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Book Details
Abstract
'A brilliant cultural history.'
Irish Examiner
Girls behave badly. If they're not obscenity-shouting, pint-swigging ladettes, they're narcissistic, living dolls floating around in a cloud of self-obsession, far too busy twerking to care. And this is news.
In this witty and wonderful book, Carol Dyhouse shows that where there's a social scandal or a wave of moral outrage, you can bet a girl is to blame. Whether it be stories of 'brazen flappers' staying out and up all night in the 1920s, inappropriate places for Mars bars in the 1960s or Courtney Love's mere existence in the 1990s, bad girls have been a mass-media staple for more than a century.
And yet, despite the continued obsession with their perceived faults and blatant disobedience, girls are infinitely better off today than they were a century ago.
This is the story of the challenges and opportunities faced by young women growing up in the swirl of the twentieth century, and the pop-hysteria that continues to accompany their progress.
Carol Dyhouse is a social historian and currently a research professor of history at the University of Sussex. Her acclaimed book Glamour: Women, History, Feminism was published by Zed Books in 2010. Longer-term, her research has focused on gender, education and the pattern of women's lives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. Her books include Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England; Feminism and the Family in England, 1890-1939; No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939; and Students: A Gendered History.
Table of Contents
| Section Title | Page | Action | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front cover | Front cover | ||
| Title page | iii | ||
| Table of contents | v | ||
| Illustrations | vi | ||
| Acknowledgements | vii | ||
| Introduction | 1 | ||
| 1 | White slavery and the seduction of innocents | 11 | ||
| 1.1 Innocent victim of the white slave trade pictured in Fighting the Traffic in Young Girls | 20 | ||
| 1.2 The white slaver disguised as a helpful gentleman approaching an unwary young lady | 21 | ||
| 1.3 The May Day festivities at Whitelands College | 32 | ||
| 1.4 Elsie Ryall | 33 | ||
| 2 | Unwomanly types: new women, revolting daughters and rebel girls | 42 | ||
| 2.1 Girl suffragette in Trafalgar Square | 60 | ||
| 3 | Brazen flappers, bright young things and ‘Miss Modern’ | 70 | ||
| 3.1 Cover image from The Girl’s Favourite magazine, March 1927 | 75 | ||
| 3.2 Pyjama-clad, cigarette-smoking flapper | 76 | ||
| 3.3 Amy Johnson, pioneer British aviator in the 1930s | 90 | ||
| 3.4 Girls inspired by Amy Johnson’s exploits could pose for photographs in simulated aeroplanes | 90 | ||
| 3.5 Factory girls in Walthamstow, north London, mid-1930s, modelling carnival hats. | 94 | ||
| 3.6 ‘Miss Modern’ resplendent in her cutting-edge swimsuit | 102 | ||
| 4 | Good-time girls, baby dolls and teenage brides | 105 | ||
| 4.1 Scene from the controversial film Good Time Girl | 114 | ||
| 4.2 Betty Burden, a young hairdresser in Birmingham in 1951, helping her mother with the weekly wash | 122 | ||
| 4.3 Young women working on an assembly line in a clothing factory in Leicester, 1948 | 124 | ||
| 4.4 Schoolgirls in a domestic science class show off their cake-making skills (early 1960s) | 126 | ||
| 5 | Coming of age in the 1960s: beat girls and dolly birds | 137 | ||
| 5.1 Poster advertising the film Beat Girl (1959) | 138 | ||
| 5.2 Mandy Rice-Davies unperturbed about the public impact of her revelations | 148 | ||
| 5.3 Trendy teenagers enjoying the sounds at Brad’s Club, London, early 1960s | 152 | ||
| 5.4 The lure of the jukebox | 153 | ||
| 5.5 Police struggle to contain young girls outside Buckingham Palace, as the Beatles are honoured with MBE awards in 1965 | 156 | ||
| 5.6 The young journalist Katharine Whitehorn photographed for Picture Post | 162 | ||
| 5.7 Miniskirted dolly birds shopping in a boutique | 163 | ||
| 6 | Taking liberties: panic over permissiveness and women’s liberation | 175 | ||
| 6.1 A young Marianne Faithfull looking innocent, 1967 | 176 | ||
| 7 | Body anxieties, depressives, ladettes and living dolls: what happened to girl power? | 211 | ||
| 7.1 Rotherham punk Julie Longden and friends pose in a photobooth, 1977 | 212 | ||
| 8 | Looking back | 241 | ||
| 8.1 Two pairs of twin sisters celebrate their A-level results at Putney High School, south London, in August 2011 | 248 | ||
| Notes | 257 | ||
| Introduction | 257 | ||
| Chapter 1 | 257 | ||
| Chapter 2 | 262 | ||
| Chapter 3 | 266 | ||
| Chapter 4 | 271 | ||
| Chapter 5 | 274 | ||
| Chapter 6 | 278 | ||
| Chapter 7 | 283 | ||
| Chapter 8 | 288 | ||
| Sources and select bibliography | 289 | ||
| Index | 303 | ||
| Back cover | Back cover |