Teetering on the Edge: portraits of innocence, risk and young female sexualities in 1950s’ and 1960s' British cinema

ABSTRACT

This article explores how British social problem films in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented social anxieties around the sexuality of girls in their mid to late teens. Its analytic focus is upon the risks posed by modern social life to the teenage girl's sexual innocence and it argues that attending to this hitherto often-neglected sexual state brings new insights to cultural histories of young female sexualities. Discussion draws upon Beat Girl (1959), Rag Doll (1960), Girl on Approval (1961) and Don't Talk to Strange Men (1962), highlighting how these films situated the figure of the teenage girl in the liminal space of child-adult and girl-woman and how this informed concerns about her sexual vulnerability. By unpicking the films' different approaches to viewing and representing this liminal space—through the lenses of adolescence and young womanhood—the authors demonstrate how at this historical juncture the intersections of gender and age are differently emphasised and given meaning in cinematic portrayals of sexual innocence.

Notes on contributors

Janet Fink is Professor of Childhood and Personal Relationships in the School of Education and Professional Development at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She is co-author of Couple Relationships in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and has also published on issues related to children in care, child abduction, illegitimacy and child migration in the mid-twenetieth century.

Penny Tinkler is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester, UK. She has written extensively on the history of girls and young women, popular magazines, the feminisation of smoking, photography and photo methods. Her books include: Constructing Girlhood: popular magazines for girls growing up in England 1920–1950 (Taylor & Francis, 1995), Smoke Signals: women, smoking and visual culture in Britain 1880–1980 (Berg, 2006) and Using Photographs in Social and Historical Research (SAGE, 2013).

Notes

1 Melanie Bell (2010) Femininity in the Frame: women and 1950s popular culture (London: I.B. Tauris); Melanie Bell-Williams (2006) ‘Shop-Soiled’ Women: female sexuality and the figure of the prostitute in 1950s British cinema, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3(2), pp. 266–283; Janet Fink (2011) For Better or for Worse? The Dilemmas of Unmarried Motherhood in Mid-Twentieth-Century Popular British Film and Fiction, Women's History Review, 20(1), pp. 125–138; Janet Fink & Katherine Holden (1999) Pictures from the Margins of Marriage: representations of spinsters and single mothers in the Victorian novel, interwar Hollywood melodrama and British films of the 1950s and 60s’, Gender and History, 11(2), pp. 233–255; John Hill (1986) Sex, Class and Realism: British cinema 1956–63 (London: BFI); Kerry Kidd (2003) Women of Twilight, in Ian MacKillop & Neil Sinyard (Eds) British Cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press); Lola Young (1996) Fear of the Dark: race, gender and sexuality in the cinema (London: Routledge).

2 Market researcher Mark Abrams defined the teenager as a single person aged 15–24 years—Mark Abrams (1961) Teenage Consumer II (London). The term was also used to refer to someone in their ‘teen’ years', i.e. 13–19. Our argument is developed through the latter. On definitions, see Adrian Horn (2009) Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and youth culture 1945–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 90–91.

3 Our approach to this particular study of sexual innocence, risk and the teenage girl builds upon our previous research into representations of teenage girls and young women in post-war British cinema, fiction, magazines and newspapers. The four films discussed here were identified after an extensive scoping exercise in which we watched all British films, released in the period between the late 1950s and early 1960s, which featured a teenage girl protagonist. The films were selected because they explore issues of risk and innocence extensively, thereby allowing us to identify similarities and differences in the films' narratives and the ways these were reflected in post-war British society.

4 Hera Cook (2004) The Long Sexual Revolution: English women, sex and contraception 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

5 Lesley. A. Hall (2000) Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (London: Macmillan).

6 Bill Osgerby (1998) Youth in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell).

7 Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change.

8 Pre-1950 there had been concerns about the sexuality of single young women, but ‘the delinquent adolescent female was something of a rarity’ and concerns focused principally on working-class girls—Carol Dyhouse (2013) Girl Trouble. Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London: Zed Books), pp. 105–121, p. 121. See also Penny Tinkler (2003) Cause for Concern: young women and leisure, 1930–1950’, Women's History Review, 12(2), pp. 233–260.

9 Christine Geraghty (2000) British Cinema in the Fifties: gender, genre and the ‘new look’ (London: Routledge); Elizabeth Wilson (1980) Only Halfway to Paradise. Women in Postwar Britain: 1945–1968 (London: Tavistock).

