Girl Trouble (5 page)

The most successful of the societies aiming to protect young women was the Girls' Friendly Society, also dating from 1875.
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Unlike the more forgiving MABYS, a non-sectarian organisation which, while aiming to keep young girls on the straight and narrow path of righteousness, was also involved in rescue work, the GFS stood for an uncompromising standard of purity.
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Loss of virginity meant loss of virtue and disqualified a girl from being or becoming a member. An early attempt (in 1878–9) to soften this rule, in order to allow work with girls who repented of any ‘lapse from grace', met with opposition from both the founder, Mrs Townsend, and the bishops. The society's aim was to prevent girls from ‘falling'. Upper-class lady ‘associates' took it upon themselves to act in a semi-maternal capacity towards unmarried, working-class girls, perceived to be in danger of being lured from virtue in factories and cities. An Anglican organisation shot through with assumptions about propriety and social deference, the GFS was astonishingly successful in the UK and even internationally, with strong links throughout the British Empire. From a base of 821 branches in 1885 it expanded to a
peak of membership in 1913, with 39,926 associates and 197,493 members in England and Wales.
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Agnes Louisa Money, the Girls' Friendly Society's first historian, defined purity as warfare:

Purity is
a warfare
… and we can but strengthen and arm the young for this warfare by encouraging healthy mental activity. The love of ease, bodily and mental, the love of excitement and pleasure, the habit of having the emotions excited with no corresponding action of the other faculties, an uncontrolled imagination, a craving for escape from monotony and dullness – these are some of the dangers that lay our girls open to temptation.
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As well as setting up networks and relationships, meetings, lodges, residences, a circulating library and various philanthropic schemes, the GFS was responsible for a massive publishing endeavour: regular periodicals such as the monthly
Friendly Leaves
, membership journals, newsletters, tracts and improving literature of all kinds. Agnes Money explained that the aim was to combat the appeal of ‘shilling shockers and penny dreadfuls', the romantic novelettes so easily available in the small shops in side streets at the time.
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In place of the unhealthy excitement offered by these, GFS publications offered uplifting stories of moral endeavour and self-sacrifice, often illustrated with images of female saints, and with floral motifs.

White flowers, of course, carried a special symbolic charge. Snowdrops and lilies were emblems of feminine purity and heavily resorted to by Victorian sentimentalists. A separate group of organisations calling themselves Snowdrop or White Ribbon Bands flourished alongside the GFS from around 1889 to 1912, particularly among factory girls in the North and the Midlands.
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Miss Nunneley, promoter of the scheme and editor of the associated monthly newsletter
The
Snowdrop
, explained that members promised to avoid ‘wrong conversation', ‘light and immodest conduct', and the reading of ‘bad and foolish books'. In place of this last they were treated to heavily moralising stories with titles such as ‘The Angel of the Honeysuckle', or pious poems on true womanhood by Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Reports from various localities showed that Snowdrop Bands held regular ‘Blossom Nights', ‘White Nights' or ‘White Suppers'. Church halls would be wreathed with green and white muslin, ivy, snowdrops or white hyacinths, and the girls would sing snowdrop songs.
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They wore ivory or enamel brooches in the shape of a snowdrop: ‘the white flower of a blameless life'. Both the GFS and Snowdrop Bands adopted the practice of encouraging country members to send bunches of spring flowers to factory girls in large towns. All this flowering-plant imagery became somewhat stretched at times:
The Snowdrop
featured an obituary column under the subtitle ‘Transplanted'.

The ideal of girlish innocence had been given full expression by the art critic John Ruskin in the 1860s: his
Sesame and Lilies
, first published in 1865, contained an essay on the subject of femininity, ‘On Queen's Gardens', which quickly established itself as a classic statement of Victorian thinking about gender.
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Femininity, in Ruskin's view, should be all about self-abnegation, purity and ‘sweet ordering' in the home. Girls were given copies of the text, bound prettily in violet suede or green calf, on anniversaries or as school prizes. Ruskin himself had been generous in distributing copies to schoolgirls, in whose company he delighted. Ruskin's passion for youthful femininity was exemplified in a long-standing adoration of Rose la Touche, whom he first encountered when she was nine years old and proposed
to (unsuccessfully) eight years later. This obsession with young girls could unsettle his aesthetic judgement: he was entranced by Kate Greenaway's prettified drawings of little girls in muslin smocks, for instance, sometimes showing an unhealthy interest in what they would look like without them.
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In the 1880s Ruskin became a keen patron of Whitelands Teacher Training College, in London, instigating an annual May Day celebration whereby the girl students elected the ‘likeablist and lovablist' of their number to serve as May Queen. The girls dressed in diaphanous frocks and garlanded each other with buttercups, dancing around a beribboned maypole.
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Kate Greenaway designed one of the earliest dresses worn by the Whitelands May Queen. The GFS enthusiastically took up this tradition, popularising springtime displays of maidenly skipping around maypoles.

