Girl Trouble (9 page)

Even those who had heard of Girton and Newnham thought them infected resorts whose products must emerge pitted for life by the intellectual smallpox they would be bound to contract, a disfigurement that would unfit them for the marriage market.
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Pervasive unease about higher education for women received a potent new stimulus in the 1900s. This came from a ‘theory' of female adolescence advanced in America by the writer G. Stanley Hall. Hall's snappily entitled two-volume study
Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education
first appeared in America in 1904, and was widely read in Britain.
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This book, together with Hall's other writings, echoed earlier arguments that adolescence was a particularly hazardous time for young women.
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Hall argued that adolescence for boys was a time for adventure and exploration. Boys grew towards self-knowledge and began to acquire an adult identity. Girls, on the other hand, were incapable of acquiring self-knowledge. Their lives were ruled by ‘deep unconscious instincts'. A girl's self-consciousness was only ‘the reflected knowledge that others have of her.' Women never really outgrew their adolescence, and a girlish charm was integral to attractive womanliness.
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Hall's tone is both mawkish and creepy. The socialist politician
Margaret Cole once memorably described John Ruskin's writings as both idealising and ‘slobbering over' girls.
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Hall's prose is remarkably similar. He refers to the young girl as a ‘backfisch', ‘a fresh fish, just caught but unbaked, though fit and ready for the process'. She is ‘wild with a charming gamey flavour'. When not implying through food imagery that he's set to gobble them up, he describes girls as ‘fillies', ready for breaking in.
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The normal adolescent girl, according to Hall, was recognisable by her clothes consciousness, whimsicality, unconscious flirtatiousness, fads, fickleness, weepiness, giggling, coquetry, passion for secrecy, and most of all, strong distaste for study. In his view this was a self-protective instinct which should be respected by educators. Girls should be protected from too much brainwork until they had crossed ‘the Rubicon of menstruation'.
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All their energies should be conserved for this. While their periods were regularising themselves, girls should ‘lie fallow', Hall insisted, and ‘let Lord Nature do his magnificent work of inflorescence'.
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For a psychologist, Hall seems to have been remarkably unselfconscious about the drift of his imagery. But the idea of ‘Lord Nature' (instead of the more commonly imagined ‘Mother Nature'), going about his inflorescence was not just an unconscious slip. Women teachers, he insisted, were not to be entrusted with adolescent girls.
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The intellectual ambitions which had qualified them for college teaching marked them out as unwomanly degenerates. They would give girls the wrong ideas, burden them with dead knowledge and turn them into pedants. Feminist teachers in particular would spoil girls for marriage and maternity. Girls should be taught refinement, dance and domesticity. Most important of all, their schools should be governed by men. At least one ‘wise, large-souled, honourable, married
and attractive man' should be present on the staff of every girls' school. If possible there should be several male mentors.
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This, to Hall, was part of the natural order of things.

Hall's penchant for fluffy-minded girlishness contrasts vividly with the vehemence with which he attacked what he saw as feminine deviancy. ‘Abnormal' girls were represented as vampires, a source of ‘vile corruption'. Every school had a number of girl pupils who were ‘little animals … infecting boys with vice'. It wasn't difficult, he suggested, to understand why societies in the past had gone in for witch-burning: the loose woman

becomes a veritable vampire, a curse to the race, whom primitive people in so many lands have burned or drowned with heavy weights in water or smothered in quagmires.
85

Hall went even further. Girls ‘exposed to city temptations' were responsible, he judged, for the white slave trade. Boys whom they seduced might sell their knowledge to pimps and purchasers. And white-slave agents often preyed upon girls on probation, even if sexually innocent, offering them inducements to escape surveillance.
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This suggestion deftly wove together elements from two of the moral panics around girls in the 1900s, the idea of education as damaging to femininity, and that of the unprotected girl falling victim to sex traffickers.

Many women were revolted by Hall's writing. In America, M. Carey Thomas, President of Bryn Mawr women's college, confessed that her reaction was visceral. Addressing college alumnae in 1907, she insisted that over a lifetime's reading on the position of women she had never come across any book so degrading to women as Hall's
Adolescence
. At the time, she recalled, she had been terrified ‘lest I, and every other woman with me, were doomed to live as pathological invalids in a universe merciless
to women'. Since then, she and others had come to realise that ‘it is not we, but the man who believes such things about us who is himself pathological, blinded by neurotic mists of sex'.
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Hall's biographer, Dorothy Ross, provides evidence to back this up: Hall was uneasy about masculinity and conflicted about his own gender identity.
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Projecting women at half their size seems to have allowed him to feel more of a man.

