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Voorkant Dyhouse 'Girl trouble - Panic and progress in the history of young women' Carol DYHOUSE
Girl trouble - Panic and progress in the history of young women
London: Zed Books, 2013, 314 blzn.;
ISBN-13: 978 17 8032 5552

[Weer alle mogelijke dankbetuigingen. Slecht teken, vind ik. Iemand die braaf is en sociaal en getrouwd. Ugh ...]

(1) Introduction

"In what ways are girls better off in Britain now than they were in Victorian times? Whereas in the past girls were schooled for home duties and pushed into domestic service, they are now educated along much the same lines as boys. And they do extremely well in education, at both school and university levels. As far as work opportunities go, young women have many more options than their mothers had, and certainly vastly more choice than their grandmothers. Many liberties are taken for granted: political rights, the freedom to move about the city, to drive cars, to operate bank accounts, to enter into contracts, to take out loans and to manage financial affairs. All this would have been unimaginable in the 1890s, and even in the 1950s and 1960s bank managers (then all male) routinely refused to grant young unmarried women the mortgages that would have allowed them to own their own homes. Up until the 1970s, opportunities for sexual self-expression were limited. Girls were generally assumed to be in pursuit of husbands. They were expected to remain chaste before marriage, and anything else – especially unmarried pregnancy – brought social shame and a prospect of doom. Today, most girls in Britain have much more control over their bodies and their sexuality.

This is not, by any means, to assert that everything in the garden is rosy. Young women today face many problems. Some of these are new, and some are depressingly familiar. There are still ‘double standards’ of sexual morality, for instance. Boys have more licence, and they get away with much more. Young women suffer more than men do from bullying, and from sexual violence. And girls are too often expected to be perfect in every way: at school, in work and behaviour, and in the way they look. Subjected to such pressures, they can turn their anger and a sense of powerlessness, or lack of control inwards, resulting in eating disorders and depression.

A great deal of contemporary writing on girlhood has been gloomy in tone. Young women are represented as the victims of all manner of social trends: of capitalism, of consumerism, of body obsessions, of ‘sexualisation’ and pornography. Girls themselves come under attack for behaving badly: as alcohol-swigging ‘ladettes’ or as narcissistic ‘living dolls’. They may be represented as defenceless innocents or as brainless Barbie-doll impersonators, floating in a fluffy cloud of self-obsession, sparkly pink, and fake tan. Several academic writers have argued that the language of ‘girl power’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘choice’, often used in accounts of the recent history of girls, has served as a smokescreen, obscuring deep-seated inequalities and oppres- sion. Scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Jessica Ringrose, Anita Harris and Marnina Gonick, for instance, have suggested that a liberal discourse of ‘freedom’ and ‘opportunity’ can disguise the fact that realistically, there are far too many girls in even the developed world who enjoy very little of either." [mijn nadruk] (1-3)

Volgt een inhoudsoverzicht.

"Chapter 7 moves into the contemporary world. It scrutinises the popular celebration of ‘girl power’, and asks why so much contemporary writing has represented girls as the casualties, rather than as the beneficiaries, of progress. " [mijn nadruk] (7)

(11) 1 - White slavery and the seduction of innocents

[Dit verhaal is me wel bekend en vertelt me niet veel nieuws.]

"Many commentators would see the late Victorian outcry over white slavery as a moral panic. This outcry did not just occur in Britain. By the early 1900s, public anxiety about the white slave trade in North America and Europe too had swelled almost to hysteria. During the period 1899 to 1916 there were regular national ­ and international meetings and conventions dedicated to suppression of trafficking. Through the zealous campaigning of W. A. Coote, the secretary of the National Vigilance Association, Britain played a leading part in this international movement." [mijn nadruk] (18-19)

['Many' 'Would see' ... Was dat onterecht dan?]

"Public pressure succeeded in bringing about a new Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1912, which tightened provisions against brothel keeping, procuring and those living on immoral earnings. It gave increased powers to the police, and provided for the flogging of male procurers. "(22)

[Dat is dus typisch voor een 'moral panic'.]

"Feminists were increasingly divided on the issue. For some, the term ‘white slavery’ had become coterminous with prostitution and the sexual slavery that they believed men inflicted on women. Others were uneasy about seeing the majority of men as sexually dangerous and the majority of women as victims." [mijn nadruk] (23)

[Toen al dezelfde tegenstrijdige opvattingen die je ook vandaag de dag kunt aantreffen. Een aantal critici toonden na onderzoeken met de feiten aan dat het allemaal niet waar was. Je kon alleen maar concluderen wat Bilklington-Greig concludeerde:]

"All this led Billington-Greig to denounce what she dismissed as ‘sedulously cultivated sexual hysterics’, premised on the notion ­ that all men were vicious while women were ‘imbecilic weaklings’. ­ F. S. Bullock thought that the level of public anxiety and the mass of scare stories gave a completely false impression of the dangers facing girls and women on the London streets. In the main he thought the panic a ‘curious result’ of press attention to the supposed existence of a white slave trade. The dedicated work of his special department in its first twelve months had brought no evidence of any organised trafficking in the capital."(24-25)

"Foreigners were particularly suspect: the white slavery obsessions of the 1900s fuelled a wave of xenophobia directed against Jews, Italians and Chinamen."(27)

[Typisch en ook van alle tijden.]

"Those involved in campaigns against white slavery saw themselves as crusaders fighting a Holy War in the name of ‘social purity’. An enormous amount of individual and collective energy went into late Victorian and early Edwardian campaigns for social ­ (effectively a euphemism for ‘sexual’) purity.quot; [mijn nadruk] (27)

"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."(33)

"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." [mijn nadruk] (35)

['Some'? Dat ligt nogal voor de hand. Dat je daar nog over zou kunnen twijfelen.]

