Girl Trouble (32 page)

The 1970s were a watershed. Second-wave feminism threw its strength behind equality legislation, particularly equal pay and the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975. It can be argued that the women's liberation movement took root in Britain not least as a result of changes in schooling after the Second World War. The 1944 Education Act introduced secondary education for all, and the first generation of girls who took this education for granted were often perplexed to encounter limited opportunities on leaving school, and a sexually segregated labour market. Second-wave feminists turned their attention to the structures of work and the family, which both came in for sustained critical analysis. A third area of concern was education itself. ‘Educational feminism' was one of the most obvious achievements of the WLM. It took the form of a mass of projects and initiatives to combat stereotyping and to encourage girl-friendly schooling. In the 1970s and 1980s, schooling and higher education in Britain were transformed, in that the traditional assumptions which held that boys and girls should be educated differently were swept away. The feminist project was aided by the introduction of a national curriculum, which helped to erode gender differentiation through subject choice. In higher education, gender quotas, which had held down a lid on the numbers of girls who could study medicine or veterinary science, were deemed unlawful. After much heart-searching and tortuous politicking in the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge, all the formerly exclusively male colleges
turned their backs on centuries of tradition and opened their doors to female students. This was a move of great importance, not all of it symbolic: the fact that there had been so few women's colleges, all of them much poorer than the wealthy male foundations, had made it impossible to admit more than a minority of girls to Oxbridge in the 1960s. From the 1990s, the numbers began to equalise. With women students no longer confined to the hencoops, their proportions in universities all over Britain began first to catch up with, and then even to overtake, those of the men.

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Two pairs of twin sisters celebrate their A-level results at Putney High School, south London, in August 2011. Girls leaping with joy at their exam successes had become a photographic convention by this time (© Steve Parsons/PA Archive/Press Association Images).

By the end of the twentieth century, girls' performance had drawn level with that of boys at each stage of education. Indeed, in some areas they were doing markedly better than their male
peers. The newspaper-reading public became accustomed to celebratory photographs of girls leaping in the air like spring lambs each year, when their GCSE or A-level examination results were announced. Feminist researchers whose careers had focused on girls' underachievement were in danger of finding themselves sidelined, as public attention shifted to boys, who were increasingly seen as ‘losing out' in formal education. There was something of a panic about boys in schools: were they bored, deprived of inspiring role models, perhaps, or maybe constitutionally unsuited to the constant demands of coursework? Lurking under the surface of such debates was a question about whether feminism had brought about some kind of imbalance in the natural order of things. Feminists in the 1970s had seen potential in single-sex classrooms as a way of increasing girls' confidence. Now there were suggestions that boys-only groupings might focus on hard physical challenge or bring adventure back into the curriculum.

The closing of the gender gap in education, together with marked changes in young women's aspirations, led some observers to talk again about social and sexual revolution. A 1994 study by Helen Wilkinson for the think tank Demos popularised the idea of a ‘genderquake'. Entitled
No Turning Back: Generations and the Genderquake
, the study identified ‘a historic shift in the relations between men and women', held to be particularly evident in younger age groups.
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For others, the 1990s witnessed the rise of ‘girl power' as a cultural phenomenon, reflected in music, media, fashion and patterns of consumption. Some argued feminism had done its work and was no longer relevant: young women, it seemed, were shying away from ‘the f-word'. Others claimed that older forms of oppression – such as the violence towards women exhibited in some kinds of pornography –
were intensifying, or they identified new sources of concern. Naomi Wolf saw what she defined as ‘beauty pornography' as a form of ‘radiation sickness', or as a virulent social disease. Others claimed that young women showed rising rates of depression, body anxiety and self-loathing. Girls were criticised for ‘laddish' behaviour, and for drinking too much. Or they were represented as the victims of a ‘sexualised' culture.