10 By 1965, 40% of brides were under twenty-one years when they married, compared to roughly 15% in 1921; see Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, pp. 124–125. See also, Stephanie Spencer (2009) Girls at Risk. Early School-Leaving and Early Marriage in the 1950s’, Journal of Educational Administration and History, 41(2), pp. 179–192.

11 Christine Geraghty (1997) Women and Sixties British Cinema: the development of the ‘Darling’ girl, in Robert Murphy (Ed.) Sixties British Cinema (London: BFI Publishing), pp. 154–155.

12 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism; Marcia Landy (1991) British Genres: cinema and society 1930–1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press).

13 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, pp. 133–146.

14 Geraghty, ‘Women and Sixties British Cinema’, pp. 155, 159; Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 84.

15 Michael Peplar (2002) Family Matters: a history of ideas since 1945 (London: Longman), p. 72.

16 Becky Conekin, Frank Mort & Chris Walters (Eds) (1999) Moments of Modernity: reconstructing Britain 1945–1964 (London: Rivers Oram Press), p. 3.

17 Raymond Williams (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

18 Sue Harper & Vincent Porter (2007) British Cinema in the 1950s: the decline of deference (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 271.

19 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 24.

20 For discussion of British New Wave cinema, see Stuart Laing (1986) Representations of Working-Class Life (London: Macmillan).

21 Harper & Porter, British Cinema in the 1950s, p. 184.

22 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism, p. 41.

23 Harper & Porter, British Cinema in the 1950s, p. 250.

24 John Montgomery (1965) The Fifties (London: George Allen & Unwin) notes that in 1959 Adam Faith's recording ‘What Do You Want?' sold 49,500 copies in one day and his sequel ‘Poor Me' was an equal bestseller.

25 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 8.

26 Montgomery, The Fifties. See also Gillian A. M. Mitchell (2013) Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’: Bill Haley's 1957 tour of Britain, inter-generational relations and attitudes to Rock ‘n’ Roll in the late 1950s', Twentieth Century British History, 24(4), pp. 573–605.

27 Hill, Sex, Class and Realism; Bell, Femininity in the Frame ; Mark Janovitch & Lucy Faire with Sarah Stubbings (2003) The Place of the Audience: cultural geographies of film consumption (London: BFI).

28 See Abrams, Teenage Consumer.

29 Michael Schofield (1965) The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 56.

30 Cate Haste (1992) Rules of Desire. Sex in Britain: World War 1 to the Present (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 162.

31 Landy, British Genres, p. 432.

32 Raymond Williams (1976, 1983) Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (London: Fontana), p. 261. See also Julia Hallam with Margaret Marshment (2000) Realism and Popular Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 45–51 for discussion of ‘realist moments’ in British films produced between 1959 and 1963.

33 Pre-1950s film focused more on young men than young women although there were some British films about working-class ‘good time girls’ in the 1930s and 1940s; see Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, pp. 112–116. In the 1950s and 1960s this orientation shifted with the rise in concerns about young women and the incidence of premarital sex; the sexually innocent young woman also came into focus in the context of risk.

34 Elizabeth Roberts (2002) Women and Families: an oral history, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell). See also discussion of how 15- and 16-year-old schoolgirls portrayed their life in Huddersfield: Brian Jackson (1968) Working Class Community (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul), pp. 132–146.

35 Daily Mirror, 19 September 1958, p. 13; The Observer, 25 May 1958, p. 10.

36 Penny Tinkler (2014) ‘I've got my own life to live’: the teenage self and lifestyle in young women's magazines, Britain 1957–70’, Cultural & Social History, 11(4), pp. 597–620.

37 Madeleine Roof (1935) Youth and Leisure (Edinburgh: Constable).

38 Anthony Giddens (1991) Modernity and Self-identity (Cambridge: Polity Press); Ulrich Beck (1992) Risk Society: towards a new modernity (Munich: University of Munich Press).

39 Gillian Swanson (2007) Drunk with the Glitter: space, consumption and sexual instability in modern urban culture (London: Routledge), pp. 74–75.

40 Adrian Bingham (2009) Family Newspapers? Sex, Private Life and the British Popular Press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 166–167.

41 There was a widespread belief, especially among educationalists, that young people should remain in part-time, if not full-time, education until they were eighteen. Although the Education Act (1944) provided free state education for all children up to eighteen according to ability, most working-class young people left school at fifteen and many middle-class youth, especially girls, at sixteen. The importance of educational provision for adolescents aged 15–18 was much discussed, e.g. Ministry of Education (1954) Early Leaving. A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (London: HMSO); Ministry of Education (1959) 15–18. A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (Crowther Report) (London: HMSO). See: Spencer, ‘Girls at Risk’; Penny Tinkler (2001) Youth's Opportunity? The Education Act of 1944 and Proposals for Part-Time Continuation Education, History of Education, 30(1), pp. 77–94.

