Girl Trouble Read online

  The 1970s in Britain were a watershed. The women’s liberation movement, or what became known as ‘second-wave feminism’, contested almost every aspect of young women’s experience. The impact of feminism, and the momentous changes in assumptions about gender and education that characterised the decade are considered in Chapter 6. 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.

  This book is first and foremost a history, and while it explores a number of contemporary issues and problems, particularly in the last chapters, it sets out to take a long view. It shows that the history of girlhood in Britain has been deeply troubled. Modern British history has been packed with horror stories about girls. Attention to representations of girlhood in British social history and popular culture shows clearly that the changes in young women’s lives since Victorian times have been accompanied by anxiety and social unease. Ideas about femininity, and feminine respectability, have proved a battleground. Expectations about how young women should behave have been contested and uncertain. Settled hierarchies, and often taken-for-granted notions of how men and women should relate to each other, have been regularly disturbed, shaken up, and challenged. For some, this has been a cause for celebration; others have reacted with pessimism or condemnation, anxiety, panic, and even despair. The Victorian middle class invested heavily in the notion of girlish innocence, holding feminine virtue to be the foundation of a stable home and family life. Social stability was seen to depend on a right ordering of male and female, and on a father’s protection of daughters. This protection was envisaged as both moral and economic; it was also, of course, built into politics and sanctioned by the law. Protection was a two-edged sword, and it frequently shaded into control. Feminism, ‘new women’ and ‘modern girls’ all challenged patriarchy, and they all brought into question both the efficacy of protection and equally, the need for, and the justice of, control. Girls’ demands for greater self-determination and independence spelled trouble. So in each generation, the image of girlhood has been hotly contested, with the ‘modern girl’ represented at times as a major beneficiary of social change, at other times as symbol, symptom and even the prime agent of social disruption.

  In the pages that follow I use the terms ‘girl’ and ‘young woman’ interchangeably. ‘Girl’ was used widely in nineteenth-century Britain, and it was used across class boundaries, unlike ‘young lady’, which generally excluded the working class. Middle-class writers in the Edwardian era often described girlhood as coming to an end when a young woman first menstruated, or first put up her hair. A decade or so later, girls were more likely to chop off rather than to coil up their tresses. Girlhood was definitely ended by marriage, although colloquially, familiarly (or rudely) women might still be described as ‘old girls’. During the twentieth century, even as the age of marriage fell, adult women might refer to themselves as girls – as in ‘a night out with the girls’. With the advent of the women’s liberation movement there was unease about the term: as applied to young adult women it was widely considered belittling and disrespectful. Since the last decades of the twentieth century, the term has been reclaimed, somewhat, particularly through discussions of ‘girl power’.4 Adult women were by the 1990s marrying later and later – if they married at all. Reactions to the use of the word ‘girl’ have often depended on who is using it. I have chosen to use it broadly and affirmatively.

  1 | WHITE SLAVERY AND THE SEDUCTION OF INNOCENTS

  Where Are You Going To …? was the deceptively innocent-sounding title of a story which horrified and enthralled British readers in 1913. Originally published as My Little Sister, the same story had created shock waves in the USA during the previous year. The book was so shocking that sales had clocked up at the rate of around a thousand copies daily, justifying a fourth edition within a month.1 The author of the story was Elizabeth Robins, a celebrated American actress then living in Britain. She was a woman of great intelligence, glamour and style. She was also a committed feminist. Robins was determined to publicise the evils of prostitution, and more particularly stories of contemporary trafficking in young women, what was known as the ‘white slave trade’. She had carried out intensive research for this book, even to the extent of dressing up in Salvation Army uniform and talking, through the night, with prostitutes working the streets around Piccadilly.2

  The book told the tale of a pretty maid, ‘white and golden’, ‘dimpled and lovely like a small princess’, who fell into the clutches of a group of lustful and immoral men. The reader is left to figure out precisely what happened next, but there is no doubt that we are meant to assume the worst. The story begins with two innocent middle-class girls living in the countryside near Brighton. Their frail and impoverished widowed mother is on her sickbed. The mother decides to send her daughters to stay with their aunt in London. Tipped off by a treacherous dressmaker, a fake aunt is waiting for them at Victoria Station. This ‘mysteriously veiled woman’, sporting a hat ominously ‘boiling over with black ostrich feathers’, greets the girls, one the unnamed narrator of the tale, the other her little sister Bettina, (the angelic, white-and-golden one), and whisks them off to a posh brothel: ‘one of the most infamous houses in Europe’.

