Summary of Mary Wood-Allen, ‘What a Young Girl Ought to Know’, 1928
(cited verbatim)
the inclusion of these fatuous subjects in her regimen. Sitting in her absurd version of masculine uniform making sponge fingers with inky hands, she must really feel like the punching-bag of civilization. The pre-pubescent girl, however sluggish and confused she may seem to the disenchanted observer, is a passionate creature. The conflicts that she is daily and hourly suffering absorb much of her energy, but she still has enough left to thrill to stories of adventure and achievement and to identify with heroes, male and female alike. Her sexuality is fundamental to these responses, just as it is to her actual genital practices. In the primary school, one may find this excited interest in an innocent and open form, sometimes quite sensual. I remember being warmly kissed once on a visit to a school in Manchester by a horde of little girls and boys, who flung their arms around my neck and snuggled into my fur, pressing questions and gifts indiscriminately. The classes of eleven-and twelve-year- olds that I taught in Australia could generate extraordinary intensity which had its expression in lots of odd ways, sometimes in crushes and rapt idealism, and sometimes in peculiar and deflected experi- ments within the playground community. Sometimes they could perform wonders of orchestrated cooperation in presenting their little plays and projects, or devising ways to recognize a birthday or thwart the school administration. More often they flagged or fell to quarrelling. Most often the authorities intervened because the classes had got too noisy, or because school routine was in danger of disruption. Gradually the scope for embracing, experiencing and expression was being limited as the pattern of submission, rejection
and all the rest that is meant by adaptation was imposed.
It was remarkable that in view of the conflict and the relentless enculturation to which they were subjected, these girls retained so much of their childhood energy and love. Some of its expression was specifically sexual, as the psychologists are prepared to admit, although
they insist that the pre-adolescent girl’s sexuality is masculine, clit- oral and so forth.
1
So they grossly misinterpret the typical adolescent
passion for horses as a reflection of the immature girl’s penis envy. The horse between a girl’s legs is supposed to be a gigantic penis. What hooey! What the young rider feels is not that the horse is a projection of her own physical ego, but that it is an
other
which is responding to her control. What she feels is a potent love calling forth a response. The control required by riding is so strong and subtle that it hardly melts into the kind of diffuse eroticism that theorists like Dr Pearson would have us believe in. For many girls who are beginning to get the picture about the female role, horse- riding is the only opportunity they will ever have to use their strong thighs to embrace, to excite and to control. George Eliot knew what she was doing when she described Dorothea Brooke’s passion for wild gallops over the moors in
Middlemarch
. It is part and parcel of her desire to perform some great heroism, to be free and noble.
Those little girls who wrote passionate love-letters to each other and to me in the schools where I taught had no conscious under- standing of their own passionate and amorphous feelings. Because of the taboos on their expression of these intense feelings, they be- came miserably agitated, sometimes hysterical, sometimes desperate and ridiculous. The feeling was expressed in a distorted fashion, like suppressed laughter, and so it was easily scorned and reviled. The reaction of most teachers to ‘that sort of thing’ is terribly destruct- ive. I have even witnessed the public reading of a child’s love poem, accompanied with sneers and deprecating gestures, as a punishment, while the little authoress stood impassive, feeling the iron enter her soul, waiting for the blessed time when she could escape to the lav- atory and enjoy the obscenity of tears. However liberal a teacher may be she early discovers that the rigid embargo imposed upon physical contact between teacher and pupil must be observed, be- cause the last flame of sexual energy is only
destructive and can only be corrupted, given the wider context and the socializing function of the school. It is an aching nerve in the education situation and will remain so, must remain so, unless our whole sexual orientation is radically changed. To defy it piecemeal can only produce ever greater suffering.
The girl who directs her passion towards her peer is in a better situation than the girl who loves her teacher. It is usual to explain such deep and lasting attachments as the seduction of one girl by another who is especially aggressive, and sexually mature, or as transferred longing for the mother whose closeness is being with- drawn as sexual maturity and oedipal rivalry become pressing
prognoses, or simply as the desire to confide sexual curiosity and share forbidden knowledge.
