Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women
Carol Dyhouse
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 1783601604
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Social historian Carol Dyhouse studies this phenomenon in Girl Trouble, an expansive account of its realities throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dyhouse looks closely at interviews, news pieces, and articles to show the clear perpetuation of this trend and the very real effects that it has had—and continues to have—on the girlhood experience. She brilliantly demonstrates the value of feminism and other liberating cultural shifts and their necessity in expanding girls’ aspirations and opportunities in spite of the controversy that has accompanied these freedoms.
Girl Trouble is the dynamic story of the challenges and opportunities faced by young women growing up in the swirl of the twentieth century and the vocal critics who continue to scrutinize their progress.
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 ‘Miss Modern’ resplendent in her cutting-edge swimsuit. Cover image, Miss Modern, August 1934 (© IPC Media 2012;
manage through the turmoil of coping with an illegitimate pregnancy.94 Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room, first published in 1960, dealt with similar themes.95 The novel’s heroine, Jane, is a middle-class, unmarried girl who has been thrown out of her father’s house on account of her pregnancy. She takes a bedsit in a seedy lodging house in Fulham. A gay black neighbour, John, and a Jewish lover, Toby, provide support. A spinster aunt, Addy, turns into something of a fairy godmother, leaving
Guardian published one letter suggesting that the girl had been victimised and that her morals were her own business. Did people want educational qualifications reduced to a ‘Mrs Whitehouse Certificate of Godliness and Cleanliness’? this writer asked.19 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
girls in the 1970s. These attitudes softened slightly in the 1980s, as more scholars began to investigate the appeal of romance literature to women. Writers such as Janice Radway and Cora Kaplan rejected the idea of the woman reader as blotting paper, passively soaking up stories.85 Readers were in dialogue with what they read. The act of reading itself could give pleasure and be an expression of independence for women. However, by the time these new academic approaches were in vogue, the
who would surely feel more at home plying their trade on the streets of Ipswich.76 Adult women infantilised themselves by wobbling around in high-heeled shoes, Liz Jones insisted, asking: how could women be so pathetic? Do we have evidence to accept Natasha Walter’s suggestion that a sexualised culture is increasingly ‘shrinking and warping the choices on offer to young women’? It depends where one looks. Walter’s writing is persuasive and at times polemical, although she punctuates her text