{"id":31646,"date":"2019-10-23T16:00:24","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T15:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cupblog.bluefusesystems.com\/?p=31646"},"modified":"2019-10-23T16:07:24","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T15:07:24","slug":"from-nice-girls-to-cool-girls-teenage-sexuality-in-mid-twentieth-century-england","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/2019\/10\/23\/from-nice-girls-to-cool-girls-teenage-sexuality-in-mid-twentieth-century-england\/","title":{"rendered":"From \u2018nice girls\u2019 to \u2018cool girls\u2019: Teenage sexuality in mid-twentieth-century England"},"content":{"rendered":"
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This blog accompanies Hannah Charnock\u2019s Historical Journal<\/em> article Teenage Girls, Female Friendship and the Making of the Sexual Revolution in England, 1950\u20131980<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I can remember in year, I dunno, it must\u2019ve been the 3rd year so that would\u2019ve been about 12 or 13, some of my friends had elder sisters and they um, were discussing about what they\u2019d done with boys and I remember us all thinking,sex \u2018Oh my God, that\u2019s absolutely disgusting! Did you really let a boy do that to you?!\u2019 And, couple of years later we were doing the same thing!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Drawing upon original oral histories and reflective testimonies collected as part of the Mass Observation Project, my article<\/a> explores the ways in which teenage girls\u2019 friendship groups and extended network of classmates and peers shaped their sexual lives. Testimonies like Tracy\u2019s suggest that these relationships were hugely significant to young women growing up in the mid-century \u2013 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\u2019 romantic and\/or sexual relationships with boys were greatly influenced by their relationships with other girls.<\/p>\n

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 \u2018nice girl\u2019 (someone without a reputation for promiscuity who boys would want to marry), and girls policed each other\u2019s 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 \u2018cool\u2019 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 \u2018Sexual Revolution\u2019.<\/p>\n

Read the full article for free here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Main image:\u00a0Teenagers in London’s Carnaby Street. Circa 1966. The National Archives UK<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 friendship groups and extended network of classmates and peers shaped their sexual lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":31724,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6,122],"tags":[6560,1641,3713,2491,2364,4450,3080],"coauthors":[6561],"class_list":["post-31646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-humanities","category-social-studies","tag-20th-century","tag-british-history","tag-european-history","tag-sexuality","tag-the-historical-journal","tag-twentieth-century-history","tag-womens-history"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31646\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31646"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cambridge.org\/core\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=31646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}