  There they are taken to a room of oriental splendour hung in rose silk. The girls are tarted up for display to a male clientele. The fake aunt dresses for dinner in ‘a gown all covered with little shining scales, like a snake’s skin’. Lest we miss the predatory allusions, we are told that she eyes the girls ‘like a huge grey hawk’ with ‘a full yellow eye, the iris almost black’, which turned ‘reddish’ in the course of the evening. A ghastly collection of male reprobates accompanies the girls at dinner. These men are designated simply as ‘the Colonel’, ‘the Tartar’ and so on. One has a hunchback; another is described as blotchy-faced and creepy. After dinner, the men leer over the innocent Bettina, goading her into singing girlish nursery songs (‘Where are you going to, my pretty maid?’). Meanwhile Bettina’s sister notices that the windows are barred. Her neighbour at table explains that the house was once a private lunatic asylum. Something in the girl’s spirit impresses this man, whose dessert she is clearly supposed to become, and he helps her to escape from the house of horror. Half-mad, she blunders through the London streets. Finding refuge in her real aunt’s house and seeking help from the police, she desperately searches for Bettina, whom she is never to see again.

  Robins’s book was one of a clutch of feminist texts claiming to unmask the realities of prostitution, venereal disease and the white slave trade just before the First World War. It should be seen alongside her friend Dr Louisa Martindale’s short medical treatise on the subject, Under the Surface (1909), and suffragette leader Christabel Pankhurst’s controversial text The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913).3 All three writers railed against a double standard of morality and what they saw as the sexual slavery of women; all three saw votes for women as the first step towards eliminating such abuses. The books cross-reference each other: Robins originally thought of titling her story ‘What became of Betty Martindale?’4 Christabel Pankhurst’s The Great Scourge refers to both Martindale and Robins.5 Robins’s text, with its pantomime villains, reads as gothic melodrama today. It may strike the reader as curious that in a book intended to chill the blood with suggestions of the blackest imaginable excesses of male beastliness, the most obvious villain is female. Nevertheless, at the time, as a piece of literary propaganda, it had a powerful impact. Christabel Pankhurst’s text has always proved controversial, particularly over its contention that a large proportion of Britain’s male population of the day were infected with venereal disease. Some contemporaries and many later historians have peremptorily dismissed this claim as deluded.6 Others have pointed out that Christabel took her information from supposedly reputable academic and clinical sources at a time when medic
al understanding of the disease was far from perfect. Anxiety over venereal disease was easy to understand. Before the discovery of sulphonamide drugs and antibiotics, these diseases were more or less untreatable. A society which tolerated sexual licence in men, while insisting on wifely innocence, posed particular problems for women.

  Christabel Pankhurst saw the powerless wife and the prostitute as linked in a system of patriarchal oppression which could be described, loosely, as white slavery. Further, The Great Scourge had a specific, contemporary example of white slavery to trumpet: that of the Piccadilly Flat case.7 The ‘foul revelations’ and ‘still fouler concealments’ of the Piccadilly Flat case, according to Christabel, summed up everything feminists should deplore about the great social evil of male immorality and the silencing of women who were denied the vote. What do we know of the Piccadilly Flat case?

