Girl Trouble Page 4
The ideal of girlish innocence had been given full expression by the art critic John Ruskin in the 1860s: his Sesame and Lilies, first published in 1865, contained an essay on the subject of femininity, ‘On Queen’s Gardens’, which quickly established itself as a classic statement of Victorian thinking about gender.68 Femininity, in Ruskin’s view, should be all about self-abnegation, purity and ‘sweet ordering’ in the home. Girls were given copies of the text, bound prettily in violet suede or green calf, on anniversaries or as school prizes. Ruskin himself had been generous in distributing copies to schoolgirls, in whose company he delighted. Ruskin’s passion for youthful femininity was exemplified in a long-standing adoration of Rose la Touche, whom he first encountered when she was nine years old and proposed to (unsuccessfully) eight years later. This obsession with young girls could unsettle his aesthetic judgement: he was entranced by Kate Greenaway’s prettified drawings of little girls in muslin smocks, for instance, sometimes showing an unhealthy interest in what they would look like without them.69 In the 1880s Ruskin became a keen patron of Whitelands Teacher Training College, in London, instigating an annual May Day celebration whereby the girl students elected the ‘likeablist and lovablist’ of their number to serve as May Queen. The girls dressed in diaphanous frocks and garlanded each other with buttercups, dancing around a beribboned maypole.70 Kate Greenaway designed one of the earliest dresses worn by the Whitelands May Queen. The GFS enthusiastically took up this tradition, popularising springtime displays of maidenly skipping around maypoles.
Whatever unease we may feel today about Ruskin’s sexual tastes, in the late Victorian and Edwardian years the GFS, along with a host of other girl protection societies, regularly prescribed his essays as improving literature.71 Purity workers set themselves the task of elevating rough girls into modest maidens, or ‘leading giddy girls into the path of safety’, as one GFS worker among factory girls in the North of England put it.72 Many of the girls she came into contact with had been ‘very rough, until the GFS tamed them’, she admitted. The Reverend Carpenter, representing the Social Purity Alliance, submitted a daunting description of working girls in London:
Let anyone go, for instance, along Commercial Road in the evening and see the awful roughness and want of modesty – the horrible loss of all that we think most tender and beautiful and pure in womanhood – among the rough girls that congregate in that road, and push their way and pass their horrid jokes.73
1.3 The May Day festivities at Whitelands College inspired by the art critic John Ruskin, 1889. Pen and ink drawing by an anonymous student (by kind permission of Whitelands College, University of Roehampton).
1.4 Elsie Ryall, crowned May Queen at Whitelands College in 1911 (photograph by kind permission of Whitelands College, University of Roehampton).
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. In 1919, for instance, the GFS mounted a full-scale ‘White Crusade’: a nationwide Battle for Purity. ‘We are no longer a fold, but an army,’ leaders declared. Although the GFS was far too conservative to lend any support to demands for women’s suffrage, this new direction seemed to draw on suffrage activism, and particularly on the suffragette genius for display. The GFS leaders, following the suffragettes, mounted pageants and processions, and organised mass meetings and rallies. At a GFS celebration in the Albert Hall in 1921, for instance, battalions of girls dressed in virginal white and veiled in blue carried banners and processed, with their company forming the Sign of the Cross.74
Many late Victorian moralists saw girls as either innocent, or ‘fallen’. The imagery was white and black. The loss of innocence – that is, of virginity – was generally regarded as a crucial turning point. Salvation Army records of girls and young women seeking shelter with the organisation from the 1880s, for instance, give case histories in the form of completed questionnaires. ‘How long Fallen?’ was one of the first questions.75 Even so, the Salvation Army – as its name implied – allowed for reclamation: ‘Has she given evidence of being saved?’ asked a question towards the end of the record. In contrast, the GFS made no provision for repentance. Fallen girls could not become members, and members who fell were expelled. Repeated attempts to soften this hard GFS line on chastity failed. Those who pushed for change argued that the chastity rule contradicted the idea of forgiveness and failed in the spirit of Christian charity. But reformers were only successful in changing the rule as late as 1936, and even then this was in the teeth of strong opposition, and many of the old guard resigned.76
In Victorian culture, the fallen girl was doomed. We think of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or of pregnant housemaids drowning themselves in millponds. There are strong associations between the ideas of sexual and of social ruin: as in discussions of white slavery, the stereotypes of upper-class rake and simple country girl come easily to mind. Purity workers in the 1890s and 1900s sometimes shared these assumptions. If the loss of chastity went unpunished by ruin, then many assumed that a fallen girl herself became a danger to others, liable to contaminate their innocence with her own knowledge of the world. There was a notion that sexual knowledge corrupted once and for all: that once having experienced intercourse, a woman would lose her most precious asset, become knowing, and never regain her virtue.
