Authors: Carol Dyhouse
Girl Trouble (13 page)
As a young woman the future writer Elspeth Huxley left her home in Africa in 1925 to embark on a degree course in agriculture at Reading University. She was interested in sex, although, she later wrote, âwe were all nervous about starting babies, and if things got as far as that, more inhibited than girls later became about checking up before-hand that our partner had a french letter'.
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Elspeth was frank about her own fumblings with sexual partners â during walks on the towpath to the village of Sonning, or lying among boats in the dusk after Henley Regatta. One went as far as one could, while avoiding going the âwhole hog'. But it wasn't always just about prudence: there was also a shortage of opportunities. âIt was not religion or morality that kept most of us relatively chaste, but lack of facilities,' she insisted.
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Young women of âadvanced views' were beginning to
experiment. This was clearly the case in intellectual and artistic circles, especially in London. Victorian prejudices about it being acceptable for men to sow wild oats before marriage, but not women, were everywhere being challenged â especially in an environment where marriageable men were in short supply. Even before the First World War there had been rumblings of a new kind of thinking. The popularity of a play by Walter Houghton called
Hindle
Wakes
, first performed at the Aldwych in 1912, illustrates this.
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The play centres on the story of a mill girl, Fanny Hawthorn, who has a fling with her boss's son over a holiday trip to Llandudno. Her parents discover this, and all hell follows. Fanny's mother determines opportunistically that Alan, the factory owner's son, must marry her daughter. But Alan is engaged to another girl, from a wealthy background: it is clear that the night with Fanny was âjust a bit of fun'. The two families meet to decide how to put things right. Alan's father reluctantly decides that his son should do the honourable thing and marry the girl he has slept with. But any chance of this botch-up solution coming about disappears when Fanny, an intelligent and independent-minded girl, speaks out for herself. She refuses, point blank, to be pushed into marriage with Alan. Fanny has come to see Alan as a bit of a wimp. She admits that going to bed with him was no more than a bit of fun for her too.
Hindle Wakes
enjoyed a long run in London and was filmed four times over the next thirty years â twice as a silent film, in 1918 and 1927, with sound in 1931, and again in 1952. It was also to be televised in 1976. Its message was clearly particularly potent and relevant for audiences between the wars.
In bohemian and literary circles all kinds of experiments were going on. âSapphism' and male homosexuality (the latter illegal) were perfectly acceptable to many. The âBright Young
Things' sometimes flirted with drugs as well as downing cocktails; their escapades and wild partying became the stuff of press exposures and comic novels.
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A more telling guide to what was going on in this milieu in the 1930s can be found in Nerina Shute's autobiography
We Mixed
Our Drinks
.
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Shute at nineteen was a typist, bored by her work and ambitious to try journalism. She aspired to be bohemian rather than ladylike. With her friends, she cultivated an image of sophistication and outrageousness, but confessed that this often functioned as a cover for insecurity. Sexual confidence was particularly hard to acquire. She recalled âthe sheer awkwardness of being a modern girl and at the same time, a virgin'.
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Shute wrote for
Film Weekly
and secured a contract with the
Sunday Graphic
for a regular diary series written by âan ultra-modern girl'. She was encouraged to shock. In place of valentines, she wrote, young women were now discussing contraceptives. Equipped with a volume of Marie Stopes, she determinedly set about losing her own virginity, and later experimented with bisexuality. She bleached her hair blonde. Carefully made-up, she dressed to look like a film star, or glamour girl, walking along Bond Street with a gardenia in her buttonhole and a small white poodle tucked under her arm.
3.6
âMiss Modern' resplendent in her cutting-edge swimsuit. Cover image,
Miss Modern
, August 1934 (© IPC Media 2012; courtesy of the British Library).
Shute worked for a while as a publicity manager for the American cosmetics firm Max Factor. She was fascinated by the potential of cosmetics to alter appearance, marvelling that âshe was changed by make-up and peroxide and expensive suits into a modern person who caught the eye'.
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But she was never easy about this deliberate creating of illusion, later abandoning the attempt to look like a glamour girl.
Shute's memoir probes beneath the surface of what it meant to be labelled âa modern girl'. A magazine which targeted young women, the first issue of which appeared in October 1930, provides more insights. The magazine, published by George Newnes, was called
Miss Modern
. It ran for ten years, ceasing publication after the outbreak of the Second World War in 1940.
Miss Modern
was a highly attractive publication which addressed girls as independent-minded, competent young women, with a regular wage packet, and an interest in relationships and style. âAt last I have found a paper that doesn't waste half of its space on housekeeping and baby affairs,' wrote one reader appreciatively.
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The paper was up-to-the-minute in its advice on fashion, with film star Madeleine Carroll writing a regular column on beauty and cosmetics. It carried adverts for soluble sanitary towels, alongside knitting patterns for bathing costumes and knitted
dressing gowns with feather trimmings. There were patterns for sewing every kind of garment, from office frocks to satin beach pyjamas. Much of this must have been beyond the means of the majority, but they could still dream. The girl on a tight budget was provided with helpful hints such as how to make jewellery out of split peas, or by stringing nutmegs into necklaces and painting them gold. There were endless debates about the modern girl. It was assumed that the majority of young women still hoped to marry. But adverts for personal insurance and pension schemes encouraged girls to look after themselves if they didn't. There were fewer torrid romance stories in
Miss
Modern
than in some of the contemporary magazines produced for young women. In 1938 a story called âFlowering Desert' warned that
No woman who awakens the desire of an Arab sheikh can ever feel secure â for love in the desert is passion unleashed, more bitter than sweet, more humiliating than rapturous.
