Girl power — we’ve come a long way

GIRLS, girls, girls.

Never has one group of human beings been so singled out, so fetishised, so agonised over, so over-protected, so wrapped up in cultural projection and expectation.

We are obsessed with girls, in all their inexperience, their potential, and their power. Girls make us drool, gawp, panic, fret, moralise, pontificate. We get ourselves in a right tizz about them. This tizz is beautifully analysed by social historian Carol Dyhouse, in her latest book, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress In The History Of Young Women, which examines the journey of the girl in the 20th century.

That is, the journey of the 20th century girl in the developed world. You’d need a much bigger book to deal with the global girl, often stymied by poverty, lack of education, sexual violence, and powerlessness. What Dyhouse looks at is the journey of the girl from Victorian times to the present day — are girls better or worse off than before? We hear a lot of doomy stuff about how contemporary girl power has been eviscerated by a slide backwards towards hyper-sexualisation and society’s obsession with face and body — instead of heart and mind — dominating the forming female psyche. Where getting your kit off is regarded as ‘empowering’, and where eating disorders and low self-esteem are normalised as part of girlhood.

Feminists and child development experts are falling over themselves to tell us what a mess girls are in, from Natasha Walters’ Living Dolls to Steve Biddulph’s Raising Girls (both excellent books, by the way, and well worth a read). But are girls really in the downward spiral we think they are?

Well, it depends. Certainly, a few decades ago, Dyhouse stated that “strong girls were in fashion. Young female punks in the late 1970s perfected a new kind of stylish stroppiness”. In the 1980s, there was Madonna, Courtney Love, and the Riot Grrrl movement as role models. Then it all went a bit pink, a bit pole-dancey, as outlined in Ariel Levy’s attack on what she terms ‘raunch culture’ in her book Female Chauvinist Pigs. Did Suffragette Emily Davison (“deeds not words”) die under a horse so that Katie Price, who recently appeared in a fantasy pony costume, could become a teenage role model? Is this really girl power? Does it matter?

Perfectionism has always been the enemy of girlhood femaleness, as opposed to manmade ‘femininity’. “Girls are too often expected to be perfect in every way,” writes Dyhouse. “At school, in work and behaviour, and in the way they look.” No wonder girls are more prone than boys to eating disorders and depression. Being brainy is brilliant, but what if you’re not conventionally feminine? Back in the Victorian era, where girls were groomed either for marriage or servitude, depending on their class, it was believed that “too much intellectualism unsexed young women”. As for girlhood female sexuality, it did not exist — at least, not among young ladies. Gracious, no.

Much horror was generated in the Victorian and Edwardian eras around the idea of ‘white slavery’. Girls were innocents to be protected by honourable men from the predatory evils of dishonourable men, and the failure of men to protect girls via fatherhood or marriage meant a girl could easily end up on the slag heap. “They required shelter provided by fathers or husbands, and their main job in life was to sanctify and purify the home,” writes Dyhouse. You know, like a kind of human air freshener. Suffragette leader 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”. Her observations were not widely popular with conservatives.

Self-sacrifice as an essentially female virtue was one of the big lies of the era. Another was that education not only masculinised girls, but could even flatten girls’ bosoms and shrivel their ovaries. “The strain on the female intellect could wreak havoc with girls’ reproductive potential,” writes Dyhouse. (In the era of the vajazzle, this sounds almost funny). Girls evidently thought so too, as the First World War eased social constraints, particularly among working class girls, who embraced make-up and the recently invented cinema with gusto. “Flappers replaced revolting daughters and hysterical Suffragettes,” notes Dyhouse, who in turn were replaced by “good-time girls”.

The good-time girl was a popular ’30s and ’40s construct. “Social workers and medical professionals helped the media to construct a stereotype… she exploited men, was probably promiscuous, and definitely a danger to health, home and family.” (Although you’d have to agree she sounds more fun than the Victorian home purifier). Then in the ’50s, yet more change occurred which would lead girls away from the path of purity, domestic devotion, and subservience: these included, says Dyhouse, “American crooners, jukeboxes, coffee bars and jazz cellars, Teddy boys and rock’n’roll.” The teenager was born.

Obviously, things were very different for girls in Ireland, thanks to social control institutions like the Magdalene Laundries and the diktat of the Catholic Church written into the Constitution; things were not quite so free and easy as they were in other Western countries in the ’60s.

Elsewhere, the phenomenon of the Pill meant that girls could now have sex the way that boys had always had sex — without fear of pregnancy. Prior to the Pill, even in countries more secular than Ireland, “pre-marital pregnancy and illegitimacy were still sources of great social shame”, and if pregnancy did occur, so too did marriage, because “even a bad choice of son-in-law was seen as better than an illegitimate grandchild”.

Girls were still being penalised for sexual behaviour considered acceptable in boys.

And then came the watershed of the 1970s for both women and girls. Along came the second wave of feminism. Here were “the first generation of girls who took education for granted” yet “were often perplexed to encounter limited opportunities on leaving school, and a sexually segregated labour market”.

In the UK, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 attempted to address this — Ireland followed two years later with the Employment Equality Act 1977. You could no longer advertise for a barman or a waitress. You could no longer ban people from jobs because of their gender.

“By the end of the 20th century, girls’ performances had drawn level with that of boys at each stage of education,” writes Dyhouse. “Indeed, in some areas they were doing markedly better.” There was even talk of a new sexual revolution in the mid 1990s, specifically a ‘genderquake’ in 1994, followed by the eruption of something called Girl Power.

Obviously, because we are talking about girls, the cultural anxiety continues unabated into the 21st century. These days instead of worrying about white slavery, too much reading making you infertile, or being corrupted by pot-smoking Beatniks in espresso bars, we fret about our girls in different but equally corrosive ways. They drink too much. They don’t eat enough. They eat too much. They have body dysmorphia. They are too vain. They hate themselves. They are depressed. They over achieve. They under achieve. They are single. They are not single. They lack ambition. They are ambitious, a trait still considered ‘unfeminine’ even today.

It’s all so much rot. Girls are supremely powerful, if only we would leave them be and let them realise their power. The best thing you could give your teenage girl is not a nose job for her 18th, but a copy of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman — cheery, sensible feminism for the would-be woman. That’s what I will be giving my girl when she’s ready to read it, alongside a daily reminder that it’s her brain that counts, not her bra size. Even in 2013.

And perhaps a copy of Carol Dyhouse for the rest of us.

* Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress In The History Of Young Women by Carol Dyhouse is published by Zed Books