  In the summer of 1913, Detective-Inspector Curry and Detective-Sergeant Burmby, of Scotland Yard’s recently created white slavery suppression branch, conducted a raid on a flat in Abingdon House, near London’s Piccadilly tube station.8 It was a property which they had had their eye on for some time. They were admitted by a woman called Elizabeth Telfer, more familiarly known as ‘Nurse Betty’ because she had qualified as a nurse and wore a nurse’s uniform. In the flat were two young girls, aged seventeen and eighteen, who were found ‘almost nude’ in the bathroom. The flat was heavily perfumed with the scent of lilies. The police seized stashes of dodgy photos and (allegedly) even dodgier correspondence, a pocketbook and diary, a whip, a cane, a revolver and a copy of the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which specified new and harsh penalties for anyone convicted of procuring for prostitution. The main occupant of the flat, who went by the name of Queenie Gerald, was charged with living on immoral earnings and keeping a disorderly house.

  Queenie Gerald was eventually fined, and was sentenced to three months’ detention in Holloway prison. Nurse Telfer was summoned by the Central Midwives’ Board, lost her nursing certificates and was struck off the midwives’ roll.9 But this was not enough to forestall an outcry over the case, which arose out of the belief that Gerald was guilty of procuring young girls and should have met with a much sterner penalty: it was widely rumoured that the less serious charge had been pursued by male lawyers and a government determined to protect the anonymity of an upper-class male clientele.

  Drawing support from women’s organisations, feminists and local churches, the protest over the case was fomented by Keir Hardie, leader of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Hardie was an old friend of the Pankhursts and had had a love affair with Christabel’s sister, Sylvia. His pamphlet The Queenie Gerald Case: A Public Scandal, White Slavery in a Piccadilly Flat, was published by the National Labour Press in 1913. With section headings such as ‘Shielding Rich Scoundrels’, Keir Hardie’s pamphlet demanded the further trial of Queenie Gerald as a procuress, and the public outing of ‘the filthy brood for whom she caters’. His rhetoric was colourful. Dismissing the government’s claim that the evidence pointed to two or three girls at the most, all of whom were over the age of consent and clearly engaged in prostitution before their introduction to Queenie Gerald, he thundered on about the lilies, hot-scented baths, and whips and lashes ‘reminiscent of Oriental orgies’ which had been found in the Piccadilly flat. His tone reminiscent of Old Testament wrath, Hardie ended his pamphlet with dire imprecations about the state of an England disgraced by some 350,000 fallen women, ‘all of them’, he concluded somewhat bathetically ‘somebody’s lassies!’10

  Papers in the Home Office and Metropolitan Police files preserved in the National Archives allow us to reconstruct something of this case. Sadly, Queenie’s pocketbook and diary have disappeared, although notes say that these were to be retained by the police. There are a couple of vaguely incriminating letters. One, addressed to Queenie and signed ‘Yorkshire’, expresses the writer’s hope that he will meet ‘your auburn friend’ on his next trip to London. Another, signed ‘Somerset’ and undated, asks simply: ‘Will you get me a virgin?’11 There is nothing in the way of hard, incriminating evidence and the Home Secretary insisted, in response to questioning in the House of Commons and elsewhere, that no evidence had actually been destroyed.12 The officers in Scotland Yard had, after all, initiated and pursued the case: the special department to deal with white slave trafficking had only just been set up, in response to public feeling, and its officers were keen to show results.13

  W. N. Willis, a somewhat shady, maverick figure who established the Anglo-Eastern Publishing Company and in the years before the First World War kept himself financially buoyant by publishing a series of books with salacious titles (Why Girls Go Wrong, Western Men with Eastern Morals, et cetera), expanded on the case of Queenie Gerald in his colourful White Slaves in a Piccadilly Flat, which appeared in 1915.14 This was a gossipy text, with dubious status as historical evidence, but Willis was an experienced sniffer-out of vice, with many contacts in the London underworld, and some of his comments on the case are suggestive of what may well have been the truth. Gerald was no procuress, Willis asserted: she was a clever woman, careful not to break the law. (We may remember that the police found an up-to-date copy of the Criminal Law Amendment Act in her flat.) Her girls were invariably ‘old hands’, although they regularly pretended innocence. She paid and treated her girls well, and they were loyal to her in return. Much of what went on in the flat centred around mixed bathing and massage rather than ‘immoral intercourse’, Willis claimed. There were also elaborate dinner parties enlivened by tableaux vivants, with girls dressing up (or down) and posing as ‘living statuary’. As for a diary or book of addresses of well-known clients, this was an old dodge, regularly resorted to by those in the trade to discourage police investigation. Willis thought that Keir Hardie and the suffragettes had got the wrong target, although he could appreciate that comparisons between the way that the suffragettes were treated in gaol (having a hosepipe turned on them, or being force-fed) and the way Queenie was indulged by warders in Holloway, rankled. According to insiders in the gaol, Queenie was tolerated and liked as a ‘star performer’, unrepentant, amusing and popular, which enabled her ‘to get away with things’.15