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âWhat are you marrying
for
?' asked an article in the same issue, advising readers to consider their goals. Was it love/security/children/loyalty/shared interests or companionship they were after? Women needed to be clear about what they wanted. It was no good sulking later because a newly acquired husband turned out to be âa plodder' in the business world.
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Miss Modern might dream of romance, and find pleasure in imagining a more luxurious way of living. But she was encouraged to keep her feet on the ground â and her eye on the road â nonetheless.
4 | GOOD-TIME GIRLS, BABY DOLLS AND TEENAGE BRIDES
In the mid-1930s the Home Office did what it could to head off a minor moral panic about girls. There had been a spate of headlines in the British newspapers deploring âImmoral Little Girls', âShameless Little Hussies' and so forth. A 1934 issue of the
Daily Express
inveighed against âGirls under 16 Who Tempt Men', adding âThey have neither morals nor manners, says a Judge.'
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The judge in question was Mr Travers Humphreys, who had presided over a case against a sixteen-year-old errand boy at Wiltshire Assizes. The boy had been charged with sexual offences against a thirteen-year-old girl. Mr Justice Humphreys was in no doubt that the girl was the more sexually experienced of the pair and that she had âled the boy on'. He considered it iniquitous that the boy should be criminalised while the girl was let off scot-free, and he wrote to the Home Secretary to explain his position.
2
The newspapers used the case to sound off about moral depravity in young girls. Then the Archbishop of Canterbury decided to get involved, writing to the Home Office about whether he should bring up the issue in the House of Lords.
3
Officials in the Home Office were tactful. Travers Humphreys was gently reminded that the recent Children and Young Persons Act of 1933 allowed local authorities to send girls who were considered in need of care and protection to âApproved Schools'. The girl in question in the 1934 case had in fact been sent to Walcot Home for Girls in Bath.
4
The Archbishop of Canterbury received a full and careful reply to his letter. The Home Office conceded
that girls under seventeen who were âout of parental control and beginning to lead a loose life' posed a problem for the authorities since they often found it hard to settle in approved schools. They frequently ran away from these institutions and it was difficult to know what to do with them. The letter suggested that the archbishop might consider calling a small conference to consider some of these matters, rather than simply fanning the flames of more scandal and publicity.
5
The Archbishop of Canterbury convened his symposium on âLax Conduct Amongst Girls' at Lambeth Palace in April 1935. Dr A. H. Morris, architect of the 1933 Children and Young Persons Act, attended on behalf of the Home Office. Representatives from the Salvation Army, the Church Army and various youth associations were also there. There was a great deal of vague talk about whether sex education and the availability of contraceptives should be seen as a problem, or as a solution. The archbishop thought that something might be done by stopping the needless advertising of contraceptives. One or two people thought that the age of consent to sexual intercourse should be raised to eighteen. The meeting petered out inconclusively, which was just what the Home Office had predicted.
6
More liberal attitudes to female sexuality were seen as causing new problems. Gladys Mary Hall's study of prostitution in the 1930s emphasised the enormous changes in attitudes to sexual morality which had taken place since the Great War. The book's introduction conceded ruefully that âBetween the old bogies of Victorian prudery and the new bogies of sexual promiscuity it is not easy to see and think clearly.'
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Hall defined prostitution to include âpaid and unpaid forms of sex promiscuity'. She maintained that professional prostitution was in decline. This was because women were becoming much more adventurous about sex. It
was becoming part of courtship. Many young women were ready to go to bed with their boyfriends in exchange for gifts, meals out, or a motor-run.
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Men much preferred this arrangement. Professional prostitutes, Hall concluded, were being replaced by amateurs.
9
Hall's way of looking at this subject, like that of so many of her contemporaries, made the relationships between young women, consumption and pleasure suspicious in a
moral
sense. There was little evidence, Hall insisted, to show that poverty was driving women into prostitution. However, there was ample evidence to show that they slept with men to obtain luxuries. Young women hankered after fashion, particularly âdress, drink, dainties and gay times'. Hall cited the psychologist Cyril Burt's work on female delinquency, in which (as we saw in the previous chapter) he claimed that very young girls often became âhabitual little courtesans' for the sake of sweets.
10
The âjoy-ride girls', the flappers bent on weekend pleasure, were transmuted in the public imagination into the âgood-time girl'.
11
The good-time girl was âno better than she ought to be'. She had probably had her head turned by watching too many Hollywood movies. She was likely to wear cosmetics and cheap perfume, and to dream of owning a fur coat. With the outbreak of war in 1939 the kind of anxieties around girls' behaviour with servicemen which had been evident during the previous world war resurfaced. Posters warned of peroxide-blonde harpies preying on soldiers for favours. There was widespread concern about âvenereal disease' (VD) reaching epidemic proportions in the armed forces. When American servicemen arrived in Britain, anxieties intensified and acquired another dimension.
12
Would English girls throw themselves at well-fed and healthy-bodied American GIs with good teeth? Would they trade their virtue
for nylons and chewing gum? And what about
black
American servicemen? Fears of miscegenation â âthe spectre of half-caste babies' â were again close to the surface.
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