Girl Trouble (25 page)

A research report for the Department of Health and Social Security, carried out by Madeleine Simms and Christopher Smith in 1986, found that teenage pregnancy was still a political football. They pointed out that the majority of teenage mothers came from rather deprived backgrounds, but they emphasised, nevertheless, that the majority of those they studied ‘were delighted with their babies and their way of life and would not have [had] it otherwise'.
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There was a complicated relationship between social deprivation and teenage motherhood, Simms and Smith suggested. For some girls, pregnancy seemed like the only route to self-respect and adult status. If society wanted to discourage teenage motherhood, better opportunities for girls and easier access to contraception and abortion were the obvious way forward.
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The question of whether doctors should prescribe the pill to sexually active girls under the age of sixteen remained difficult.
Most doctors felt that withholding contraceptive advice, or insisting on involving parents against the daughter's wishes, would do more harm than good. Victoria Gillick, a Roman Catholic mother of ten children, thought differently. When in 1980 a DHSS circular gave guidance on the subject which confirmed that the prescription of contraceptives to under-sixteen-year-olds without parental consent should be a matter for a doctor's discretion, Mrs Gillick sprang into action. She objected that doctors who prescribed contraceptives to under-sixteens would be encouraging sex with minors, and, further, that only parents could give consent to medical treatment.
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After temporary success with an appeal court ruling, Gillick lost her case in the House of Lords, but went on battling against what she believed to be the social encouragement of promiscuity among young girls.
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But the reaction against permissiveness could only go so far. The government and medical authorities charged with dealing with sexual health issues could scarcely ignore the importance of sex education, birth control and other public health issues. By the 1980s, panic over HIV and AIDS had added to this agenda. And so had feminism.

What is often referred to as ‘second-wave' feminism really took off in Britain in the early 1970s. The first National Women's Liberation Movement conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford in the spring of 1970. Four demands were originally formulated: equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free twenty-four-hour nurseries. Second-wave feminists saw themselves as building upon the achievements of the suffrage movement. Where suffragists, or ‘first-wave' feminists, had concentrated on fighting for the vote, this new generation would question wider social structures, including the family.

Women's reproductive rights – the right to choose whether or not to bear children – were high on the agenda of second-wave feminists from the beginning. Over the next few years, the political edge of the WLM in Britain was sharpened by a fight against attempts from the moral right to undermine the provisions of the 1967 Abortion Act. Anti-abortionists often resorted to deeply misogynist language, which helped to provoke the ‘them and us' mentality that suffused the pages of the feminist newspaper
Spare Rib
in the 1970s. In 1975, for instance, mobilising support against James White's restrictive amendment to the 1967 Act,
Spare Rib
quoted Alan Clark, then Conservative MP for Plymouth, as having suggested that White's projected amendment would reduce ‘the numbers of au pair girls and sundry slags' from the Continent drifting through the country to have abortions.
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Readers were given a list of MPs ‘who voted against us' on this issue and urged women to start lobbying them.

Our Bodies, Ourselves
, produced by the Boston Women's Health Collective, was first published in the USA in 1971. It quickly established itself as one of the most influential texts of second-wave feminism. A British version, edited by Angela Phillips and Jill Rakusen, was published by Penguin in 1978, and reprinted in 1980, 1983, 1984 and 1986. Praised in the
British Medical Journal
as ‘well-researched, informative and educational for both men and women', this compendious volume soon established itself as ‘a bible of the women's health movement'.
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The book covered a wide range of subjects pertinent to women's health and well-being, including sexual health and reproduction. It gave direct, no-nonsense advice on contraception and abortion, with directions about how to find a clinic appropriate to the reader's needs. It was a mine of information for young women unsure of their sexual preferences and orientation, explaining a
diversity of lesbian and heterosexual practices in a completely non-judgemental and helpful way. The tone was never condescending or patronising. The authors recognised that male doctors could be intimidating. Women should not allow themselves to be controlled, they insisted: they should look upon their GPs as partners and advisers. When first meeting a male doctor, they suggested, a woman should introduce herself and shake him firmly by the hand. This should bring him to his feet. Contact on the level, eyeball to eyeball, was preferable to a situation in which a woman patient approached her doctor ‘as supplicant, when he wearily raises his eyes from writing his notes to give you the once-over'.
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Charlotte Greig, who studied at the University of Sussex in the 1970s, drew upon her experiences for her novel
A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy
, published in 2007.
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The book conveys something of the difficulties experienced by young women in the era of permissiveness and rapidly changing values. Susannah, the central character, is pregnant and agonises over whether to have an abortion. Her friends urge her to visit the university health service. One points out that the doctors on campus are likely to be sympathetic, and even if they are not, the friends can get their women's group to exert pressure. After all, it is a woman's right to choose whether to have a baby or not. ‘This is about control over our lives,' insists the friend. ‘Haven't you read
Our Bodies, Ourselves
?'

‘No I bloody haven't', said Cassie, ‘and I'm not going to. It's all about getting the clap and looking up your fanny with a wing-mirror and a bike torch, isn't it?'
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Ideas about young women not relying on lovers for contraception, taking responsibility for their own bodies, even to the extent of
wresting control from a male-dominated medical profession, and making their own choices, were radical at the time. Autonomy wasn't always easy: a message which emerges strongly from Greig's novel.

