Britain, especially the widening of employment opportunities for women, also played a part in changing aspirations. So, too, did the increased opportunities for young women to control their fertility. It became easier to focus the mind on education when you were in control of your own body. But it is difficult to exaggerate the importance of education. In the first place, the WLM itself was a product of the educational changes which were put in place after the Second World War. Its leaders were the first generation of women in the UK to have been able to experience secondary education as a right, following the Butler Education Act of 1944. Second, a movement towards more equal opportunities had been gaining pace in the 1960s,
with some support from all the major political parties. At the end of the 1960s, the WLM exploded upon the scene, generating massive activity and pressure. Educational feminism became a powerful force in government and educational circles. There was a decisive break with history, in that state schooling moved away from the assumption that girls and boys should be educated for very different roles in life: what the Victorians had understood as ‘separate spheres', or what early twentieth-century policy makers had seen as the male breadwinner/female housewife model. At the same time a plethora of initiatives to promote ‘girl-friendly schooling' ensured sustained attention to the question of girls' achievement.
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Girls did better and better in school. In the 1960s, boys outperformed girls in examinations at sixteen. Then girls drew level. However, from the late 1980s girls began to overtake. Only about eighty boys to every hundred girls were achieving five high-grade passes at GCSE by 1987.
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Girls' ambitions and aspirations expanded at the same time. Sue Sharpe, in a follow-up study to her work on Ealing schoolgirls, originally carried out at the beginning of the 1970s, noticed a marked change. Whereas in 1972, some 67 per cent of the girls in her sample had wanted to leave school on reaching sixteen (or earlier), by 1991 she found the same kind of proportion determined to stay on at school.
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For this new generation, work seemed to offer space for personal development and independence: it was no longer a case of finding any old job for as short a time as possible before marriage. More girls set their sights on higher education too. For middle-class girls, aspiring to university became taken for granted. In the following decade, female undergraduates would come to outnumber their male counterparts in British universities, a trend which would have been unimaginable half a century earlier.
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At school level, social class and ethnic background still made for very different experiences among girls. At the end of the 1980s, the sociologist Ellis Cashmore suggested that for some working-class women the value of education had remained uncertain, guiding them ‘towards domesticity as effectively as if it had dumped them on a number eight bus to Tesco's'.
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But there can be no doubt that for some girls battling poverty and deprivation, school could represent a lifeline. Andrea Ashworth's moving account of growing up in Manchester in the 1970s and 1980s makes this clear.
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Ashworth's family was rent by domestic violence, they had very little money, and a sequence of abusive relationships had propelled her mother into deep depression. School wasn't exactly a bed of roses either. Ashworth's biological father had been half-Italian, half-Maltese: olive-skinned, she was constantly derided as a ‘wog' or a ‘dirty Paki' in the playground. Sharp-witted and clever, she survived. Books were her escape. ‘Anti-sexist initiatives' reached inner-city Manchester. Andrea was good at science, and remembered filling in GIST forms, GIST being the acronym for a project designed to get Girls into Science and Technology. At secondary school she bloomed, and was encouraged to go on to university. Andrea later described how, as a student at Oxford, she had felt ‘that the world opened up like a massive flower'. ‘… it was abracadabra – it was another world'.
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Her education conferred self-respect. It also made it easier for her to write about her experiences, both to come to terms with them herself, and also in a way that she hoped would be of benefit to others.