"To Royden and her co-authors, the way forward was through education, social work and careful studies of the circumstances leading some girls into prostitution. Their own study is something of a landmark in understanding not just prostitution, but the sexual behaviour of young women of the day. The case histories in Downward Paths provide snapshots of the circumstances and options facing individual young girls in the 1900s. The girls in Downward Paths have agency: however difficult their circumstances, they are not just victims, and they do make choices in their lives. Their stories dispel the high drama associated with tales of ‘falling’ and ‘ruin’. They are life histories seen not in moral terms of black and white, but in human terms, with many shades in between. Maude Royden was equally well aware that the furore over white slavery owed a great deal to the rise of the women’s movement." [mijn nadruk] (39)

"With hindsight, then, it was no coincidence that the moral panic about white slavery coincided with the rise of the women’s movement, and particularly with the militant campaign for women’s ­ suffrage. At a time when women were undoubtedly getting stronger, and becoming more assertive politically, it suited a range of interest groups, for very diverse reasons, to represent girls as frightened, as oppressed, or as victims. "(41)

(42) 2 - Unwomanly types: New women, revolting daughters and rebel girls.

"The British campaign for women’s suffrage grew out of a new mood of self-assertion among women. This new mood was clearly evident in late Victorian society, and it was reflected in controversies over ‘the woman question’ and ‘the new woman’ in the 1890s. Part journalistic and fictional stereotype, part a reflection of social trends, the hallmark of the New Woman was that she rejected the mid-Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House. She would not be content with domesticity and self-sacrifice. She sought self-development instead. " [mijn nadruk] (42)

[Reacties waren natuurlijk vaak negatief. Maar zeker niet alleen.]

"Daughters hungered after education and travel, seeking wider horizons. But the wise mother, Mrs Crackenthorpe insisted, knew the importance of protecting her daughter’s innocence and reputation, and hence her chances of marriage."(43)

"Alys Pearsall Smith (soon to become the first wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell) was hot in her defence of the daughters, who, she insisted, had a right to lives of their own. She thought that too many girls were forced to sacrifice themselves to household duty, frittering their lives away on trivialities. It was a form of mental starvation. Others agreed with her."(43)

"There is a brisk tone about the writing of these ‘revolting daughters’. Their arguments are robust and unapologetic. This in itself reflects the strength of the late Victorian woman’s movement."(44)

"Much had been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century. There had been significant progress in widening opportunities for both the education and the employment of women. Political agitation had centred on married women’s property rights, child custody arrangements, the fight for a single standard of sexual morality, and of course demands for the vote. "(44)

[Veel feministes en 'revolting daughters', maar er waren grenzen: ]

"Millicent Garrett Fawcett, for instance, loftily declared that free love had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism." [mijn nadruk] (51)

[Nee, getrouwd zijn / blijven met een conservatieve man, dat is feminisme.]

"The New Woman, even if not a Girton Girl, was likely to be highly educated and to have a mind – and a voice – of her own. For anti-feminists, this was part of the problem: in their view, womanliness required gentle submission. Vociferous critics of the New Woman genre saw its heroines as desexualised, victims of an overblown passion for learning. They condemned this literature as decadent, morbid and hysterical.
By the 1890s, the gains that women had made in education had unsettled many. There was growing unease about whether education made girls unladylike."(51-52)

"To castigate clever young women as self-deluded egotists was common enough. But late Victorian anxiety about the ‘unsexing’ effects of higher education extended further, into pseudo-science. From the 1870s onwards, doctors and evolutionary thinkers started ­ to raise the possibility that higher education was dam ­ aging to women’s bodies. One of the earliest to think along these lines was the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who suggested that high-pressure education might enfeeble women and render them unattractive to men." [mijn nadruk] (54)

"Like Clarke, Maudsley kept referring to ‘the woman’s apparatus’, meaning her reproductive system. Girls had to rest during adolescence in order to let their ‘reproductive apparatus’ get started. If they insisted on study, their energies were diverted, and these bits might atrophy. (...) In England several doctors fell over themselves to agree with Clarke and Maudsley."(55)

[En opnieuw zetten de medici zich in om conservatieve waarden en normen te verdedigen met pseudo-wetenschap en nep-deskundigheid.Verzet van de kant van de vrouwen bleef dan ook niet uit.]

"Among women, there was widespread mistrust of professional men – doctors, academics and clergymen – some of whom had played an important strategic role in frustrating women’s access to higher education. This mistrust combined with a growing disillusionment with male politicians to foster a new and less compromising phase in feminism after 1900. This was the era of the ‘rebel women’, some of whom focused their entire lives on fighting for the vote. A determination to fight with ‘deeds, not words’ reflected impatience with the lack of progress brought about by many years of careful argument and persuasion. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded in Manchester in 1903, with Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel taking a leading role in its affairs. It marked a new departure and a new resolve." [mijn nadruk] (58)

"Between 1900 and 1914, feminism swelled into a mass movement, loud and impossible to ignore. There were spectacular demonstrations and processions – the suffrage procession mounted for the Coronation in 1911 numbered some 40,000–50,000 women and produced some stunning pageantry and street theatre. It was estimated to have been seven miles long."(59)

Suffragettes uit de arbeidersmilieus werden veel slechter behandeld dan die uit de middenklassen / van de gegoede families.

"In her book Rebel Girls, the historian Jill Liddington has shown how magistrates were often at a loss to comprehend the motives of working-class women activists, particularly the younger suffragettes."(61)

"If girls were showing spirit and rebelliousness before 1914, there were also signs of backlash and repression."(64)

(70) Brazen flappers, bright young things and Miss Modern

WO I leidde tot grote veranderingen voor vrouwen, o.a. tot (een zeer beperkt) stemrecht in 1918. Pas tien jaar later werd het algemeen stemrecht.

"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." [mijn nadruk] (71)

[Typisch. Mannen onder de 30 waren dat dus wel?]

"Younger women were said to have turned into wartime nymphomaniacs. 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."(71)

"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."(74)

Ze droegen hun haar kort, gebruikten make-up, en meer van die dingen.