  Newspaper reports of Queenie’s stylish appearances in court, dressed fetchingly in tight costumes with patent boots, and the Metropolitan Police files, reflecting snapshots of her career over the next decade or so, confirm the impression conveyed by Willis. The files contain several letters addressed to the police from ‘The Honourable Geraldine “Queenie” Gerald Gaynor’, the handwriting elegant and bold, their envelopes sealed with gobs of glossy black wax impressed with a crown and a curly letter Q.16 Queenie Gerald was twenty-six years old in 1913. In the years that followed, her behaviour increasingly perplexed the police, leading to long descriptions of the gorgeousness of her attire (tailored black jackets, sparkly shoes, white silk stockings worked with sequins) and the luxuriance of her living conditions, with warning notes about the importance of never letting junior officers near her if they were alone.17 But material success brought little peace of mind to Queenie, who remained vulnerable to vitriolic press attacks and an object of abuse from and persecution by moralists for many years after 1913.18

  None of this tells us much about the white slave trade, the horrors of which so obsessed many contemporaries. To understand the history of concern about the trafficking of women and girls in Britain we need to track back to the 1880s, when campaigning journalist W. T. Stead published a sensational series of articles on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in the Pall Mall Gazette. This story is well known.19 Reports of English girls being lured to Continental brothels had already led to government-instigated investigation by a lawyer, Thomas Snagge. A number of concerned individuals, in particular the feminist Josephine Butler and moral reformers Alfred S. Dyer and Benjamin Waugh, pressed for more action, and in 1881 a Select Committee of the House of Lords set out to consider the law in respect of the protection of young girls ‘from
Artifices to Induce them to lead a Corrupt Life’.20 The evidence on the subject was somewhat contradictory. However, the perception that the government was dragging its feet on the matter inspired Stead to dramatic action. He set out to expose the evils of the sex trade by purchasing a young girl, spiriting her away to Europe, and penning a colourful account of his actions in the Pall Mall Gazette.21 The series of sensational articles which resulted was a triumph of Gothic horror-eroticism, with lashings of detail about chloroform, cries of childish terror, and the inflamed passions of old rakes gloating over torture and innocence despoiled. The episode landed both Stead and Rebecca Jarrett, a reformed sex worker who had acted as his reluctant accomplice in the affair, in gaol. But as a publicity stunt it generated all and more of the outrage that Stead had been seeking. For many reformers and feminists he had become a hero. Shortly after the publication of the ‘Maiden Tribute’ articles, the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.22 Vigilance societies, rescue homes, refuges, penitentiaries, and missions for friendless and fallen girls mushroomed all over Britain.23

  Many commentators would see the late Victorian outcry over white slavery as a moral panic.24 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. Twelve countries were represented at the first meeting, in London, in 1899,25 and conventions in Paris in 1902 and 1904 called for the setting up of specialised branches of national police forces which would dedicate themselves to eliminating trafficking.26 Britain’s Metropolitan Police force had established such a department by 1912, with Inspector Curry heading a team of nine constables, and Miss MacDougall, previously a diocesan mission worker, as Lady Assistant.27 This was the team that cracked down on Queenie Gerald in 1913. The same year saw London’s Caxton Hall hosting the fifth International Conference for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic. This was attended by prelates, peers and presidents from many different countries: King George V and Queen Mary sent strong messages of personal support.28