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. There is a hint of this, for instance, in Elizabeth Robins’s novel Where Are You Going To? Purity workers were divided on the question. Some believed that knowledge would help forearm a girl and hence protect her virtue. Others felt exactly the opposite: that sex education would inflame curiosity, stimulate impure thoughts, and increase susceptibility to corruption. The perils of going public with ‘radical ideas’ on the subject of sex education were illustrated by a controversy which blew up in Derbyshire in 1913.77 Miss Outram, responsible for an elementary school in the village of Dronfield, was teaching Scripture when her pupils asked her questions about pregnancy and childbirth. After giving the matter some careful thought she responded by reading them two stories. The first, heavily laced with references to God, touched on the matter of eggs and seeds and the beginnings of life. The second story was a stern moral warning against temptation, underscoring the importance of chastity and self-control. This was a careful enough response, one might imagine, but parents were outraged and the neighbourhood erupted in scandal. The school managers took the line that Miss Outram had corrupted childhood innocence. Some parents contended that Miss Outram had not only passed unsuitable knowledge to their daughters, but that these girls had then gone on to exercise a corrupting influence on younger siblings. Many families withdrew their children from the school. The episode illustrates not only the contentiousness of ideas about sex instruction, but also the strength of the widespread belief that innocence actually depended on ignorance of the facts of life.
Nevertheless, accounts of girls’ sexual experience before marriage in this period show a much more complex picture than purity workers often painted. Of course evidence isn’t always easy to come by. There is fragmentary evidence from refuges, homes for ‘female penitents’ and shelters for ‘fallen women’. These accounts were often shaped by a sense of what was required, and there were undoubtedly many situations in which girls needed above all to look penitent. The Salvation Army statement books mentioned above are a case in point: young women seeking shelter are likely to have framed their responses according to what they thought would yield the best result. Moreover, the responses to the questions will have been filled in �
�� and so shaped by – Salvation Army workers. Answers to the question ‘Cause of First Fall’ show an unsurprising mixture of innocence, regret and, only occasionally, defiance. But there is very little high drama. ‘Flirting with a lad’ was a common enough response. One suspects the reply ‘Bad companions and natural depravity’ to have come from interviewer rather than applicant. Undermining the stereotype of the ravaged innocent, one poor woman confessed that she had ‘fallen’ after walking out with the same man for a full nine years.78
A richer source of evidence comes from an inquiry carried out in the early years of the First World War and published as Downward Paths in 1916.79 The study was introduced by the Anglican preacher and suffragist Maude Royden. It represented the researches of a group of women medical and social workers (who judged it prudent to remain anonymous), who set out to consider the reasons why some women turned to prostitution. About 830 case histories went into the book, which maintained an intelligent, sympathetic and non-judgemental tone. Pre-marital sex wasn’t always shameful and disastrous, the authors pointed out: there were parts of Britain where it was pretty much accepted as normal. Indeed, far from being passive victims of male lust, women might even take the initiative in sex. Girls could be just as sexually curious as boys, although the penalties for ‘going astray’ were worse for the female sex. Young girls living in poverty often sought colour and adventure to perk up their lives: ‘To girls, the temptations of curiosity and of the awakening sex-instinct go often hand in hand with the possibilities of gain, and money means so much to those who want variety, colour, life …’80
Girls’ love of clothes and adornment should not be simply condemned as moral weakness, the authors insisted – it was self-respect that made many of them anxious to dress well.81 Equally, young working girls might be encouraged by attentions from men in uniform, or gentlemen of a higher social class, because they hoped to better themselves. Was this really such a crime? ‘Going with a gentleman’ might look like a safe option, and a well-dressed man might ‘throw a glamour over the transaction’ in the eyes of someone young and hopeful.82 This was all pretty radical, liberal stuff, and yet Royden and her co-authors went even further. Social workers dealing with the casualties of prostitution saw only part of the picture, they suggested. Some women undoubtedly did well for themselves and lived an independent lifestyle. Others married and settled down with men who were happy to keep them. Definitions of prostitution, and the borders around respectable behaviour, were rarely as clear as moralists insisted. After all, Royden cautiously suggested, there was a sense in which marriage itself was a kind of economic bargain, with the wife being kept in exchange for sexual services. There were different ways in which women might profit from sex. One story in the book, for instance, referred to two enterprising girls who for a number of seasons had worked on a cruise ship running between England and America:
They were most popular girls, the life of the ship and the pets of all the old ladies; ‘women you could really make friends with’, the men used to say. They would pick and choose their men, and a man might pursue them unsuccessfully during a whole voyage. By their earnings as prostitutes they supported a father and a brother who was at a University, while their family believed they were journalists. During the winter they dropped their profession, and the ship’s officers would visit them as friends.83
