Girl Trouble (31 page)

There was much talk of ‘postfeminism' in the 1990s. Its meaning was ill-defined. Some argued that women had achieved a sufficient measure of equality and that feminism was no longer relevant. Others identified a backlash, or a betrayal. As a political movement, feminism lost clear, cohesive goals, but has been far from disappearing. Something similar happened in the early part of the twentieth century, after the vote was won. There seem to be moments in history when feminism emerges as a force which powerfully impacts on contemporary culture, other times when its character appears more latent and diffuse. Some observers have heralded the appearance of third – or even fourth – ‘waves' of feminism, more global and inclusive in their remit. The impact of the digital revolution has been profound. Where young women in the 1980s and 1990s produced fanzines, their counterparts today turn to websites and to blogging. Keeping in touch with what other young women are thinking has never been easier, and there are exciting possibilities both for self-expression and for making social and political connections.

Founded and originally edited by Catherine Redfern (since 2007 by Jess McCabe), in 2001
www.thefword.org.uk
set out to create a new spirit of community among younger feminists. The American blogger Jessica Valenti's Feministing.com, which also set out to appeal to younger feminists, dates from 2004. UK Feminista, directed by Kat Banyard, was established as a grassroots campaigning organisation with an informative website (
ukfeminista.org.uk
) in 2010. A host of feminist websites in both the UK and North America address everything from how to combat patriarchy (
Iblamethepatriarchy.com
) through body image (
www.about-face.org
) and violence against women
(
www.endviolenceagainstwomen.org.uk
), to women in the media and pop culture (
bitchmagazine.org
). It isn't easy to give a comprehensive account of such a rich and moving picture: some websites prove ephemeral, others take deep root and thrive, but the array is dazzling.

One example of how quickly feminist campaigning has been changing under the influence of new media was the Slutwalk campaign of 2011. What began as a dispute in Canada quickly turned into a series of protest marches across the world. Early in 2011, women in Toronto were outraged when a local police officer suggested to a group of law students that girls might lessen their chances of being subjected to violent rape by not ‘dressing like sluts'. Tired of hearing the victims of sex crimes blamed for their own sufferings, and determined to reclaim the right to dress however they chose, over 3,000 women gathered in the local park before marching in protest to Toronto police headquarters. Many of the women chose to march in ‘provocative' clothing, joyously flaunting their fishnets and cleavage bras. They hoisted banners asserting ‘My Dress Is Not a Yes' and ‘Slutpride'. Assured of massive media coverage, the idea spread like wildfire. There were Slutwalks in New York, London and Melbourne. They stimulated plenty of controversy. In Britain, the right-wing columnist Melanie Phillips denounced ‘these silly girls' for what she described as ‘an international explosion of self-indulgent and absurd posturing'. In Phillips's view, Slutwalks exposed feminism for being ‘well past its sell-by date'.
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Jessica Valenti, on the other hand, celebrated both the energy with which women rejected the ‘dangerous myth' that they invited rape through their ‘suggestive' clothing and the exhilarating speed with which a new generation of feminists could now translate their anger into action.
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8 | LOOKING BACK

Historians often smile wryly at the idea of progress. Societies change, but it is not always easy to judge whether this is for better or for worse. Some Victorians thought that they had reached a high point of human civilisation; others, particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century, were haunted by a despair that things were getting worse.