There was also the question of continuing double standards. Feminism was less than gung-ho about the joys of permissiveness, although there were differences of viewpoint here.
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In the United States, Gloria Steinem had declared (in the first issue of the magazine
MS
), that the sexual revolution ‘was not our war'. The sexual revolution, she insisted, was a revolution for men, but not for women. Some feminists believed that men proclaimed the joys of sexual freedom to get women into bed with them, and that women, comparatively powerless, found it hard to say no. Others emphasised that for women, sex could never be the emotionally neutral, noncommittal exercise that it was for some men; nor was it ever completely cost-free. Sexual adventure was still riskier for girls than for their male peers: a boy might gain a positive reputation as a Don Juan, or ‘a bit of a lad', while girls were apt to be labelled ‘sluts' or ‘slags'. But while some feminists counted the cost of permissiveness for women, few would have wanted to turn the clock back to the 1950s. More reliable contraception and easier abortion had certainly been liberating. And feminism supplied the opposition to double standards, and the concern for women's well-being, that would challenge the more ‘sexist' aspects of permissiveness. In addition to this, feminist writing opened up discussions about sexual orientation and the sources of women's sexual pleasure.

At root, the WLM, like first-wave feminism, encouraged women to speak for themselves. This was easier in a sympathetic context, which is why small ‘consciousness-raising' groups were a mainstay of the early stages of the movement in the late 1960s
and early 1970s. Participants often recorded a thrill of recognition when they realised that other women shared their experiences and concerns. In this way, the personal was redefined as political. Mary Kennedy, who attended the Ruskin College conference in 1970, remembered that

there was a real buzz of excitement. As a child I had been very angry about being a girl, in terms of the way that I was treated, because the boys and the men had all the power. Then here came this turning point, and we were all able to speak up.
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Feminism blossomed in the 1970s. Simone de Beauvoir's
Le Deuxième Sexe
, originally translated from the French in 1953, was much more widely read in Britain fifteen years later. Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
, a dissection of the frustrations of the American housewife, appeared in 1963 and made a strong impact on both sides of the Atlantic. Most influential of all was probably Germaine Greer's brilliant, belligerent polemic
The Female Eunuch
, first published in 1970.
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This spoke to women of all ages, but its richly witty account of how girls are conditioned to fit ‘the feminine stereotype' probably had particular resonance for the young. No one who read it could forget Greer's advice to girls to try tasting their menstrual blood as a measure of the extent to which they felt comfortable with their own bodies. Forty years later, the journalist Laurie Penny recalled reading her mother's copy of
The Female Eunuch
as a young girl in the 1980s: ‘at the time, it felt like a striplight had been switched on in my mind'.
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The resurgence of feminism helped bring about the Equal Pay Act of 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. These battles for equal pay and equal opportunities for women had
a long history, going back (at least) to the early years of the twentieth century. But ideas about, and indeed, the very concepts of ‘sexual discrimination' and ‘equal opportunities' were being expanded and reinterpreted at this time. In 1968, Edward Heath, as leader of the Conservative Party, had asked Anthony Cripps QC to head a committee to investigate the legal status of women. This committee had produced a report, rather quaintly entitled
Fair Shares for the Fair Sex
, in 1969.
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In 1968 the MP Joyce Butler made the first of her four attempts to get an anti-discrimination bill through Parliament. In 1971, anti-discrimination bills were introduced in both the House of Commons (by William Hamilton) and the Lords (by Baroness Seear). Both bills were referred to select committees.
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Both Lords' and Commons' committees collected ample evidence relating to sexual discrimination. In 1973 the Conservatives committed themselves to legislative intervention. The Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) of 1975 outlawed both direct and indirect discrimination.

The massive amount of investigation, research, discussion, lobbying and controversy which surrounded these developments revealed a variety of viewpoints. Margaret Thatcher, for instance, then Secretary of State for Education and Science, had confessed that she found ‘great difficulty in grasping the practical element of discrimination in education'.
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Others were convinced that schools and universities were riddled with sexist practices. Some of these were pretty overt kinds of discrimination, such as the ‘quotas' limiting the numbers of girls who could be admitted to medical or veterinary schools. Others – such as the existence of single-sex schools and colleges – were more complex. In the strongly male-dominated elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the existence of single-sex colleges in combination with quotas and practical limitations on women's entry came to look
increasingly discriminatory. The processes by which historically all-male colleges came eventually to accept women students (and conversely, previously all-female colleges came to admit men) were extraordinarily tortured and troubled. But this dismantling of centuries-old traditions happened very quickly.
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There can be no doubt that the introduction of the SDA acted as a powerful stimulus and catalyst. Twenty years after the passing of the SDA, there were hardly any single-sex colleges left.

Mrs Thatcher had expressed the opinion that there was virtually no scope for anti-discrimination legislation in schools. She could hardly have been more wrong. One of the strongest achievements of second-wave feminism was its thorough-going scrutiny of the ways in which girls become ‘conditioned' or ‘socialised' into sex roles. Beginning in the family, this process was seen to gain impetus during the school years. First of all there were the differences in the curriculum offered to girls and boys since Victorian times: cookery, needlework, and housecraft for girls; woodcraft and technical drawing for the boys. Sporting activities, of course, were often highly gendered, with girls doing netball, hockey and lacrosse to the boys' rugby, athletics and football. More insidious than these differences in the formal curriculum were the differences in what came to be referred to as the informal, or ‘hidden curriculum'. This meant all the things that might be learned inadvertently: the covert, often taken-for-granted values inherent in organisation, uniform and dress codes, classroom interaction, textbooks and everyday speech. The hidden curriculum came into operation every time a teacher asked the ‘big strong boys' for help with chair shifting, or banned girls from wearing trousers in cold weather on the grounds that trousers didn't look ladylike. It could be observed in boys' domination of teacher time and
playground space. It was inherent in a great deal of everyday classroom speech.