42 David Fowler (1995) The First Teenagers: the lifestyle of young wage-earners in inter-war Britain (London: Woburn); Andrew Davies (1992) Leisure, Gender and Poverty: working-class culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press); Penny Tinkler (1995) Constructing Girlhood: popular magazines for girls growing up in England, 1920–1950 (Falmer: Taylor & Francis).

43 See, for example, Abrams, Teenage Consumer; Colin MacInnes (1960) In England, Half English (MacGibbon & Kee). The notion of a generation gap has been questioned; see, for example, Selina Todd & Hilary Young (2012) Baby-Boomers to ‘Beanstalkers’: making the modern teenager in post-war Britain, Cultural & Social History, 9, pp. 451–467.

44 Abrams, Teenage Consumer.

45 Haste, Rules of Desire, p. 203.

46 Angela McRobbie & Jenny Garber (1976) Girls and Subcultures’, in S. Hall & T. Jefferson (Eds) Resistance through Rituals (London: Hutchison).

47 Louise Jackson (2008) ‘The Coffee Club Menace’: policing youth, leisure and sexuality in post-war Manchester, Cultural and Social History, 5(3), pp. 289–308. Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, pp. 140–141.

48 Mirror, 4 November 1959, p. 9.

49 We build on the observation that teenage girls in the 1980s were caught between two contradictory discourses of adolescence and femininity; Barbara Hudson (1984) Femininity and Adolescence, in A. McRobbie & M. Nava (Eds) Gender and Generation (London: Macmillan), pp. 31–53.

50 For example: Hemming, Problems of Adolescence; ‘Problems of Adolescence’ series in The Observer, May/June 1958.

51 Kenneth Walker & Peter Fletcher (1955, 1958) Sex and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 98.

52 Ruth Adam (1975) A Woman's Place, 1910–1975 (London: Chatto & Windus), p. 182. The trend towards early marriage, especially among working-class girls, further complicated the distinction between teenage girls and adult women; see note 10.

53 Tinkler, ‘Cause for Concern’; Penny Tinkler (1994) An All-Round Education: the Board of Education's policy for the leisure-time training of girls, 1939–50’, History of Education, 23(4), pp. 385–403; Tinkler, ‘Youth's Opportunity?’.

54 See, for example, Marie Battle's ten-part series on the ‘Problems of Adolescence’ in The Guardian, 1958; also the ‘Beanstalk Generation’ series (1959) and Mary Brown's problem page, both in the Daily Mirror.

55 James Hemming (1960) Problems of Adolescent Girls (London: Heinemann).

56 Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, notes the emphasis on female maturity in the period's literature on mothering, sexuality and employment, p. 157.

57 Observer, 6 July 1958, p. 9.

58 Hemming, Problems of Adolescent Girls.

59 Jay Dixon (1999) The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon, 1909–1990s (London: UCL Press); Lynne Pearce (2007) Romance Writing (Cambridge: Polity Press).

60 Hemming, Problems of Adolescent Girls.

61 Pat Thane & Tanya Evans (2013) Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

62 Bell-Williams, ‘“Shop-Soiled’ Women”', p. 275. In the film, The Flesh is Weak (1957), Bell-Williams also identifies tentative exploration of new forms of female sexuality.

63 17–18% of teenage pregnancies were illegitimate 1938–late 1950s; 18.6% in 1960; 20.5% in 1962. Cited in Callum G. Brown (2011) Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c.1950–75: the importance of a ‘short’ sexual revolution to the English religious crisis of the sixties’, Twentieth Century British History, 22(2), p. 210.

64 Schofield revealed that in 1962–63, only two-thirds of the young women he surveyed were ‘hostile’ to premarital sex; opposition dropped to 8% of young women by 1971. Cited in Brown, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman’, p. 211. See also Honey magazine, Tinkler, ‘I've got my own life to live’.

65 See also Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, pp. 139–141.

66 Fink & Holden, ‘Pictures from the Margins of Marriage’; Christine Gledhill (Ed.) (1987) Home Is Where The Heart Is (London: BFI); Marjorie Rosen (1973) Popcorn Venus (New York: Coward, McGann & Geoghegan).