Girl Trouble (11 page)

Foley had a number of jobs. Her account makes it clear that hardship and poor conditions were easier to bear than the loss of identity, and the stigma of having to wear cap and apron. One of her most telling experiences was as a maid in College Hall, a hostel for girls studying at University College, London in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Winifred made the mistake of talking to a friendly Canadian undergraduate, and was reprimanded. Having a conversation with a student was seen as socially assuming, ‘getting above herself'. She was bitterly humiliated by this reprimand. On the verge of tears, she consoled herself by singing the ‘Red Flag' and recalling her father's socialism. Then she walked out of the job.
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‘Mary Smith', who told her story to youth worker Pearl Jephcott, during the Second World War, left school aged fifteen in 1936.
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She found work hard to get, and resented the fact that those who interviewed her at the Junior Employment Exchange wanted to push her into domestic service. After a short stint as a shop assistant, Mary tried dressmaking, but hated it. Rather
than enrol at the local ‘junior instructional centre', generally known as the ‘dole school', she was persuaded to try work as a housemaid with a family known to a friend. This proved a disaster. She was expected to be a general skivvy for eleven people, and found the work extremely hard. Reduced to tears time and again, Mary recorded that what hurt the most was that she was forced to eat her meals by herself, in the kitchen, while the whole family sat in the living room. After a couple of days she left and threw herself on the mercy of the dole school.

Stories like this were common, but choices were opening up. It is significant that both Winifred and Mary were able to abandon domestic service, that they found other options. After the dole school, Mary found more congenial work in a laundry, and eventually started training as a nurse, which had long been what she had really hankered after. Winifred worked as a waitress and found her own bedsitting room: she lived frugally for a while, but relished her freedom. Jobs in the service industries were becoming more plentiful with the expansion of chain and department stores. Restaurants such as Lyons' tea shops and corner houses provided meals for the growing army of white-collar workers in cities, and employment for the waitresses who worked in them. At the same time, new factories were mushrooming in the Midlands and the South of England. These began to produce electrical goods and domestic appliances on a large scale. They manufactured synthetic fibres and chemicals, or were dedicated to food canning and processing. A large proportion of those who worked on the conveyor belts and assembly lines in these new industries were young women.
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Through the 1920s, cinema newsreels and newspaper stories featured women entering all kinds of work and distinguishing themselves as aviators, engineers, stunt drivers and Channel
swimmers. Even if times were hard, these stories acted as a tonic. It seemed that there was very little that women couldn't do, if they were only offered the opportunity.
Hutchinson's Women's Who's Who
, a bulky volume published in 1934, provides an impressive compendium of the range of work, both paid employment and voluntary public service, carried out by women. It provides lists of individual women working in medicine, schools, universities, accountancy – everything from engineering to silver fox fur breeding, angora rabbit farming, or growing violets in flower nurseries, feeding the new cosmetics industry.
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Several organisations set out to encourage girls with careers advice, either through employment bureaux or through regular newsletters and directories. The feminist Ray Strachey chaired the Cambridge University Women's Appointments Committee in the 1930s. She also threw her energies into organising national initiatives such as the Women's Employment Federation, helping to find work for educated girls. By the mid-1930s the the middle-class-oriented
Daily Mail
was publishing articles with headings such as ‘Sixty Women with Unusual Jobs'. These included women working as harbour officials, stockbrokers, aviators, farm bailiffs and piano tuners.
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There was no shortage of role models, since the popular press exulted in stories of ‘women firsts': the first woman barrister, the first woman to swim the English Channel, to fly across the Atlantic, and so forth. This celebration of female competence was very much in evidence in portrayals of women drivers and aviators. Even schoolgirl story annuals ran features on girls learning to drive and familiarising themselves with sparking plugs and oil cans. Women doctors and teachers often purchased their own cars and were keen motorists. In novels of the time, a modish independence is conveyed through the image of a woman's hands
on the wheel. In Winifred Holtby's
Poor Caroline
, for instance, the heroine Eleanor de la Roux dons a pair of leather gauntlets and drives herself to London in search of career opportunities and training. She is highly educated and a competent mechanic, as well as being ambitious for power and worldly success.
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Women rally drivers and aviators exuded the same qualities of intrepid femininity. After graduating from the University of Sheffield, the young Amy Johnson found herself unenthusiastic about her career prospects and frustrated in love. The thought of school teaching depressed her. She persuaded her father to pay back the grant she had accepted from the Board of Education in return for a pledge to go into teaching.
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Amy's lover Hans refused to marry her, in spite of all her efforts at persuasion. She was stunned when she learned that he had married someone else – another graduate her own age, already pregnant with his child. Amy betook herself to London and embarked on a hectic lifestyle to numb her sorrows. She took to hanging around an airfield in Stag Lane and fell in love with the idea of flying. She also bought a car: a dark maroon two-seater Morris Cowley, borrowing money from her father to finance her purchase. She discovered that she enjoyed tinkering with engines. Amy Johnson was the first woman in Britain to be awarded a ground engineer's licence. She earned herself a place in history in 1930 when she undertook her solo flight to Australia in a Gipsy Moth biplane, affectionately named
Jason
. Amy was glamorous. She had dyed her hair blonde and was petite with a girlish figure. This, combined with her somewhat reckless courage, endeared her to many. The newspapers were full of her. A number of popular songs (including ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy') celebrated her exploits. In 1932 the
Daily Mirror
reported that when young girls visiting Madame Tussaud's waxworks exhibition were asked whom they
would most like to emulate when they grew up, they put Amy Johnson high on the list. (First choice was the First World War heroine Edith Cavell, then Amy, both ahead of Joan of Arc, who took third place.)
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Flying lessons were relatively cheap in the 1920s and 1930s. It was said to be possible to obtain a pilot's licence after some eight hours of tuition. Once qualified, you could hire a plane for around £1 per hour. Even so, this was well beyond the reach of the majority. Ordinary working-class girls, inspired by Amy, took to having themselves photographed in simulated aeroplanes, a facility which became popular at funfairs or as a seaside attraction during the 1930s.
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Opportunities for leisure and pleasure expanded enormously between the wars. Girls with regular jobs and pay packets were major beneficiaries. They flocked to the dance halls. There were ballrooms, dance halls and dancing schools in all major cities. The Palais, the Ritz and the Locarno were household names. Hotels and even department stores offered afternoon tea dancing. Fashionable new dances and jazz rhythms with catchy names (the black bottom, the lindy hop, the boogie-woogie), generated a dizzy succession of ‘crazes'. Jazz mounted in popularity, especially in bohemian circles.