Downward Paths questioned contemporary stereotypes and unsettled assumptions at every point. Maude Royden argued that panic – based on ignorance – had too often governed policy, as in the case of the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Panic about white slavery had shaped public attitudes to sex. Citing Teresa Billington-Greig’s researches and similar studies, she emphasised yet again that cases of forcible abduction were extremely rare, pointing out that ‘a weeping and reluctant girl is not an easily marketable asset’. Nonetheless
Incredible and even grotesque stories were told and believed on the slenderest authority, or on no authority at all. The only demand was that they should be sufficiently frightful. Newspapers and bookstalls were deluged with articles, pamphlets and books narrating horrors and proposing remedies as preposterous – and sometimes as horrible – as the disease.84
None of this was to deny that procuring existed, Royden continued, still less that girls might be drawn into prostitution through poverty and despair. But procurers had no need for chloroform or syringes, their victims had usually been rendered ‘helpless enough by poverty and misfortune and apply to him [the procurer] as they might to the foreman of a relief works’. The procurer was ‘less the orchard thief than the blow-fly settling on fallen fruit’. Were every procurer to be flogged to death, it was unlikely that prostitution would be exterminated.85
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. Women’s groups dedicated to suppression of the white slave trade had mushroomed across Britain between 1900 and 1913, coinciding with the rise of militant suffragism. The image of a young girl enslaved by the predatory male could be central to feminism, especially when linked to ideas about social purity. White slavery not only served as a metaphor for the sexual oppression of women by men. In the minds and writings of many this was the great social evil of the day, and one which could only be remedied once women obtained the vote. ‘Votes for Women’ and ‘Purity for Men’ were twin demands in Christabel Pankhurst’s manifesto. Many feminists believed that once women had the vote there would be an end, once and for all, to prostitution.
But the image of the girl as victim had an altogether wider appeal. It was reassuring to anti-suffragists, who believed in feminine frailty and who contended that women and girls were vulnerable without male protection. Arthur Lee, proponent of the 1912 parliamentary bill against ‘White Slavery’, had emphasised that staunch opponents of women’s suffrage such as himself were under a special obligation to clamp down on ‘those sinister creatures who batten upon commercialised vice, and who make a profitable business out of kidnapping, decoying and ruining … unwilling girls’.86 Moreover the image of the girl as innocent, and as vulnerable, had undeniable erotic charge. Stead’s highly coloured account of ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ had been shot through with near-pornographic descriptions of hardened rakes enjoying the helpless cries of panicked girl-children. A mixture of moral outrage and obsessive focus on the details of degradation has proved common in accounts of white slavery, even in more modern historical writing. Of course, publishers have not been slow to capitalise on this. In the 1960s, for instance, the paperback edition of the historian Charles Terrot’s account of white slavery was presented as a shock-horror text about lust, depravity and the flesh-markets of Europe. The lurid blurb on the cover promised the reader ‘Innocent girls – completely ignorant of sex – captured by trickery – abducted by force – compelled to submit to the corrupt and degraded desires of men sunk in vice and perversion …’87 And so forth, which presumably did no harm to the book’s sales at the time.
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 s
uited a range of interest groups, for very diverse reasons, to represent girls as frightened, as oppressed, or as victims.
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.
This new era was heralded by the production of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House, first performed in Britain in 1889.1 The play’s heroine, Nora, is patronised and infantilised by her husband Torvald, who treats her as a plaything. Nora’s realisation that without independence and self-respect she cannot be a good wife or mother leads her to walk out on her home and family. Into the waste basket went Ruskin’s prescriptions for wifely submissiveness as Nora slammed the door of the doll’s house behind her and strode into the world. Feminists were inspired. The more conventional in the audience were appalled.
The controversy over the New Woman was not just about marriage: much of it focused on education and girlhood. Middle-class daughters were seen to be getting restless, which generated a lively correspondence in the periodical literature of the time. In 1894, an article entitled ‘The Revolt of the Daughters’ by the majestically named Blanche Alethea Crackenthorpe contended that there was a crisis in family relationships.2 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. The article provoked responses from like-minded mothers (such as the conservative literary hostess Lady Jeune)3 in addition to particularly spirited rebuttals from younger women and feminists, who were immediately dubbed the ‘revolting daughters’. 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.4 Others agreed with her. The idea of caging girls up in conservatories, like hothouse plants or pet songbirds, was senseless, declared Gertrude Hemery, another rebel daughter. Confinement made girls vulnerable rather than protecting their ‘purity’, she argued.5 Another feminist, Sarah Amos, agreed but went further, emphasising the importance of social class. Whereas middle-class parents seemed obsessed by the need to protect their daughters’ virtue by limiting their movements, most working-class girls went about independently by the age of fifteen or sixteen. A great deal of girls’ ill-health or ‘delicacy’ was due to repression, she insisted. Boys, too, would be prone to ‘hysteria’ if their lives were hedged in by so many constraints.6