"A concern for ‘the future of the race’ became widespread as the new, pseudo-science of eugenics gained adherence among a variety of political groups including socialists, conservatives and feminists."(78)

"Popular eugenics encouraged ideas about ‘racial purity’. Unease about mixed-race romantic and sexual entanglements was widespread during and after the First World War."(79)

"The image of Limehouse as a warren of perfumed dope dens where evil Chinamen lay in wait for innocent young girls became even more entrenched. As in discussions of white slavery before the war, many found it easier to see young women as victims, rather than to accept that they might make choices which others judged as undesirable." [mijn nadruk] (81)

Het ging allemaal niet van een leien dakje, het verzet van de kant van conservatieven was groot.

"Feminists often felt themselves on the defensive in education between the wars. There was a backlash against women’s work in some quarters as men returned from the battlefield. The London medical schools, which had reluctantly opened their doors to women students through the war years, promptly closed them again.A rash of novels indicted selfish women clinging to their jobs while ex-servicemen languished, unmanned by their inability to find work. The reality, especially for educated women after the war, was that jobs were in short supply. Women graduates found themselves in a particularly difficult situation, especially those who had studied science. There were stories of women with first-class degrees in science working in sardine factories during these years. In the 1930s, openings in teaching – long regarded as both the safest option and something of a last resort – were drying up through an oversupply of qualified women. Working-class women, many of whose horizons had expanded during wartime, often found themselves pressed back into dom ­ estic service."(84)

"Through the 1920s, cinema newsreels and newspaper stories featured women entering all kinds of work and distinguishing themselves as aviators, engineers, stunt drivers and Channel swimmers. Even if times were hard, these stories acted as a tonic. It seemed that there was very little that women couldn’t do, if they were only offered the opportunity." [mijn nadruk] (86-87)

[Nee. echt? Maar goed, uiteindelijk namen de kansen voor vrouwen toe, ondanks al dat conservatieve verzet.]

"Opportunities for leisure and pleasure expanded enormously between the wars. Girls with regular jobs and pay packets were major beneficiaries. They flocked to the dance halls. There were ballrooms, dance halls and dancing schools in all major cities."(89)

"Dancing, cinema-going and a raft of new magazines targeting young women expanded opportunities for indoor pleasures. There were new facilities for outdoor activity too. The bicycle, emblematic accessory of the new woman in the 1890s, became increasingly affordable by those on modest incomes. Cycling clubs were immensely popular among young people. Camping out in the countryside had particular appeal. Girls growing up between the wars often recorded memories of bonfires and sleeping in the great outdoors as a time of happiness and freedom. The range of physical activities thought appropriate for girls expanded, as women took up rowing, athletics or gymnastics. Some joined the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, founded in 1930, which held that ‘movement is life’ and encouraged synchronised exercises in the open air. Swimming and sunbathing became common pastimes. The knitted – and later ruched and elasticised – bathing costumes of the inter-war period looked daringly revealing to contemporaries. Lounging about on the beaches, or on the sun-decks of the new open-air lidos which were built across Britain in the 1930s, provided new opportunities for flirtation. It wasn’t long before the press stoked up controversy about the seemliness of mixed bathing among the young."(91)

[Uiteraard waren dat allemaal nagels aan de doodskist van de conservatieven en de media maakten er 'moral panics' van. Stel je voor: vrouwen die plezier hadden. Dat vrouwen uiteindelijk toch de ruimte konden nemen had alles te maken met dat daar geld aan te verdienen viel. Vrouwen werden gewilde consumenten.]

"Knowledge about birth control, and aids to contraception, both became more easily available between the wars. Where women themselves made free decisions about their use, they could be life-changing. Marie Stopes’s phenomenally best-selling works Married Love and Wise Parenthood (1918) were landmarks in popular education. Her first birth control clinic opened in north London in 1921. Stopes emphasised that her advice was for married couples only. Nevertheless, her relish for controversy ensured massive publicity."(100)

"Victorian prejudices about it being acceptable for men to sow wild oats before marriage, but not women, were everywhere being challenged – especially in an environment where marriageable men were in short supply."(101)

(105) 4 - Good-time girls, baby dolls and teenage brides

[Bestaat voornamelijk uit allerlei anecdotes en de reacties erop, iets wat ik te vaak zie in studies van historici. Trek eens wat abstracter conclusies, zou ik zeggen. Het betreft de 'moral panics' rondom wat in Nederland 'breezer seks' heet en algemener 'compensated dating'. Dat is echt niet iets van de laatste tien jaar en de media spelen er altijd een kwalijke rol in met hun sensatiejournalistiek.]

"The good-time girl had become a folk-devil. Stereotypes of her appeared in surprising places, sometimes under the guise of ‘objective’ social research."(117)

"This report has echoes of Cyril Burt, who had characterised girl delinquents as sometimes highly intelligent but ‘oversexed’: reckless adventuresses with no sense of shame. According to the British Medical Journal writers, such girls did not settle well in remand homes or approved schools, and needed medical and psychiatric treatment. These wayward girls, they submitted, were out of control."(118)

"Writing about girls’ problems, and problem girls, is shot through with prejudice stemming from assumptions about class, aesthetics, taste and morality. With references to breasts and underwear, and accusations of sluttishness and nymphomania, these descriptions are also eroticised." [mijn nadruk] (118)

"Like Gladys Mary Hall in the 1930s, most investigators maintained that girls traded sex for luxury, not out of necessity."(119)

"In the 1950s, lurid stories of London vice and criminality filled the pages of the People and the News of the World. Any evidence of white girls consorting with immigrant or ‘coloured’ men continued to provoke horror, and often predictably stereotyped reactions, in the press. "(120)

Overigens laten onderzoeken in die vijftiger jaren zien dat het overgrote deel van de vrouwen, gewoon iemand tegen wil komen, wil trouwen, een eigen gezin wil stichten, en zich verantwoordelijk voelt voor de familie.