But whatever Hall's personal insecurities, his professional impact was considerable. His theories were endorsed and quoted approvingly by many psychologists, educationalists and youth workers over the next couple of decades. Women teachers were given regular warnings about the dangers of overstraining their pupils with intellectual work. Dr Janet Campbell, for instance, a medical adviser to the Board of Education, warned her colleagues not to expect too much in the way of maths from girls:

Lessons requiring much concentration and therefore using up a great deal of brain energy, mathematics, for instance, should not be pushed. With some girls it is well to discontinue one or more subjects for a time if they begin to show signs of fatigue, and the subsequent progress will fully justify this action. Such subjects as cookery, embroidery or the handicrafts may well be introduced into the curriculum as they cause comparatively little mental strain.
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At a more popular level, books such as A. B. Barnard's
The Girl's Book about Herself
(1912) affected a tone of intimacy between writer and reader, warning girls against ‘excessive devotion to books' and other such ‘tomboyish' behaviour. Growing girls shouldn't tax their brains, Barnard scolded; they should ‘put away the trigonometry and do some needlework'.
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More insidiously, girls who persisted in study were likely to
be labelled psychologically deviant. They were seen as refusing to accept the feminine role. As the first President of the American Psychological Association, Stanley Hall encouraged both Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung to lecture in the United States and was influenced by their approach. His research students were encouraged to ponder the unconscious psychological meanings of ‘rebellion' in young women. One of his favourite pupils, for instance, Phyllis Blanchard, went on to study the psychology of adolescent girlhood. She argued that self-sacrifice and masochism were the basis of ‘true womanhood'. Much of the rebellion in adolescent girls would be outgrown, Blanchard suggested, as they came to terms with their limitations as females. Feminism, she averred, was nothing but a colossal ‘masculine protest', a ‘power goal of the neurotic'.
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Blanchard's work wasn't widely read, although several of the more popular writers on adolescent girlhood in the 1920s and 1930s refer to it.
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In the years of social unrest before the First World War, there were plenty of observers who were keen to belittle suffragettes as hysterical or neurotic.
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Or as man-hating lesbians. Blanchard's arguments would have struck a chord. All these ideas about the fragility of adolescent girlhood, and the need to wrest control of girls' education out of the hands of deviant and possibly perverted feminists, were to return after the war.

3 | BRAZEN FLAPPERS, BRIGHT YOUNG THINGS AND ‘MISS MODERN'

Both the First and the Second World Wars brought dramatic change in the social position of women in Britain: they were periods of widening opportunity alongside terrible loss. The two decades between these wars were marked by great uncertainty about ‘the modern girl'. Who was she? Should she be celebrated or deplored? The characteristics of the modern girl became a source of endless fascination in the press, in literature, and on the cinema screen.
1
These discussions were inevitably bound up with ideas about the desirability and meanings of social change.

It is often assumed that women ‘earned' themselves the right to the vote by their patriotic behaviour in the First World War. The Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) called a halt to militancy when war broke out in 1914, and over the next four years women's contribution to the war effort proved them competent and reliable in all manner of trades and activities formerly thought ‘masculine'.
2
But getting the vote can't simply be seen as a reward for war work. It was effectively withheld from the mass of younger women who had worked in munitions and other wartime industries. The women enfranchised in 1918 were over thirty years of age. Even among this group, a property qualification meant that many unmarried, professional women living in rented accommodation found themselves excluded. It has been estimated that only about one in fifteen of the women in paid employment were entitled to vote in the 1920s. It was to take another ten years of lobbying and campaigning before
women gained the right to vote on the same terms as men. In the meantime, many politicians expressed misgivings about whether girls under the age of thirty were sensible enough to be trusted with full citizenship, and discussions about the implications of ‘the flapper vote' were commonplace.
3