The Victorian thinker Herbert Spencer judged that a society in which women were ‘freed' from the labour force and ‘protected' by men, so that females could stay within the home and rear children, was an excellent thing. Feminists who sought careers had got things wrong, he asserted, and it was a mischievous idea to think of educating girls to fit them for business or the professions.
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Feminism, in Spencer's view, had probably only come about because there was a shortage of men, and it was unfortunate that some women had to reconcile themselves to the fact that they would never find husbands. The art critic and social reformer John Ruskin would have agreed warmly. In Ruskin's vision, girls were tender beings, like plants needing protection from damaging frosts. They required shelter provided by fathers or husbands, and their main job in life was to sanctify and purify the home. Women who failed to appreciate and to carry out this mission were responsible for all manner of social ills. Young ladies all over the country were presented with prettily bound copies of Ruskin's homilies, and particularly his essay ‘On Queen's Gardens', in
Sesame and Lilies
, for right-minded contemplation of their future as wives and mothers.
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Feminists turned these ideas upside down. Some judged Ruskin sanctimonious drivel.
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The women's movement stood for education, property rights, and what was often seen as an unwomanly involvement in work and politics. This struggle involved protracted battles. Gender politics were never completely straightforward: many men supported women's claims to equal rights, and some women rejected the need for enfranchisement. But in the early twentieth century, as agitation for the vote was stepped up in the face of obdurate opposition, the conflict took on the complexion of a sex war. Around suffragette militancy and the force-feeding of women political prisoners, just before the outbreak of war in 1914, this battle between the sexes reached its most vicious stage.

One of the skills historians can supply is perspective. Girls growing up in late Victorian Britain found their freedom and prospects extremely circumscribed. Experiences and opportunities varied, in the first instance, according to social class. Middle-class girls were often cushioned from the outside world. A young Molly Hughes, growing up in London in the 1880s, was certainly not encouraged to travel on a bus on her own.
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But this kind of ‘protection' depended upon having a father, brothers or other male relatives who could provide. When Molly's father died unexpectedly, she was thrown much more on her own resources. She had to contemplate earning some kind of living, possibly in teaching, and this required a more solid education than that hitherto provided for her by her mother, at home.
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Working-class girls usually had to shift for themselves from an early age, as well as shifting for others. Their childhood was often short: responsibilities for domestic work and the care of younger siblings intruded even before they had the chance of going to school.
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Whatever their class background, girls in late Victorian and Edwardian times shared some experiences in common. They were brought up to think of self-sacrifice as a quintessentially feminine virtue, and to defer to fathers, brothers and male authority generally.
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They were brought up very differently from boys. Any idea that their education should have the same purpose as their brothers' was unthinkable. Girls' opportunities to support themselves were limited. And they had perforce to learn the lesson that as young women their rights, educationally, socially and politically, barely existed.

Daughters who revolted against this situation were commonly regarded as a problem. But the system itself was under strain. There were, after all, the ‘odd women', the ‘surplus women' for whom a husband might never materialise. Both paternal provision – and patriarchy – had their limits: what was to become of those who could not be provided for? To equip daughters with some kind of education started to look like an insurance policy. It was frequently sold as such. But education could and did give girls ideas and self-respect. It might indeed make them strong-minded. Would the strain on the female intellect wreak havoc with girls' reproductive potential? Many physiologists maintained that this was indeed a risk: girl graduates, they warned, might never become mothers. And even if their education hadn't flattened their chests and shrivelled up their ovaries, strong-minded women were widely perceived as having ‘unsexed' themselves.

Women who unsexed themselves by fighting for their rights were regularly portrayed as ugly harridans with slatternly hairstyles: unbalanced, hysterical and devoid of judgement. A comic postcard industry throve on such imagery. Suffragists countered these representations with images of saintly martyrs, dressed in virginal white, often topped with academic robes and mortar
boards to indicate trained intelligence and high-mindedness to boot. For some feminists, men in general became the enemy. Men were the brutish sex, who drank and whored and reduced all women to a state of sexual slavery, often infecting them with unspeakable diseases in the process. Votes for women and purity for men were the twin demands of the Women's Social and Political Union. In this fevered atmosphere, a moral panic about white slavery spread like an epidemic. White slavers were imagined as stalking the streets and lurking around ports, railway stations and even theatre foyers, chloroform at the ready, looking for girls to kidnap and carry off. Urban myths flourished on the basis of endless lurid stories and journalistic exposés. Moralists, religious campaigners, feminists, social conservatives who deemed girls in need of even more ‘protection', and a public ready for titillating scandal all wanted to read more about it.