"Most girls’ lives were shaped by the fact that their schooling ended in very early adolescence: at fourteen, most commonly, in the war years. The school leaving age was not raised to fifteen until 1947. Secondly there was the trend to early marriage. This had been evident before the Second World War, but became more marked afterwards. In 1921 only about 15 per cent of brides had been under twenty-one years of age. By 1965 this proportion had risen to 40 per cent. Early marriage was more common among working-class girls. Formal education was often experienced as a somewhat unreal interlude in their lives, and they might be impatient to leave school and start earning." [mijn nadruk] (124)

"The girls’ schools of the 1950s became battlegrounds. There had probably always been a tendency for women teachers to see girls’ interest in boys as a distraction from intellectual pursuits. "(125)

"Most girls learned that their education mattered less than that of their brothers. It was the old story: daughters were expected to marry and men didn’t like women to be too clever. Even in the more academic schools of the 1950s, girls were often steered into sitting for two rather than three A levels, since that would get them into teacher training college if not university. After all, teaching was probably what they’d end up doing if they didn’t get husbands. Better still, in the eyes of many parents, was secretarial college."(131)

[En zo komen alle vooroordelen en belemmeringen steeds weer terug. Of zijn nooit weg geweest natuurlijk.]

"The 1950s, then, were not altogether a good time to be a girl. Things were beginning to change, however. The (Butler) Education Act of 1944 had introduced secondary schooling for all in England and Wales. The school leaving age was raised from fourteen to fifteen from 1947. The Butler Act later became notorious for enshrining a ‘tripartite’ system of education, which was effectively class-based. Children were divided into brainy types, those who were good with their hands, and a lumpen, ‘less able’ majority. The eleven-plus examination was there to weed them out and to grade them, like eggs. But the Act broke new ground for bright working-class children and for girls. Indeed, girls did so well in the eleven-plus examinations in the 1950s that some local authorities began to discriminate in favour of boys, lest the girls take over the grammar schools. A grammar-school education could be a lifeline for a clever working-class girl."(132)

(137) Coming of age in the 1960s - Beat girls and dolly birds

Bespreking van allerlei films als Beat Girl waarin jongeren van 'het rechte pad' afwijken (en op het eind weer braaf meedoen met de conventies).

"Representations of young people jiving, or hypnotised by jazz in coffee bars and basement cellars, were fast becoming a way of drawing attention to the problems of youth."(140)

"The moral panic over clubs in Stepney was highly revealing of contemporary anxieties and prejudices. For the Rever- end Williamson, clubs were centres of vice to be thundered at. He denounced them as centres of everything he deplored: unchecked immigration, girls ‘oozing money’ on account of their ‘elastic moral standards’, contraceptives, and jukeboxes, which he clearly saw as the work of the devil." [mijn nadruk] (143)

"Hardly surprisingly, however, it was the shock-horror stuff that made it into the newspapers. The good manners, chivalry and the concern for young girls – for all of which Ramsay and Ravensdale found ample evidence in the clubs of Stepney – made for far less colourful copy." [mijn nadruk] (145)

[Typisch voor 'moral panics'. Je vraagt je wel eens af wat al die 'persvrijheid' eigenlijk aan positiefs oplevert. Ook hier zou vrijheid samen moeten gaan met verantwoordelijkheid: geen persvrijheid als media zo gemakkelijk de waarheid geweld aan doen en vooroordelen bevestigen.]

"And were girls always the victims of vice? The gentlemen discussing the clubs in the House of Lords liked to portray them as such, but there was evidence that becoming a call girl was an attractive career option that brought lucrative prospects."(146)

"It was getting hard to tell the difference between ‘whores’ and ‘liberated’ – or enterprising – young women-about-town. "(150)

"In Manchester, police raids on the clubs brought a relatively small number of minor prosecutions. Most of the young people attending these venues were simply there to have a good time. But suspicions persisted. Part of the reason was simply unease about youth culture." [mijn nadruk] (151)

"In the early 1960s, pop concerts joined jazz, jukeboxes and rock ’n’ roll on the list of things widely seen as responsible for leading girls off the rails. Swooning over crooners proved just the beginning. Falling in love with Paul Anka, Tommy Steele or Elvis was a common enough state among girls at the end of the 1950s. But ‘Beatlemania’ was something on a different scale."(157)

"There are cultural historians who have emphasised female passivity as the basis of ‘fandom’, pointing out that many girls enjoyed pop music in the company of one or two best friends, probably in their own bedrooms. (...) But Beatlemania was of course not just a passive condition; despite Dr Cameron’s assertions it was also an expression of desire. The American feminist and social scientist Barbara Ehrenreich has argued convincingly that Beatlemania constituted ‘a huge outbreak of teenage female libido’ which might legitimately be regarded as an opening salvo in the sexual revolution.(...) Girls found the Beatles sexy. And teenage girls’ open expressions of desire were a challenge in a society keen to protect sexual innocence in the young. At the same time, as Ehrenreich and her co-authors emphasised, such overt abandonment constituted rebellion against the rules that defined female sexuality as something ‘to be bartered for an engagement ring’." [mijn nadruk] (159-160)

"How independent were these girls? There were indeed signs of a new independence among young women in the 1960s. They were the first generation to grow up taking secondary education for granted. Jobs were available, and they were (independently) relatively affluent and well-fed. (...) Working in the city, living in digs or lodgings, could spell freedom. Similarly, studying at university, living in a hall of residence or student hostel, opened up spaces for sexual experimentation away from the supervision of parents. The image of the ‘dolly bird’ in ‘Swinging London’ became emblematic of Britain in the 1960s. Girls began to dress differently from their mothers, in Quant-inspired dolly-dresses, high boots and miniskirts." [mijn nadruk] (161-162)

[Goede vraag, maar ik zie niet echt een antwoord. ]

"The cultural emphasis on the sexuality of young girls which had been apparent in 1950s representations of Lolitas, Baby Dolls and nymphets showed little sign of abating. Interest in sex and the single girl easily extended to an interest in sex and the schoolgirl."(164)

"In their investigations, Schofield and his colleagues were concerned to find that unmarried girls were often reluctant to use contraceptives. They preferred to leave the responsibility to male partners. But they weren’t gen ­ erally insistent on their boyfriends using contraceptives either. ­ Why was this? It was partly because such calculation was felt to look brazen and hence ‘unfeminine’: girls liked to look ‘innocent’ and didn’t want to create the impression that they were experienced, or too ready for sexual experience, in case it gave the wrong signals. There was a great deal of shyness and reticence. Equally, many girls feared that if they approached family doctors for advice on birth control, they would be interrogated about their morals instead. This was indeed often the case, even well into the following decade." [mijn nadruk] (166)

[Als je dit leest is er weinig sprake van zelfstandigheid. Het is toch een je vastklampen aan de traditionele rolverdeling waarbij de verantwoordelijkheid bij mannen wordt gelegd.]