The word
flapper
had rich associations. It suggested a young bird flapping its wings, learning to fly. Some held it the equivalent of the German
Backfisch
, often used to denote a young adolescent girl. Others suggested that
flapper
referred to a girl's pigtail, flapping loose down her back, before she was of the age when she would be expected to put up her hair. The word might suggest tomboyishness. It almost always connoted liveliness and spirit, with suggestions of movement, dancing, jazz and frivolity. These days the word
flapper
conjures up images of long beads, cigarette holders and the charleston. But some scholars have pointed out that from the late nineteenth century the word
flapper
had been slang for a young prostitute. So in the 1920s, the term was ambiguous: it denoted a young woman sometimes innocent, sometimes anything but.
4

A heightened anxiety over young women's sexual behaviour can be traced from the outbreak of war in 1914. With the declaration of hostilities, people took to the streets. Women were said to have become hysterical. Mothers no doubt panicked about the safety of their sons. Younger women were said to have turned into wartime nymphomaniacs.
5
Soldiers were sexy. In the previous century women who were attracted to soldiers in their regimental coats were said to have suffered from ‘scarlet fever'. Now, an epidemic of ‘khaki fever' was allegedly sweeping the country.
6
According to one observer, girls ‘went out like cats on the tiles and shrieked madly'. This remark emanated from travel writer Mrs Alec Tweedie, who continued:

They wanted to mate. Anything would do … Every woman wanted a male creature to cling on to like a winkle. Every man wanted to talk to a woman and —— but few wanted to marry them.
7

The turmoil associated with troops, travel and new working conditions brought opportunities. Ties of family control and supervision were loosened. Camps grew up where soldiers were in transit, and munitions factories mushroomed across the country. Girls were said to flock to the camps in order to flirt with soldiers, and some were alleged to have behaved outrageously.

It was in this context that ‘the flapper' came to be seen as a social problem. Clergymen, women police officers and a variety of voluntary groups set out to intervene. Middle-class women, some of them feminists, set up ‘patrol committees'. They walked round parks in the evenings, interrupting romantic assignations and turning torchlight on anyone caught canoodling on benches. Young girls might receive a stiff talking-to about respectable behaviour and national duty. Most of these flighty youngsters were not morally bad, insisted Mrs Tweedie, merely ‘temperamentally unbalanced', and ‘not playing the game'. Nonetheless their behaviour was seen as dangerous; they were risking not only their own reputations, but the health and safety of young men. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, was horrified by the prospect of young men returning from the trenches to be met by ‘giggling, glad-eye flappers' on the streets of London.
8

Baden-Powell's passion for scouting hadn't always extended to the feminine side of the movement. It is said that when he turned up to inspect boy scouts at the first large official rally in London's Crystal Palace in 1909, he was acutely embarrassed to
come across a party of girls in khaki shorts, calling themselves ‘girl scouts' and demanding inspection alongside the boys. In Baden-Powell's worldview, ‘manliness' called for a clear demarcation and distancing from anything female. Anxious to save scouting from feminine contamination, he hived the girls off to form a separate movement, the Girl Guides. The Guides were put under the tutelage of his sister, Agnes Baden-Powell, who could be trusted to encourage more ladylike behaviour. Agnes dutifully set out to feminise the tomboys. One of the first steps was to suppress the patrol names chosen by the girls themselves. Wildcats, Foxes, Wolves and Bears became Roses, Cornflowers and Lilies of the Valley. It was said that there was muttering resentment about this among the girls.
9

Agnes's notions of acceptable femininity recalled Ruskin. Guides were subjected to homilies about the importance of home making and encouraged to crochet pillow lace.
10
Even her brother must have realised that her cloying prescriptions were outdated. A way out was at hand. In 1912 the fifty-five-year-old Robert married the brisk-mannered, twenty-three-year-old Olave St Clair Soames. They moved to Sussex, where Olave became scoutmaster of the local troop, assisted by the family's housemaid and gardener. After a reorganisation, Lady Baden-Powell became Chief Commissioner of the Girl Guides in 1916. Eighteen months later she was elevated to the title of World Chief Guide. Her work in this capacity was to stretch over the next forty years.
11

Olave set out to deal with flapperdom. In
Training Girls as Guides
(1917) she breezily emphasised that the question of ‘Our Brazen Flappers' needed urgent attention. Britain's strength depended upon its mothers and its homes, and girls were the mothers of the future. Flappers played hard and fast with freedom and

Familiarity with freedom is apt to make a girl blasée. When she has learnt the ABC of sin it is but a step towards the first primer of vice.