Then there were the cinemas. On screen, the ‘serial queen' melodramas such
The Perils of
Pauline
or
The Exploits of Elaine
had proved immensely popular with munitions workers during the Great War.
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Featuring the intrepid heroine Pearl White, these films celebrated both the dangers that threatened young women and the resourcefulness and pluck with which they overcame them. Films depicting the romantic entanglements of girls who succeeded in making spectacular marriages were usually crowd-pullers. After the Great War, cinema-going became a passion among many girls and young women who thought nothing
of seeing films twice or even three times a week. The films got bolder and glossier, featuring sultry-eyed vamps, masterful sheikhs and cruel-featured Arab lovers. Female audiences swooned over Valentino, and learned a lesson or two from screen heroines with ‘It' (sex appeal) who were resourceful enough to make sure they got their man. ‘Cinemagazines' (short feature or news films) such as Pathé's
Eve's Film Review
catered explicitly for
female audiences and reported on the latest fashions and news affecting women in a light-hearted and gossipy manner.
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Hollywood cinema supplied screen goddesses and glamour. Its impact on British audiences was immense. Young women's habits of consumption were changed for ever as they eagerly copied the fashions in clothing, cosmetics and hairstyles which they studied in the picture palaces. A whole new genre of film magazines, from
Girls' Cinema
to
Picturegoer
and
Film Fashionland
, provided extra sources of information about these trends.
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3.3
Amy Johnson, pioneer British aviator in the 1930s (photograph© Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images).

3.4
Girls inspired by Amy Johnson's exploits could pose for photographs in simulated aeroplanes (postcard image from 1930s ©collection of Tom Phillips, courtesy of copyright holder).

Dancing, cinema-going and a raft of new magazines targeting young women expanded opportunities for indoor pleasures. There were new facilities for outdoor activity too. The bicycle, emblematic accessory of the new woman in the 1890s, became increasingly affordable by those on modest incomes. Cycling clubs were immensely popular among young people. Camping out in the countryside had particular appeal. Girls growing up between the wars often recorded memories of bonfires and sleeping in the great outdoors as a time of happiness and freedom. The range of physical activities thought appropriate for girls expanded, as women took up rowing, athletics or gymnastics. Some joined the Women's League of Health and Beauty, founded in 1930, which held that ‘movement is life' and encouraged synchronised exercises in the open air.
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Swimming and sunbathing became common pastimes. The knitted – and later ruched and elasticised – bathing costumes of the inter-war period looked daringly revealing to contemporaries. Lounging about on the beaches, or on the sun-decks of the new open-air lidos which were built across Britain in the 1930s, provided new opportunities for flirtation. It wasn't long before the press stoked up controversy about the seemliness of mixed bathing among the young.
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Indeed, all these new forms of leisure provoked anxiety in
some quarters. There were those who found the idea of mixed bathing improper and deplored the fashion for bodily display. Others followed the Arabella Kenealy line and argued that competitive sport damaged femininity. Reading University's Vice Chancellor, W. M. Childs, had fretted himself silly about whether rowing and sculling were safe sports for women undergraduates. His successor Franklin Sibly inherited his concern. Women students had to produce medical certificates and written permission from parents before they were allowed to go on the river, and racing against male crews was strictly forbidden.
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Cinema-going aroused all kinds of concern. Cinemas were dark places. Romance on the screen might give people ideas and what was to stop them getting up to no good in the back row? Even the posters advertising film showings were considered ‘lurid and distasteful'. Young girls were sometimes considered to put themselves in moral danger simply by going to the pictures. Mary Allen of the Women's Police Service contended that young audiences were ‘aroused to breathless excitement' in their seats. ‘They shout with fear and terror and dance about in their places.' There was a danger of young people becoming ‘over-sexed', she thought.
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The National Council of Public Morals had set out to investigate the influence of cinema on the young in 1916–17, and fears of this kind were much in evidence.
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The concerns were amplified over the next couple of decades. Cinemas themselves became bigger and more luxurious, with deep-pile carpets and exotic fittings. They were places where people could dream, and escape temporarily from the hardships of everyday life. Moralists worried that Hollywood glamour would lure girls astray. Seduced by their desire for luxury, they might become restless gold-diggers, painted hussies, scornful of homely virtues.