2
It is dangerous to admit that insepar-
able girls are often fascinated by each other, deeply altruistic and cooperative, and often genuinely spiritual, as well as utterly sexual if not literally genital. If we dignify these relationships by the name
love
, without patronizing diminutions, we imply a set of anti-social corollaries which cannot be allowed. Learning to dissemble these feelings, among the strongest and the most elevated that she will ever feel, is a squalid but inevitable business. However innocently one girl caresses the body of another, she cannot escape the necessity of furtiveness which she intuits right from the birth of her love. Gradually she learns to consider her own feelings in the light of the common appraisal of them and to ridicule and disown them. Such loss is enormous, and brings her much further on the way to the feminine pattern of shallow response combined with deep reserve. From the frank sharing of another’s being she turns to the teasing and titillation of dating, which all the world condones. I can remem- ber a scene with my mother when she discovered a letter written by me to my lover at school, a girl who introduced me to Beethoven by playing his sonatas to me in a dingy annexe where we retreated at every spare moment, who held my hand while we sang harmonies of Palestrina and
Pachelbel in the crack school choir, and pretended I was George Sand and she was Chopin, and vice-versa, a girl who was obliterated by puberty and would end up singing in the chorus of
Damn’ Yankees
. Mother was screaming that I was unnatural: to stem her flow, I re- peated what I had read in the Sunday Supplements, that it was an adolescent homosexual phase, and I was through it anyway. I expi- ated that pusillanimous, lying betrayal of myself and my love for weeks. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
Puberty is when the still struggling woman—child receives her
coup de grâce
. The definition of puberty is difficult; much of the conflict which surrounds it is only arbitrarily connected to the necessary physiological changes. As usual physiology is made the excuse for destiny; contingency is described as necessity. If there have been studies made of the progress through the trauma of puberty by Trobriand Islanders or some such other people who are free from the neuroses which beset not only our society but most others that we know of, their results are not common knowledge. As it is, all that we are constantly aware of is that puberty is hell. It is hell for boys as well as girls, but for boys it is a matter of adjusting to phys- ical changes which signify the presence of sex and genitality, as well as to the frustration of genital urges and the guilt and confusion oc- casioned by nocturnal pollutions and randy fantasies. For the girl it is a different matter: she has to arrive at the feminine posture of passivity and sexlessness. No sooner does her pubic hair appear than she has to learn how to obliterate it. Menstruation must be borne and belied. She has been so protected from accepting her body as sexual that her menstruation strikes her as a hideous violation of her physical integrity, however well she has been prepared for it. This is the time when she will reap the fruits of the whirlwind. All her conflicts come home to roost. If she cannot strike an equilibrium between her desires and her conditioning this is when she breaks down, runs away, goes wrong, begins to fail in school, to adopt
forms of behaviour which are not only anti-social but self-destructive. All observers of female psychology, from Freud and Deutsch to Horney and Terman, agree that the girl’s intellectual and other
abilities suffer a marked diminution during and after puberty.
1
The
slight advantage that she enjoys over the boys in school is lost. Dr Chapman thinks that ‘woman are to be congratulated on being able to traverse this stage of life retaining any semblance of emotional stability’ but what he means by it is yet another discrimination
against women.
2
It is a male chauvinist position to suppose that any
creature that bleeds from the site of its torn-off sexual organ ought by rights to be a maniac. If we listen to what pubescent girls them- selves are saying, we may find ample cause for conflict, without citing the secret ministry of biology.
I have a worry which is too embarrassing for me to seek the advice of my mother. I sometimes feel very lonely and simply long for a boyfriend. I yearn for an experience which I have never known. I know I am very young to be talking about this sort of thing as I am only thirteen but I can’t help it and it reduces me to despair when I think I have so long to wait. Please don’t advise me to forget this desire because I can’t however much I try. My mind runs on it most
of the time. Please help me.