"So, were young women the casualties of permissiveness or its beneficiaries? It is certainly possible to argue that girls benefited less than boys from the softening of conventional standards of morality in the 1960s. But ultimately they gained a great deal. (...) As the sixties progressed, student demands for more easily available contraceptive advice grew more vocal. Discussions about unwanted pregnancy became much more open. Pressure for reform of the law on abortion also mounted nationally. "(166-167)

"By the end of the sixties, then, young women had more control over their own fertility than ever before in history. The pill was widely adopted as the preferred contraceptive choice for young, unmarried women as well as wives. Abortion was no longer inextricably associated with illicit transactions involving fistfuls of pound notes and seedy rooms in backstreets. These choices were by no means universally available, of course: much depended on social class, education, and where one lived. But the number of women benefiting from such changes has led historians such as Hera Cook to conclude that we should think in terms of a sexual revolution. From the end of the 1960s, sexuality became increasingly separated from reproduction. Girls could experiment, sexually, without the constant fear of pregnancy. This undermined fatalism, and gave much more scope for personal development and career planning. In the universities before the end of the sixties, female students had tended to be looked upon as a class apart. They were seen as needing special supervision and disciplinary arrangements lest they get pregnant and cause trouble for the authorities as well as themselves. These fears began to recede from the early 1970s on."(168)

"The 1969 Act had a strong impact on higher education. Students were now adults and could not be expected to submit to ‘moral tutelage’ and the kinds of surveillance over their private lives which had caused so much trouble in the past. Since these systems of moral surveillance had fallen so much more heavily on girls, they were particular beneficiaries."(173)

(175) Taking liberties - Panic over permissiveness and women's liberation

"Almost inevitably, some people feared that the challenges to traditional authority and the rise of more tolerant, ‘permissive’ attitudes to sexual behaviour in the 1960s had gone too far. Liberty, they proclaimed, was in danger of becoming licence. Young people were in danger of losing their moral compasses. It was suggested that young women, particularly, might need less freedom and more protection, if they were not to come to grief. Those who deplored what they saw as the increasing addic- tion of the young to sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll could point to well-publicised stories of excess and misbehaviour. These stories carried a particular charge when girls were involved. "(175)

[Steeds weer die dubbele moraal bij conservatieven. Vooral meisjes moeten braaf zijn, jongens zijn nu eenmaal ... etc. etc..]

"In retrospect, she [Marianne Faithfull wordt hier besproken - GdG] saw herself as having been a victim of double standards which glamorised sexual adventure and experimentation with drugs in young men, while condemning women who behaved similarly as sluts and bad mothers. There was undoubtedly some truth in this. Faithfull’s open inter- est in sex, and her willingness to condone sexual relationships and pregnancy outside marriage, would attract little attention today, but appeared scandalous in the 1960s. At that time, as the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt Marjorie Proops pointed out, there was widespread belief that a refusal to marry suited men more than women." [mijn nadruk] (178)

[Ik vind ook dat ze gelijk heeft.]

"Teenage girls needed a firm hand, argued psychologist Dr Elizabeth Radford in 1963; too much money and too much freedom and they would almost always go to the dogs.12 In 1966, another psychologist, Phyllis Hostler, reported ‘hair-raising stories of necking and petting parties in quite ordinary homes’. Boys were badgering girls into sex, she asserted, and parents needed to stand firm and keep an eye on things."(179)

[Niet alleen de medici, ook de psychologen weten het beter dan wie dan ook. Helemaal in lijn met het conservatieve denken: veroordelen en verbieden, niet helpen en ondersteunen. En zoals altijd spelen de media met hun sensatiezucht een bijzonder negatieve en bedenkelijke rol.]

"Of course, not all parents were in a position to watch their daughters’ every move. A growing number of girls were escaping parental surveillance by going away to university."(179)

"By 1971, Mrs Mary Whitehouse had become the figure in Britain most associated in the public mind with the backlash against permissiveness. A schoolteacher and evangelical Christian, she had been active from the mid-1960s in a campaign to ‘clean up TV’, founding the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association in 1965."(180)

"At root, critics of permissiveness shared concerns around what they perceived as moral decay brought about by misguided progressives, pornography and pressure groups such as the Abortion Law Reform Association. Beyond these, they tended to express disquiet over a catalogue of contemporary social phenomena, ranging from swearing on television, through nudity on stage, to the way young people dressed and wore their hair. Long hair on young men was suspect, as was too much exposure of flesh by young women, whether via midriff or miniskirt. Some of the most vocal opponents of the permissive society had grown up in what they thought of as an era of clear-cut gender distinc- tions. Single-sex schooling was considered normal, especially for the middle classes, and boys went on to do National Service, which was thought to make men of them. A short-back-and- sides haircut indicated a well-disciplined personality. Those who had imbibed these values were often disconcerted by the 1960s fashion for ‘unisex’. To them, young men floating around in Mr Freedom velvets and florals or girls in sharply cut trouser suits were anathema. As a result, there were many attempts at sartorial policing [kledingvoorschriften] in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Girls in offices and law courts in the 1960s were often banned from wearing skirts above the knee, for instance." [mijn nadruk] (181-182)

[Opvallend is hierbij dus weer het benadrukken van hoe mannen en vrouwen er uit horen te zien en zich horen te gedragen.]