Whatever unease we may feel today about Ruskin's sexual tastes, in the late Victorian and Edwardian years the GFS, along with a host of other girl protection societies, regularly prescribed his essays as improving literature.
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Purity workers set themselves the task of elevating rough girls into modest maidens, or ‘leading giddy girls into the path of safety', as one GFS worker among factory girls in the North of England put it.
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Many of the girls she came into contact with had been ‘very rough, until the GFS tamed them', she admitted. The Reverend Carpenter, representing the Social Purity Alliance, submitted a daunting description of working girls in London:

Let anyone go, for instance, along Commercial Road in the evening and see the awful roughness and want of modesty – the horrible loss of all that we think most tender and beautiful and pure in womanhood – among the rough girls that congregate in that road, and push their way and pass their horrid jokes.
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1.3
The May Day festivities at Whitelands College inspired by the art critic John Ruskin, 1889. Pen and ink drawing by an anonymous student (by kind permission of Whitelands College, University of Roehampton).

1.4
Elsie Ryall, crowned May Queen at Whitelands College in 1911 (photograph by kind permission of Whitelands College, University of Roehampton).

Any contradiction between the idea of girls as frail flowers and girls as warriors for purity tended to be overlooked. Later into the twentieth century, following the years of suffragette militancy and the impressive contribution to war work made by women between 1914 and 1918, this ‘feminine frailty' idea started to wear a little thin. In 1919, for instance, the GFS mounted a full-scale ‘White Crusade': a nationwide Battle for Purity. ‘We are no longer a fold, but an army,' leaders declared. Although the GFS was far too conservative to lend any support to demands for women's suffrage, this new direction seemed to draw on suffrage activism, and particularly on the suffragette genius for display. The GFS leaders, following the suffragettes, mounted pageants and processions, and organised mass meetings and
rallies. At a GFS celebration in the Albert Hall in 1921, for instance, battalions of girls dressed in virginal white and veiled in blue carried banners and processed, with their company forming the Sign of the Cross.
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Many late Victorian moralists saw girls as either innocent, or ‘fallen'. The imagery was white and black. The loss of innocence – that is, of virginity – was generally regarded as a crucial turning point. Salvation Army records of girls and young women seeking shelter with the organisation from the 1880s, for instance, give case histories in the form of completed questionnaires. ‘How long Fallen?' was one of the first questions.
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Even so, the Salvation Army – as its name implied – allowed for reclamation: ‘Has she given evidence of being saved?' asked a question towards the end of the record. In contrast, the GFS made no provision for repentance. Fallen girls could not become members, and members who fell were expelled. Repeated attempts to soften this hard GFS line on chastity failed. Those who pushed for change argued that the chastity rule contradicted the idea of forgiveness and failed in the spirit of Christian charity. But reformers were only successful in changing the rule as late as 1936, and even then this was in the teeth of strong opposition, and many of the old guard resigned.
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In Victorian culture, the fallen girl was doomed. We think of Thomas Hardy's
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
, or of pregnant housemaids drowning themselves in millponds. There are strong associations between the ideas of sexual and of social ruin: as in discussions of white slavery, the stereotypes of upper-class rake and simple country girl come easily to mind. Purity workers in the 1890s and 1900s sometimes shared these assumptions. If the loss of chastity went unpunished by ruin, then many assumed that a fallen girl herself became a danger to others, liable to
contaminate their innocence with her own knowledge of the world. There was a notion that sexual knowledge corrupted once and for all: that once having experienced intercourse, a woman would lose her most precious asset, become knowing, and never regain her virtue.

There was a great deal of sexual ignorance, especially before the First World War. Sex education barely existed in any formal sense, and any idea that it should be taught in schools would have horrified most people. Some feminists thought that girls' ignorance of the facts of life increased their vulnerability. There is a hint of this, for instance, in Elizabeth Robins's novel
Where Are You Going To?
Purity workers were divided on the question. Some believed that knowledge would help forearm a girl and hence protect her virtue. Others felt exactly the opposite: that sex education would inflame curiosity, stimulate impure thoughts, and increase susceptibility to corruption. The perils of going public with ‘radical ideas' on the subject of sex education were illustrated by a controversy which blew up in Derbyshire in 1913.
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Miss Outram, responsible for an elementary school in the village of Dronfield, was teaching Scripture when her pupils asked her questions about pregnancy and childbirth. After giving the matter some careful thought she responded by reading them two stories. The first, heavily laced with references to God, touched on the matter of eggs and seeds and the beginnings of life. The second story was a stern moral warning against temptation, underscoring the importance of chastity and self-control. This was a careful enough response, one might imagine, but parents were outraged and the neighbourhood erupted in scandal. The school managers took the line that Miss Outram had corrupted childhood innocence. Some parents contended that Miss Outram had not only passed unsuitable knowledge to their daughters, but
that these girls had then gone on to exercise a corrupting influence on younger siblings. Many families withdrew their children from the school. The episode illustrates not only the contentiousness of ideas about sex instruction, but also the strength of the widespread belief that innocence actually
depended
on ignorance of the facts of life.