The First World War slackened constraints, and contemporaries worried about girls on the loose. Flappers and roaring girls replaced the revolting daughters and hysterical suffragettes in the minds of those who bewailed the loss of the old order, which now looked as if it might be gone for ever. Many observers were unsettled by the idea of uppity young women turning their backs on domestic service, painting their faces, and flocking into the cinemas and dance halls. Even worse was the spectre of these brazen hussies earning good wages at the expense of deserving ex-servicemen and the fathers of families with many mouths to feed.

In popular demonology, the pleasure-seeking flapper was gradually replaced by the good-time girl. The good-time girl was seen as out for what she could get; she exploited men, was probably promiscuous, and certainly a danger to health, home and family. Social workers and medical professionals helped
the media to construct a stereotype, so that there would be no mistaking her. This spectre of the good-time girl continued to haunt respectable society in the post-1945 world. Crimes committed by young women were comparatively rare, but when they did occur, they claimed disproportionate media attention and allowed for a great deal of public moralising. Young women who were judged to wear too much lipstick and ‘flaunt' fur coats and nylon stockings provoked head shaking and muttered tut-tutting. A common moral judgement was that such hussies ‘had it coming to them'.

In the 1950s and 1960s there was growing concern about new forces in society with potential to lead girls astray and turn them into rebels. These included American crooners, jukeboxes, coffee bars and jazz cellars, Teddy boys, and rock 'n' roll. The Profumo affair troubled the establishment male: upstarts such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were disconcertingly eager to contact the newspapers and to speak up for themselves. They were apparently shameless and could bring a man down. In respectable middle England, even away from the excesses of the metropolis, a burgeoning teenage culture threatened to exclude parents altogether from any supervision of courtship: daughters were increasingly perceived as out of control and as running after the wrong kind of men. Bad boys with raw sex appeal gave middle-class fathers headaches: their intentions didn't look particularly honourable. There was no National Service any more to knock them into shape, nor was it apparent that these youths had prospects. Films such as
Beat Girl
played on horror stories of an aimless generation of youngsters, the girls, like the boys, out for kicks, contemptuous of family values, and dicing with fast cars alongside their reputations.

Pre-marital pregnancy and illegitimacy were still sources of
great social shame. Young people were marrying at much younger ages than before the Second World War, and some of these unions were shotgun marriages, with pregnant brides. Social tensions arising from these new patterns of behaviour were reflected in a marked increase in the 1950s in the number of parents – largely fathers – who tried to have their daughters made wards of court. The courts complained that they could barely cope with this rise in demand for their services. Magistrates were further frustrated by the alacrity with which appellants tried to undo such arrangements for wardship once it became clear that a daughter was actually pregnant. Even a bad choice of son-in-law was seen as better than an illegitimate grandchild. Dissatisfaction with the way wardship cases were clogging up the courts was one of the main reasons why in the late 1960s there was reconsideration of the age of majority. After the Family Law Reform Act of 1969, young women were no longer classed as ‘infants', and could marry even without parental consent, from the age of eighteen.

By the time that the age of majority was reduced from twenty-one to eighteen, the pattern was again changing. Beatlemania had swept the country, and young people were caught up in the story of Swinging Britain. The contraceptive pill was allowing young women to experiment with sex without having to risk pregnancy. Legalised abortion meant that fewer of those who did conceive out of wedlock felt that they had no choice other than to marry. The seemingly relentless fall in the age of marriage which had characterised the 1960s halted, and even went into reverse. Young women grew more independent still, increasing numbers of them going off to university or living in flats and bedsits, away from the watchful eye of parents. This new, ‘permissive' social ethos elicited a variety of responses: some girls
experienced it as liberating. Others, particularly in retrospect, confessed that in some ways they had felt more pressured into sexual encounters with men. But by the 1970s, a flourishing women's liberation movement made it easier to speak out and to share stories. It also provided support for young women's views, of whatever persuasion.