"The more focused concerns of those who deplored permissiveness included sex education, promiscuity, contraception, abortion and pornography. These were all subjects which generated controversy over the position and protection of young women. In the minds of the moral right, girls tended to appear as either victims or sluts. They were chaste or they were promiscuous. They needed supervision and protection and should not be left alone. The average, sexually curious young girl simply did not appear in their imaginings. The spectres of schoolgirl mothers, or feckless young hussies bent on one-night stands and expecting abortion on demand when they got into trouble, loomed large. So did fears of sexually transmitted disease among young girls."(182)

[Uiteraard lieten ze zich in hun opvattingen vooral 'informeren' door de sensatiepers die alle problemen breed uitmaten. Bij alle 'moral panics' blijkt steeds weer dat de aantallen probleemgevallen zwaar worden overdreven.]

"Researcher Michael Schofield emphasised that conservatives were prone to exaggerate the dangers of contracting venereal diseases in the 1970s as a way of frightening young people out of sex. He cited Germaine Greer’s dry observation that this was rather like trying to persuade people not to eat as a precaution against food poisoning.
It was partly concern over unwanted pregnancies and venereal ­ disease among teenagers that led the British Medical Association and other public health organisations and groups to lobby the government to improve sex education in schools. Schofield lent his support. His 1965 study The Sexual Behaviour of Young People had found little evidence of promiscuity among teenagers. What he had found was an alarming state of sexual ignorance, and he urged that the schools needed to do something to remedy this. But the whole issue of sex education in the early 1970s became entangled in the conservative backlash to the permissive society." [mijn nadruk] (183)

[Conservatieven zijn altijd tegen kennis over seksualiteit en dus tegen seksuele voorlichting uit angst dat het seksueel gedrag stimuleert. Ze zijn blind voor de feiten die duidelijk maken dat het roepen dat jongeren zich moeten onthouden van seks tot aan het huwelijk weinig tot niet niet werkt en dat gebrek aan kennis over seksualiteit in de praktijk daardoor tot immense problemen leidt.]

"The anti-permissive lobby objected to sex education not least out of a conviction that it would encourage young people to experiment. Their vociferousness brought results."(184)

"Sex education for girls was a particular minefield because conservatives wanted to preserve chastity and innocence. Most of the sex education books used in schools underplayed girls’ interest in sex and suggested that they were more interested in love and romance. Boys were represented as driven by adolescent hormones; male sexuality was shown as urgent and difficult to control. Girls’ sex drive, on the other hand, was supposed to be mild and diffuse. It was often suggested that it remained dormant until aroused by actual experience of intercourse (when it might suddenly become worryingly voracious). In addition to this, a girl was supposed to take responsibility for a boy’s continence, by not egging him on or letting him get carried away. Mary Hoffman, an educational journalist who despaired of this prejudice in the 1970s, poured scorn on typical descriptions of adolescent girls’ sexuality." [mijn nadruk] (185)

"But the reaction against permissiveness could only go so far. The government and medical authorities charged with dealing with sexual health issues could scarcely ignore the importance of sex education, birth control and other public health issues. By the 1980s, panic over HIV and AIDS had added to this agenda. And so had feminism.
What is often referred to as ‘second-wave’ feminism really took off in Britain in the early 1970s. The first National Women’s Liberation Movement conference was held at Ruskin College, Oxford in the spring of 1970. Four demands were originally formulated: ­ equal pay, equal education and job opportunities, free contraception and abortion on demand, and free twenty- four-hour nurseries. Second-wave feminists saw themselves as building upon the achievements of the suffrage movement. Where suffragists, or first-wave’ feminists, had concentrated on fighting for the vote, this new generation would question wider social structures, including the family."(193)

"One of the strongest achievements of second-wave feminism was its thorough-going scrutiny of the ways in which girls become ‘conditioned’ or ‘socialised’ into sex roles. Beginning in the family, this process was seen to gain impetus during the school years." [mijn nadruk] (199)

[Ik vraag me af hoe succesvol die aanpak uiteindelijk is geworden. Worden meisjes en jongens nu anders gesocialiseerd dan vroeger? Op welke punten wel en op welke punten niet? Uiterlijk? Nee. Rolverdeling? Ik betwijfel het, als ik de rapporten lees over relaties en seks tussen jongeren.]

"Feminists both inside and outside academia generated a huge and impressive literature on the subject in the 1970s and 1980s. Sue Sharpe’s ‘Just Like a Girl’: How Girls Learn to Be Women was published by Penguin in 1976. In a preface, the author recorded her thanks to ‘all the members of the Arsenal Women’s Lib- eration Group’ for their support. The book was wide-ranging, paying attention to both social class and race. Most of the girls studied by Sharpe were working class, and at school in the London borough of Ealing. Some of the girls from Asian families found school particularly challenging. Their parents were often anxious about their daughters becoming tainted by Western permissive values."(201)

"Sharpe found that most of the girls in her study expected to be married by the time they reached twenty-five years of age. Their occupational ambitions were limited. Her finding was in line with those of researchers in the 1960s, who had similarly emphasised that the majority of adolescent girls saw their futures as entirely bound up with home making. Educationalists observed time and again before the 1980s that while girls leapt ahead in the early years of schooling, their performance dropped off dramatic ­ ally when they reached adolescence. The revival of feminism stimulated important new studies of female adolescence. Up until the 1970s, with a handful of exceptions, studies of ‘youth’ had been of boys. Now Angela McRobbie, Jenny Garber, Valerie Walkerdine and other scholars turned their attention to the girls. New questions were asked about the impact of popular culture on girls, and their involvement in teenage subcultures. Was girls’ apparent loss of interest in school as they reached their teens simply a consequence of their interest in boys and romance? " [mijn nadruk] (202)

Het tijdschrift voor meisjes Jackie als voorbeeld van de invloed van de media op hun ontwikkeling tot 'standaard meisjes'.