3
What help can there be? The writer of this plea must be convinced that she wants something else. She is already too well aware that such desire she describes is not supposed to exist. When she is fifteen she will have become convinced that it doesn’t. On the other hand, this child’s problem is tailored for solution:
I am the plain Jane in our family and just long for beauty. When I go to the pictures and see the beautiful girls it makes me nearly cry
to think I’m so unattractive. Can you give me any beauty hints?
4
This girl’s uneasiness and shame are the result of the steady erosion of her personality. She is poised on the
brink of a lifetime of camouflage and idiotic ritual, full of forebodings and failure which may be momentarily allayed while she is young and courted only to return with redoubled ferocity when that brief time is over. During the period of puberty the outward manifesta- tions of conflict which may have existed from infancy become more conspicuous—irritability, nightmares, bed-wetting, giggling, lying, shyness, weeping, nailbiting, compulsive counting rituals, picking at sores, brooding, clumsiness, embarrassment, secretiveness.
There is no parallel in the young female groups, limited usually to the school situation, for the intense polymorphous genital activity which characterizes male puberty. The growing girl is encouraged to use her feminine charm, to be coy and alluring, while ignoring the real theatre in which such blandishments operate. Her strong desires become dissipated in passive fantasies, while their connection with sexuality is effectively underplayed or obscured. Kinsey’s sta- tistics that ninety per cent of males masturbated while sixty-two per cent of women have done so at least once, give a very imperfect idea
of the actual difference in the auto-erotic activity of boys and girls.
5
In this critical period a girl is expected to begin her dealings with men, dealings based upon her attractiveness as a sexual object, dealings which can only be hampered by any consideration of her own sexual urge. In these palmy days of the permissive society this situation has given rise to some perversions which are extremely depressing. It is not uncommon for a girl seeking ‘popularity’ or approbation from boys to allow boys to take extraordinary liberties with her, while neither seeking nor deriving anything for herself. The phenomenon of girls agreeing to massage boys to orgasm, or even to let them have intercourse with them in rushed and sometimes squalid or public conditions is an unlooked for but not uncommon result of the inert force of inculcated passivity in the permissive so- ciety. Any Saturday afternoon in a provincial English town one may see groups of girls clad in the uniform of their
accepted image standing about the streets feigning to ignore the groups of boys who express clear scorn for them. Their susceptibility combined with insipidity and dishonesty offers them no ground for genuine intercourse with their male contemporaries. Ironically, the conditioning for femininity which ought to increase the market value of the sex object can and does become the worst devaluation.
When a girl fails to manipulate her sexual situation, as she often does, she turns to guidance for the answer cannot come from herself. James Hemming studied the correspondence sent to a weekly peri- odical magazine, noticing that twice as many letters came from girls as from boys, and most of them, unlike the boys’, were concerned with problems of personal adjustment. He gives a number of reasons:
What accounts for the sex difference is not clear. It may be that boys find it easier to adjust to a society which is still predominantly con- trolled by men in spite of the growing emancipation of women. It may be that problems exist for the girl which the boy escapes because parents are more anxious about their adolescent daughters than about their adolescent sons. It may be that she is more disturbed by the existing confusion of values than are boys. It may be that the girl’s greater facility in expressing herself in words makes her more willing to write about personal problems. Or it may be that what Dr James Suttie called ‘our tabu on tenderness’ makes boys shy about sharing their problems in case this should make them appear ‘soft’. Whatever the reason, all research into problems of adolescence
produces more problems of adjustment from girls than boys.
6
All the cases that Hemming mentions are products of the root cause: the necessity for the adolescent girl to adopt the role of the eunuch. Her seeking guidance is one essential symptom of her abandonment of her autonomy. She has always been subjected to more control and supervision than her brother, and now she is re- quired to adopt the proper feminine passivity and continue her own repression by herself. It is a delicate operation,