Waves of anxiety, horror stories and panic, then, have accompanied social change affecting women since Victorian times. A particular unease over the position of young women seems to have been a concomitant of modernisation. It is not always easy for the historian to read what was going on in any particular period for a number of reasons. In the first place, strong cultural expressions about femininity or girlhood (such as those formulated by Ruskin or the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore)
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may be understood as prescriptions for – rather than descriptions of – contemporary social behaviour. In other words, Ruskin preached at schoolgirls precisely because they were increasingly dissatisfied, and bent on fulfilment outside the sanctuary of the home. Second, the image of girlhood innocence has always carried rich symbolic associations and emotional meanings: young women have had a hard time escaping these. In Victorian times, girls were either pure or they had fallen. Their chastity had a property value, especially if they were middle or upper class, and this property was vested in fathers and future husbands. Once she was ‘fallen', a girl's assets, or indeed her value as a person, were considered to have been lost. Innocent girls might carry some kind of redemptive power. But once fallen, many predicted that there was no stopping them on the road to ruin, and they would most probably drag men into worldly perdition with them. Girls' behaviour has regularly been judged as innocent or corrupt,
white or black, with no shades of grey in between. A consequence of this has been the tendency to portray girls as either victims or villains, rather than ordinary, curious, fallible human beings.

The social thinker and criminologist Stanley Cohen introduced the idea of ‘moral panics' into academic sociology when he published his influential
Folk Devils and Moral Panics
in 1972.
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His book explored social reactions to youth subcultures in the 1960s, and in particular, the activities of Mods and Rockers. Cohen showed how the media could overreact to behaviour which was seen to challenge existing social conventions. The media response can amplify and distort: representations cannot always be read as reflecting social reality. In a later edition of his book, Cohen emphasises that calling something a ‘moral panic' does not imply that the something didn't actually exist, or that the reaction to any particular social problem is based purely on fantasy or delusion.
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It does, however, allow us to see social problems as socially constructed and selectively highlighted, and to ask questions about culture and power. How and why do some issues steal the headlines as urgent social problems while others, arguably more serious, fail to attract the attention they deserve? Cohen's book did not deal centrally with girls, although he later signalled his awareness that there was more to be said about the social reaction to female Mods and indeed about moral panics around what was perceived to be socially challenging, ‘unfeminine' female behaviour.
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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. Female undergraduates outnumber
men in higher education and they now have access to the most prestigious institutions. Girls have more opportunities for personal and sexual self-expression and more control over their bodies than ever before. Contraception and abortion are widely available and the terrible social shame that used to attach to illegitimacy has gone. Opportunities for work and employment have widened dramatically. None of this has come about without acute problems of adjustment. There has been a great deal of anxiety, generating regular crops of horror stories and panic. Indeed, a continuing vein of anxiety about girls has been a subtext of the twentieth century and more. Young women who deviated from convention in late Victorian times were often stigmatised and pathologised. Similarly, ‘the modern girl' has regularly been seen as both threatened by and threatening to, a social order undergoing profound social change.

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. Some would argue that feminism has privileged the voices of white, middle-class women, and that the movement has paid insufficient attention to difference and diversity. The struggle for the vote in the 1900s brought some degree of unity between women from different backgrounds and around strategic goals – though not always around the strategies for pursuing them.
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There was similarly a degree of consensus around rights to education and equal pay, and to some extent around reproductive rights, in the 1970s. At other times over the last century and more, it is arguably easier to point to tensions and dissensions within feminism rather than to consensus. There were conflicts in the nineteenth century, for instance, between feminists who insisted on women's education matching up to existing male standards and patterns,
and those prepared to contemplate a different, more ‘feminine' course.
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In the 1970s and 1980s, feminists were divided over whether women should receive wages for housework: what was then described as the ‘domestic labour debate'.
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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.

But an awareness of the diversity of affiliations and viewpoints within feminism today has to be balanced by an appreciation of some of the ways in which feminists are working together internationally, to improve girls' lives. Plan International's ‘Because I Am a Girl' campaign aims to fight gender inequalities worldwide, seeking to promote girls' rights and education and to lift millions of girls out of poverty.
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The organisation brings together many other foundations with similar aims and equally dedicated to improving the welfare of adolescent girls.

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.

There have been times over the last century and a half when feminism has gathered strength and power, and other times when it has appeared less a political movement with clear-cut goals and more a state of mind – something akin to recognising women as fully human beings with agency and autonomy. Rebecca West famously confessed that she wasn't sure what a feminist was, but that everyone labelled her as such when she expressed sentiments which differentiated her from a doormat.
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One of the main achievements of Caitlin Moran's exuberant best-seller
How to Be a Woman
, is that it makes feminism sound like common sense.
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Equally important, though, has been the need for women to share stories, since the sharing of experience makes for understanding and the strength which is necessary for political action. This is what consciousness raising set out to achieve in the 1970s. The digital revolution has opened up opportunities for the sharing of stories and experiences on an unprecedented scale.