This blog accompanies Hannah Charnock’s Historical Journal article Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England, 1950–1980.

In June 2014 I interviewed Tracy [pseud], an accountant living in the south west of England as part of my doctoral research into teenage sexuality in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Tracy was born in 1962 and so was a teenager in the mid-1970s. Asked to describe her first romantic relationship she went off on something of a tangent:

“I think I can remember in year, I dunno, it must’ve been the 3rd year so that would’ve been about 12 or 13, some of my friends had elder sisters and they um, were discussing about what they’d done with boys and I remember us all thinking,sex ‘Oh my God, that’s absolutely disgusting! Did you really let a boy do that to you?!’ And, couple of years later we were doing the same thing!”

Drawing upon original oral histories and reflective testimonies collected as part of the Mass Observation Project, my article explores the ways in which teenage girls’ friendship groups and extended network of classmates and peers shaped their sexual lives. Testimonies like Tracy’s suggest that these relationships were hugely significant to young women growing up in the mid-century – not only were conversations with friends an important way of learning about sex but teenage girls spent a lot of time talking about their actual practice. Reflecting on their teenage lives, women like Tracy recalled how intensely they cared about what their friends thought and their preoccupation with making sure that they had the right kind of reputation. In these ways, girls’ romantic and/or sexual relationships with boys were greatly influenced by their relationships with other girls.

Crucially, these testimonies reveal that teenage girls did not simply exist within a sexual landscape defined by the adults who made laws, preached morals and directed popular culture. Rather, girls developed their own sexual values and hierarchies and mobilised these within their social networks. Undoubtedly, parents and teachers in the 1960s and 1970s continued to emphasise the importance of being a ‘nice girl’ (someone without a reputation for promiscuity who boys would want to marry), and girls policed each other’s behaviour accordingly. But for mid-century teenagers, being known to be sexually active did not simply cost girls their reputations. Across this period, young women came to believe that sexual knowledge and experience were things to be valued. Having a boyfriend was seen as a marker of social status and having experience of sexual activity was linked to being modern, grown-up and ‘cool’ and was increasingly aspired to. Teenage girls were shifting the boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviour and should be acknowledged as key architects in the so-called ‘Sexual Revolution’.

Read the full article for free here.

Main image: Teenagers in London’s Carnaby Street. Circa 1966. The National Archives UK