… the flapper is growing brazen. She is out in the world, sometimes at a pretence of war work, but often as a mere butterfly enjoying her escape from the chrysalis of childhood, and she is meeting with temptations and dangers without having learned how to resist them. She revels in flag-days because they offer the great chance. ‘Won't you buy a flag?' has taken the place of ‘May I introduce myself?' And the flapper is sharp enough to see her advantages.
12

There is a great deal in this vein. Flappers are castigated for ‘aiding nature by eyebrow pencil and lip-salve, powder puff and rouge-pot, at an age when such things should not exist for her'. The charges were multiple. Flappers were precocious, they were too young to be interested in sex, or to be obsessed with young men. They were a danger to these young men, they were on the downward slope, they would grow up into rotten mothers.
13
How could this be remedied? The Girl Guide Movement set out to train girls in character and responsibilities. Guiding encouraged fresh air and backbone. Girls were encouraged to throw themselves into nature work, camping out, war-service activities, nursing and VAD work. Guides made sandbags and collected sphagnum moss for bandages. Guides enjoyed healthy competition and developed community-mindedness. Guiding would ensure the development of a new generation of healthy, clean-minded, patriotic mothers.

Khaki fever was a temporary phenomenon, but concern about flappers continued through the 1920s, merging into wider preoccupations with modernity, the party-going ‘bright young
things' of the 1930s, and the modern girl. There were many aspects of the modern girl which attracted attention. Her hair, her dress and her demeanour, to start with. Then there were her habits (especially drinking and smoking), her tastes in leisure (dancing, cinema-going, and sunning herself in lidos), her taste in men, her sexual proclivities more generally, her feminine frivolity. Or, indeed, her
lack
of feminine frivolity. Girls with Eton-crop hairstyles and sharply tailored suits were equally cause for concern. In Britain between the world wars, just about everything thought characteristic of modern girlhood was subject to scrutiny and debate. The popular press was obsessed with the subject.
14

3.1
Was the modern girl reassuringly old-fashioned at heart? Cover image from
The Girl's Favourite
magazine, March 1927 (courtesy of the British Library).

3.2
Pyjama-clad, cigarette-smoking flapper. Postcard image by the French artist Achille Lucien Mauzan, produced in 1918 in Milan. The stereotype of the flapper was widely recognisable (by kind permission of Gabriel Carnévalé-Mauzan).

The appearance of the flapper or modern girl in the 1920s was distinctive in that it was a sharp break from Victorian and Edwardian tastes. Cropped hair shocked an earlier generation for whom long tresses had been a hallmark of femininity. In the nineteenth century, a range of rituals had grown up around hair brushing and hair care, and the moment when a young girl exchanged ribbons and braids for hairpins and ‘put up her hair' was still an important rite of passage, signifying grown-up womanhood. Short hair – whether ‘shingled, bingled or bobbed' – was widely interpreted as looking boyish, or as an act of outright rebellion.
15
Parents might be horrified, and some girls were punished for cutting their hair. The future aviator Amy Johnson, aged eighteen, cut off her plaits and her father punished her by making her stay on for an extra year at school.
16
The artist and writer Kathleen Hale (author of
Orlando the Marmalade Cat
) recorded that she narrowly missed being expelled from university for cutting her hair during the First World War.
17
Cosmetics were another bone of contention. Many Victorian ladies associated powder and paint with the dubious morals of streetwalkers, theatre and music hall performers. But after the war, young women turned to cosmetics with enthusiasm.
18
Lip rouge, powder puffs and kohl-rimmed eyes were the hallmarks of flapperdom. The more conservative were appalled, Baden-Powell among them. As early as 1917 an article in the
Girl
Guide Gazette
(entitled ‘Women Slackers') had proclaimed:

The ‘Flapper', while she consumed quantities of sweets and tied her hair with astonishing bows, was amusing enough. But in her new manifestations, as she expands towards the costliest of silk stockings, smokes numberless cigarettes, and makes up with paint and powder as if to go on the stage
in a revue chorus, she stands for tendencies that the more experienced man or woman knows to be undesirable from every point of view.