"Feminists had a field day deploring Jackie and its supposedly pernicious effects on the minds of young girls in the 1970s. These attitudes softened slightly in the 1980s, as more scholars began to investigate the appeal of romance literature to women."(203)

"Jackie lost its appeal because teenage girls were becoming more worldly, sophisticated and independent-minded. They wanted to learn more about sex. In 1975 Judy Blume, writing fiction for teenage girls, scored a massive hit with Forever, a sensitive portrayal of a young girl’s first sexual experiences." [mijn nadruk] (203)

"In addition to this, the climate in which stories of sexual abuse and domestic violence could be told, by the end of the twentieth century, owed a great deal to women’s increasing self-confidence and to the concerns of feminism. These issues were much discussed in the 1980s.
In that decade, more and more women were going public with stories of how they had suffered abuse, as young girls, in the domestic environment, and often from men within the family. From attempts to provide shelters for battered wives in the 1970s through campaigns to improve the treatment of girls and women who had suffered rape and abuse in the 1980s, feminists set out to confront sexual violence. They were successful in keeping these issues in the public eye, and thus on the political agenda. " [mijn nadruk] (208)

"But the WLM in Britain lost coherence in the 1980s as divisions deepened. There was a great deal of heart-searching about whom the movement spoke for. Was it too middle class? Were black women being marginalised or excluded? There was bitterness ­ among activists who considered that British feminists were­ ignoring the very different experiences of women elsewhere in the world. Controversies over sexuality and pornography also became ­ divisive. Some academic feminists retreated into what could look like ivory-tower obsessions with the nature of language ­ and identity. Some feminists looked around gloomily, seeing signs of backlash and reaction. But there had been profound shifts in culture, language and social expectation. This enabled others to be more sanguine, trusting that a new generation of younger women would take ideas about sexual equality as their birthright. " [mijn nadruk] (210)

(211) 7 - Body anxieties, depressives, ladettes and living dolls - What happened to girl power?

"‘Girl power’ was much discussed in the 1990s and early 2000s. (...) The OED defined girl power as ‘a self-reliant attitude amongst girls and young women manifested in ambition, assertiveness and individualism’.
Strong girls were in fashion. Young female punks in the late 1970s perfected a new kind of stylish stroppiness. From the 1980s, popular culture had begun to reflect a widespread enthusiasm for self-assertive female types."(211)

"In sharp contradiction to all this, a steady stream of books began to emerge from major publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic arguing that girls were being massively damaged and disadvantaged by social change. An early example of this trend was Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth, first published in 1990."(212)

[Merkwaardige formulering. Niet 'by social change', maar door maatschappelijke repressie, commerciële uitbuiting, etc. Nu lijkt het net of Wolf in de conservatieve hoek zit. Maar waarschuwingen als van Wolf, Pipher, Brumberg zijn terecht. In de praktijk viel het blijkbaar nogal tegen met 'girl power', dat werd een kreet die door de commercie gebruikt werd om meiden achter hun kapitalistische karretje te spannen, met de nadruk op het uiterlijk, wat niet gevaarlijk was en goed voor de zaken.]

"Yet more alarms were sounded in the next decade. Ariel Levy, a staff writer on the New Yorker magazine, launched an attack on what she called ‘raunch culture’ in her witty and polemical Female Chauvinist Pigs, published in 2005. Levy took issue with ‘women who make sex objects of other women and themselves’. Her text is rich in its denunciations of women ‘who get their tits out for the lads’, girls happy to strut around in white stilettoes and body glitter, sporting Playboy bunny rings, and rhinestone- studded thongs and G-strings. Feminists had taken a wrong turning if it they saw this kind of behaviour as ‘empowering’. Bawdiness, she, reminded her readers, was not the same thing as liberation." [mijn nadruk] (213-214)

"The literature on girls’ anxieties about their bodies, for instance, is often closely related to that on eating disorders, unhappiness and depression. Nor is it easy to separate out hard evidence from social panic. Both polemical books written by journalists and social critics, and the findings of academic and professional researchers are taken up and amplified – and some- times distorted – in the press. Since the 1970s, the media have shown an exaggerated interest in girls’ bodies. Some historians have traced this back to the permissiveness of the late 1960s; others have seen the trend as part of a backlash against the rise of feminism." [mijn nadruk] (215)

[Het is natuurlijk moeilijk om allerlei conservatieve reacties op gedrag van jongeren - hier: meisjes - te onderscheiden van terechte kritiek op het gedrag van jongeren. Wat zijn de motieven? Waar willen de critici naar toe met hun kritiek? Wat zijn hun achterliggende waarden en normen? En dan zitten we bijvoorbeeld op het spoor van de discussie over seksualisering. ]

"A new theme – or at least buzzword – began to surface in these debates about the well-being of young women. This was the term sexualisation. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, girls were increasingly identified as being the targets of ‘a sexualised culture’, or the victims of a ‘creeping’ or ‘inappropriate’ sexualisation. There were a number of slants on this. A popular notion that girls were under pressure ‘to grow up too soon’ was sometimes bolstered by notions of childhood innocence."(223)

"A long list of individuals and groups queued up for the chance to jump on this particular bandwagon. Concerns were raised not only in Britain. M. G. Durham’s book The Lolita Effect cites journalist Jill Parkin of Australia’s Courier Mail deploring what she identified as a new trend of ‘little girls dressed as sex bait’. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, columnist Rosa Brooks worried about whether American capitalism was ‘serving our children up to pedophiles on a corporate platter’. Politicians in the UK sensed a golden opportunity. In 2010, the Conservative leader David Cameron, for instance, spoke out in defence of parents against ‘premature sexualisation’. Children were being bombarded by inappropriate messages, he thought. In the same feature, the (now extinct) retail store Woolworth was reported to have recently withdrawn its Lolita range of girls’ bedroom furniture.
Was this a moral panic? A few brave voices spoke up, suggesting that indeed it was. Laurie Penny shrewdly pointed out that the notion of ‘sexualisation’ needed unpacking, because it tended to assume girls had no sexual feelings of their own. She confessed that she herself ‘would have killed for a padded bra when I was in primary school, if only to give an extra boost to the wodges of toilet roll I had already begun to stuff into my crop-top’. Adolescents showed insecurity about growing sexual development in various ways. Penny detected something of a class agenda behind the attacks on stores such as Primark for ‘trashy’ merchandise. The British journalist Barbara Ellen, always a staunch defender of the autonomy of teenage girls, and uneasy about what she termed the ‘sub-McCarthyist hysteria’ about child sexualisation, made similar observations. What stands out from the historian’s point of view is just how quickly stores such as Primark capitulated to pressure groups, withdrawing the offending merchandise."(224-225)

