Girl Trouble (21 page)

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The young journalist Katharine Whitehorn photographed for
Picture Post
alone in a bedsit warming her toes by the gas fire (1956) (© Bert Hardy/Getty Images).

The image of the ‘dolly bird' in ‘Swinging London' became emblematic of Britain in the 1960s. Girls began to dress differently from their mothers, in Quant-inspired dolly-dresses, high boots and miniskirts. The writer and publisher Alexandra Pringle described the ‘Chelsea girl' of the sixties as having ‘confidence, and it seemed, no parents'.
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New kinds of magazines appeared, catering for these younger women:
Honey
in 1960, followed by
Petticoat
and
Flair
.

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Miniskirted dolly birds shopping in a boutique on London's fashionable King's Road, 1960s (© Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images).

Sex and the Single Girl
was widely read in Britain before the
contraceptive pill became generally available. Girls still went in fear of unwanted pregnancies and the social shame that continued to be associated with single motherhood. Nevertheless, studies of teenage sexual behaviour pointed out that in spite of these fears, more young people were experimenting with pre-marital sex, whether ‘heavy petting' or ‘going the whole way'. G. M. Carstairs, a professor of psychiatry and regular commentator on teenage sexual behaviour, estimated that 11 per cent of sixteen-year-old boys and 6 per cent of sixteen-year-old girls had some experience of pre-marital sex.
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Among eighteen-year-olds, the proportion rose to 30 per cent of boys and 16 per cent of girls. Carstairs took his figures from Michael Schofield's study
The Sexual Behaviour of Young People
, carried out in the early 1960s. Such studies showed widespread acceptance of the idea of pre-marital sex among the young, even though a double standard
persisted in that many still professed to believe that a girl should be a virgin as she went to the altar.
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Schofield emphasised the ‘tremendous prominence of marriage as an immediate goal in the lives of many teenage girls'.
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In the first half of the 1960s, the age of marriage was still falling, especially among working-class girls. This was a period of transition. The rise of ‘permissiveness' – a newly tolerant and relaxed attitude to sexual mores – brought difficult adjustments. Girls might find themselves in a quandary about sexual behaviour, not sure how to square risk with reward, how to embrace experience without falling victim to double standards and the often unforgiving strictures of traditional morality.

The cultural emphasis on the sexuality of young girls which had been apparent in 1950s representations of Lolitas, Baby Dolls and nymphets showed little sign of abating. Interest in sex and the single girl easily extended to an interest in sex and the schoolgirl. This interest was sometimes literary, sometimes social-scientific, sometimes prurient. James Barlow's novel
Term of Trial
(1961) focuses on the story of a down-at-heel schoolmaster, one of whose young female pupils falls in love with him. She tries to seduce him. When he refuses to sleep with her she is peeved and accuses him of having attempted to assault her sexually. His career goes down the tubes as a result. This tale of masculine vulnerability in the face of schoolgirl precocity was turned into a film, starring Laurence Olivier, Sarah Miles and Simone Signoret, in the following year.
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If anything, the 1960s accentuated the association of schoolgirls with soft porn. Cartoon artist Ronald Searle's hugely popular portrayals of schoolgirls at St Trinian's school dated from the 1940s.
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Searle's original drawings featured daemonic, calculating little monsters and subversives. The various film versions
inspired by his original vision (1954, 1957, 1960, 1966 and later 1980, 2007, 2009 and 2012) show increasingly sexualised images of the schoolgirls.
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During the 1960s their skirts get shorter and their gymslips tighter with noticeably bulging bodices. (In the later versions we get stocking tops and cleavage.) The film
The Yellow Teddy Bears
(1963), alternatively titled
Gutter Girls
, took this further with a tale of schoolgirl promiscuity in the fictitious Peterbridge Grammar School, where girls signified and celebrated the loss of their virginity by wearing yellow brooches in the shape of teddy bears.
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One of the girls, Linda, fears she is pregnant as a result of a fling with the school's window cleaner, Kinky, a would-be pop singer. Much more amusing, but scandalous at the time, was
The Passion Flower Hotel
, a novel by ‘Rosalind Erskine', first published in 1962.
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This featured girls discussing breasts, men's preferences for tarty types, and
Lolita
over packet soup in the history library at a posh girls' boarding school. As narrated by the resourceful Sarah Callender, the girls demonstrate their entrepreneurship and interest in widening the curriculum by forming ‘The Syndicate', a venture designed to foster sexual experimentation with pupils at a neighbouring boys' school. Like the boys, the girls admit to a healthy degree of sexual curiosity. Some prove skilful at striptease and adept in the construction of louche stage personalities (‘Miss Gaby de la Gallantine' and ‘Princess Puma'). In general, individuals of both sexes prove rather too self-conscious to get up to very much.
The Passion Flower Hotel
became an immediate best-seller. It was, of course, written by a man. ‘Rosalind Erskine' was in fact Roger Erskine Longrigg, educated at Bryanston and Magdalen College, Oxford, a graduate in modern history and the son of a brigadier.
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Given the pervasiveness of 1960s representations of teenage sexuality, it is not surprising to find that girls were often unsure
about how to relate to boyfriends. In their investigations, Schofield and his colleagues were concerned to find that unmarried girls were often reluctant to use contraceptives. They preferred to leave the responsibility to male partners. But they weren't generally insistent on their boyfriends using contraceptives either. Why was this? It was partly because such calculation was felt to look brazen and hence ‘unfeminine': girls liked to look ‘innocent' and didn't want to create the impression that they were experienced, or too ready for sexual experience, in case it gave the wrong signals.
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There was a great deal of shyness and reticence. Equally, many girls feared that if they approached family doctors for advice on birth control, they would be interrogated about their morals instead. This was indeed often the case, even well into the following decade. The writer Janice Galloway described in the second volume of her autobiography,
All Made Up
, how she and her fiancé approached a doctor for contraceptive advice in the late 1970s only to be treated to a lecture on the importance of abstinence. Janice became pregnant, and had to endure an abortion, not long afterwards.
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Doctors in university health centres often took a liberal line on contraception. Even so, there were many ‘casualties'. In 1969, Anthony Ryle, of Sussex University's health service, argued that unplanned pregnancies were the source of a large proportion of student casualties, estimating that around 10 per cent of women students became pregnant during their three years as undergraduates.
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Studies of female students at the University of Aberdeen in the early 1970s showed that a disturbingly high proportion of female students with active sex lives took no precautions whatsoever against unwanted pregnancy.
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So, were young women the casualties of permissiveness or its beneficiaries? It is certainly possible to argue that girls benefited
less than boys from the softening of conventional standards of morality in the 1960s. But ultimately they gained a great deal. Sexually active young women in the 1950s had lived in constant fear of pregnancy. A whole clutch of novels and autobiographical accounts of the period have attested to this. The novelist Penelope Lively, reflecting on her student years in Oxford in the 1950s, described how the fear had inhibited contemporaries:

in those pre-Pill days grim tales of clandestine abortion haunted us all. There was much scared and private counting of days and watching of the calendar. Each of us knew, or knew of some girl to whom it had actually happened: that awful realization, the nausea, the panic. This was no climate of sexual liberation – it is strange now to think that the sixties were only ten years off.
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As the sixties progressed, student demands for more easily available contraceptive advice grew more vocal.
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Discussions about unwanted pregnancy became much more open. Pressure for reform of the law on abortion also mounted nationally.
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The Abortion Law Reform Association had existed since 1936. In a landmark case, two years later, gynaecologist Aleck Bourne had tested the then legal ruling that abortion could only be justified if the life of the mother was in danger by terminating the pregnancy of a highly distressed fourteen-year-old who had been gang-raped by a group of British soldiers. Bourne was tried and acquitted, thereby establishing a precedent for abortion in cases where a woman's physical and mental health was considered to be at risk. Reliable statistics on abortion in this period are difficult to come by. However, in most post-1945 discussions of the subject there was agreement that whereas middle-class women might find access to ‘legal' and hygienic abortion, albeit at a
price, working-class women had to rely on self-help, or ‘backstreet' practitioners. The toll of suicides, botched abortions and septicaemia was alarming. Home Office statistics suggested that annually, thirty to fifty women were dying as a result.
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In 1967 the Liberal MP David Steele introduced a private member's bill which succeeded in getting abortion law reform through parliament: several previous attempts had failed. The 1967 Abortion Act made abortion legal, under certain conditions and with the signatures of two doctors, up to twenty-eight weeks of pregnancy.

By the end of the sixties, then, young women had more control over their own fertility than ever before in history. The pill was widely adopted as the preferred contraceptive choice for young, unmarried women as well as wives. Abortion was no longer inextricably associated with illicit transactions involving fistfuls of pound notes and seedy rooms in backstreets. These choices were by no means universally available, of course: much depended on social class, education, and where one lived. But the number of women benefiting from such changes has led historians such as Hera Cook to conclude that we should think in terms of a sexual revolution.
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From the end of the 1960s, sexuality became increasingly separated from reproduction. Girls could experiment, sexually, without the constant fear of pregnancy. This undermined fatalism, and gave much more scope for personal development and career planning. In the universities before the end of the sixties, female students had tended to be looked upon as a class apart. They were seen as needing special supervision and disciplinary arrangements lest they get pregnant and cause trouble for the authorities as well as themselves.
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These fears began to recede from the early 1970s on.

If young women were coming to enjoy a greater sense of independence and control over their lives, this was in part also
a result of more general trends. There was a great deal of discussion in the 1960s about the age at which young people could be considered adults. Teenagers were maturing physically at earlier ages: girls were reported as reaching puberty on average at thirteen and boys at fifteen years of age. They were better-educated and better-off than teenagers in previous generations. They were increasingly independent and inclined to get stroppy when treated as children. And yet the law of the land, in England (though not in Scotland), defined young people under the age of twenty-one very precisely as ‘infants'.
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