"Much of the literature denouncing the sexualisation of girls presents girls as victims, as relatively passive, with limited power to make decisions of their own. On the other hand, another vein of concern runs through these debates. This represents girls as leaping on a handcart to ruin through their own incontinence and ‘laddish’ behaviour. Girls drinking too much, taking drugs, taking their clothes off, exhibiting loud-mouthed and vulgar behaviour, and creating mayhem in the streets began to dominate newspaper headlines in the 1990s. These girls were often described as ‘ladettes’ or as unrepentant participants in ‘raunch culture’. " [mijn nadruk] (227)

"The reference to glamour modelling hit a raw nerve. Feminists were increasingly disturbed by reports of girls allegedly rating personal beauty ahead of brains. There was incredulity and near-despair when surveys suggested that many British teenage girls saw glamour model Katie Price as a ‘role model’."(230)

[Ik vind die hele weergave van de problematiek tot nu toe maar oppervlakkig. Dyhouse heeft de neiging om positief te blijven. Maar ze laat het afweten als het gaat om de rol van het kapitalisme, de invloed van de media, en de normatieve beeldvorming die er van uitgaat. Het is in feite een andere manier van conservatieven om jongeren en dan met name meisjes onder de duim te houden. Maar deze manier is veel minder gemakkelijk te pakken omdat het gaat om een grootschalige manipulatie die gebracht wordt onder het mom van vrijheid van keuze. ]

"The bigger picture gives more cause for optimism. From a historical perspective, the gains since the 1980s have been impressive. Girls have made dramatic progress, for instance, in education."(235)

[Dat bedoel ik nu. Ja, op bepaalde punten is er inderdaad van alles gewonnen, maar niet op het vlak van 'girl power', zelfvertrouwen, normatieve helderheid, inzicht in basiswaarden, seksualiteit en zo meer. De meeste jongeren willen er 'bijhoren', zo zijn als anderen, vinden het eng om een 'afwijker' te zijn. Daar zit het grootste probleem en het grootste aangrijpingspunt voor de manipulatie door conservatieven.]

"Looking back over changes since the 1990s, it is clear that a new generation of strong, resourceful young women did appear on the cultural scene and that many of them stayed there well after ­ their youth was over. The list would include singers and musicians, ­ artists, actors, television and film personalities, models, sports personalities and entrepreneurs."(238)

[Dat kun je toch moeilijk extrapoleren naar grote lage van de bevolking. Dat is niet een hele generatie, dat zijn een paar vrouwen uit die generatie en dan waarschijnlijk ook nog vrouwen die vanuit huis allerlei kansen hadden.]

(241) Looking back

Is er historisch gezien sprake van vooruitgang?

[Jammer genoeg volgt eerst een samenvatting van het hele verhaal.]

"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. 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. "(243)

"Waves of anxiety, horror stories and panic, then, have accompanied social change affecting women since Victorian times."(250)

"Since the early twentieth century, the lives of young women in the ‘Western’ world have been transformed. They have gained educational and political rights. Girls are no longer driven into domestic service in their droves in early adolescence. They are schooled along much the same lines as boys and are extremely successful in examinations."(251)

"Feminism has played an important part in this process of social change. As a political movement, feminism has never been monolithic: it has always encompassed diverse viewpoints. (...) Another source of contention – echoing similar divisions in the 1900s – involved how to relate to men. Radical and separatist feminists wanted as little as possible to do with them. Socialist feminists, on the other hand, wanted women and men to work together for a brighter social future. Ten years later there was a great deal of often acrimonious disagreement about pornography: should all pornography be dismissed as degrading to women or was it a whole lot more complicated than that? Disagreements over pornography continue to divide feminists. "(252-253)

"There has been a recurrent tension between a feminist tendency to portray women and girls as victims and a counterbalancing insistence on women’s agency and capacity for self-determination. Looking back through history we can see that too much emphasis on victimisation can produce odd political results. It is difficult to forge a political identity out of victimhood. Victims call for protection, and too much protection can easily begin to look like control. This was very evident in the 1900s when some feminists campaigned alongside evangelical religious groups for ‘social purity’ and against what was depicted as the mass menace of a white slave trade. Much of this was chimerical and a result of moral panic. It conduced to some strange political alliances between social purity feminists and men who were wholly opposed to women’s suffrage, but keen to protect a sex the image of whose frailty reassured them. " [mijn nadruk] (253-254)

"To highlight the ways in which girls’ and young women’s lives have changed for the better is not to suggest that there aren’t still problems deriving from double standards and inequality. Of course there are. Sexual double standards still distort and damage young women’s lives. Material inequalities – and the ways in which these appear to be widening – give profound cause for concern. These inequalities constrain and distort the life chances of girls, particularly those from less privileged social backgrounds. The historian bent on taking the long view may discern clear signs of progress, but this is not in any way to surrender to complacency. For history also demonstrates the ever-present possibilities of backlash, reaction and new oppressive forces. Young women need feminism as much as ever, if they are to see their lives in context and to live them fully. " [mijn nadruk] (254-255)

[Waar, maar ik zou het toch fijn gevonden hebben als hedendaagse problemen rondom socialisatie in de opvoeding, rolverdelingen, dubbele moraal, seksualisering, de invloed van kapitalisme en media, machtsverhoudingen, en zo meer een groter plaats hadden gekregen.]