There was no shortage of role models, since the popular press exulted in stories of ‘women firsts’: the first woman barrister, the first woman to swim the English Channel, to fly across the Atlantic, and so forth. This celebration of female competence was very much in evidence in portrayals of women drivers and aviators. Even schoolgirl story annuals ran features on girls learning to drive and familiarising themselves with sparking plugs and oil cans. Women doctors and teachers often purchased their own cars and were keen motorists. In novels of the time, a modish independence is conveyed through the image of a woman’s hands on the wheel. In Winifred Holtby’s Poor Caroline, for instance, the heroine Eleanor de la Roux dons a pair of leather gauntlets and drives herself to London in search of career opportunities and training. She is highly educated and a competent mechanic, as well as being ambitious for power and worldly success.52
Women rally drivers and aviators exuded the same qualities of intrepid femininity. After graduating from the University of Sheffield, the young Amy Johnson found herself unenthusiastic about her career prospects and frustrated in love. The thought of school teaching depressed her. She persuaded her father to pay back the grant she had accepted from the Board of Education in return for a pledge to go into teaching.53 Amy’s lover Hans refused to marry her, in spite of all her efforts at persuasion. She was stunned when she learned that he had married someone else – another graduate her own age, already pregnant with his child. Amy betook herself to London and embarked on a hectic lifestyle to numb her sorrows. She took to hanging around an airfield in Stag Lane and fell in love with the idea of flying. She also bought a car: a dark maroon two-seater Morris Cowley, borrowing money from her father to finance her purchase. She discovered that she enjoyed tinkering with engines. Amy Johnson was the first woman in Britain to be awarded a ground engineer’s licence. She earned herself a place in history in 1930 when she undertook her solo flight to Australia in a Gipsy Moth biplane, affectionately named Jason. Amy was glamorous. She had dyed her hair blonde and was petite with a girlish figure. This, combined with her somewhat reckless courage, endeared her to many. The newspapers were full of her. A number of popular songs (including ‘Amy, Wonderful Amy’) celebrated her exploits. In 1932 the Daily Mirror reported that when young girls visiting Madame Tussaud’s waxworks exhibition were asked whom they would most like to emulate when they grew up, they put Amy Johnson high on the list. (First choice was the First World War heroine Edith Cavell, then Amy, both ahead of Joan of Arc, who took third place.)54 Flying lessons were relatively cheap in the 1920s and 1930s. It was said to be possible to obtain a pilot’s licence after some eight hours of tuition. Once qualified, you could hire a plane for around £1 per hour. Even so, this was well beyond the reach of the majority. Ordinary working-class girls, inspired by Amy, took to having themselves photographed in simulated aeroplanes, a facility which became popular at funfairs or as a seaside attraction during the 1930s.55
Opportunities for leisure and pleasure expanded enormously between the wars. Girls with regular jobs and pay packets were major beneficiaries. They flocked to the dance halls. There were ballrooms, dance halls and dancing schools in all major cities. The Palais, the Ritz and the Locarno were household names. Hotels and even department stores offered afternoon tea dancing. Fashionable new dances and jazz rhythms with catchy names (the black bottom, the lindy hop, the boogie-woogie), generated a dizzy succession of ‘crazes’. Jazz mounted in popularity, especially in bohemian circles.
Then there were the cinemas. On screen, the ‘serial queen’ melodramas such The Perils of Pauline or The Exploits of Elaine had proved immensely popular with munitions workers during the Great War.56 Featuring the intrepid heroine Pearl White, these films celebrated both the dangers that threatened young women and the resourcefulness and pluck with which they overcame them. Films depicting the romantic entanglements of girls who succeeded in making spectacular marriages were usually crowd-pullers. After the Great War, cinema-going became a passion among many girls and young women who thought nothing of seeing films twice or even three times a week. The films got bolder and glossier, featuring sultry-eyed vamps, masterful sheikhs and cruel-featured Arab lovers. Female audiences swooned over Valentino, and learned a lesson or two from screen heroines with ‘It’ (sex appeal) who were resourceful enough to make sure they got their man. ‘Cinemagazines’ (short feature or news films) such as Pathé’s Eve’s Film Review catered explicitly for female audiences and reported on the latest fashions and news affecting women in a light-hearted and gossipy manner.57 Hollywood cinema supplied screen goddesses and glamour. Its impact on British audiences was immense. Young women’s habits of consumption were changed for ever as they eagerly copied the fashions in clothing, cosmetics and hairstyles which they studied in the picture palaces. A whole new genre of film magazines, from Girls’ Cinema to Picturegoer and Film Fashionland, provided extra sources of information about these trends.58
3.3 Amy Johnson, pioneer British aviator in the 1930s (photograph© Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Getty Images).
3.4 Girls inspired by Amy Johnson’s exploits could pose for photographs in simulated aeroplanes (postcard image from 1930s ©collection of Tom Phillips, courtesy of copyright holder).
Dancing, cinema-going and a raft of new magazines targeting young women expanded opportunities for indoor pleasures. There were new facilities for outdoor activity too. The bicycle, emblematic accessory of the new woman in the 1890s, became increasingly affordable by those on modest incomes. Cycling clubs were immensely popular among young people. Camping out in the countryside had particular appeal. Girls growing up between the wars often recorded memories of bonfires and sleeping in the great outdoors as a time of happiness and freedom. The range of physical activities thought appropriate for girls expanded, as women took up rowing, athletics or gymnastics. Some joined the Women’s League of Health and Beauty, founded in 1930, which held that ‘movement is life’ and encouraged synchronised exercises in the open air.59 Swimming and sunbathing became common pastimes. The knitted – and later ruched and elasticised – bathing costumes of the inter-war period looked daringly revealing to contemporaries. Lounging about on the beaches, or on the sun-decks of the new open-air lidos which were built across Britain in the 1930s, provided new opportunities for flirtation. It wasn’t long before the press stoked up controversy about the seemliness of mixed bathing among the young.60
Indeed, all these new forms of leisure provoked anxiety in some quarters. There were those who found the idea of mixed bathing improper and deplored the fashion for bodily display. Others followed the Arabella Kenealy line and argued that competitive sport damaged femininity. Reading University’s Vice Chancellor, W. M. Childs, had fretted himself silly about whether rowing and sculling were safe sports for women undergraduates. His successor Franklin Sibly inherited his concern. Women students had to produce medical certificates and written permission from parents before they were allowed to go on the river, and racing against male crews was strictly forbidden.61
Cinema-going aroused all kinds of concern. Cinemas were dark places. Romance on the screen might give people ideas and what was to stop them getting up to no good in the back row? Even the posters advertising film showings were considered ‘lurid and distasteful’. Young girls were sometimes considered to put themselves in moral danger simply by going to the pictures. Mary Allen of the Women’s Police Service contended that young audiences were ‘aroused to breathless excitement’ in their seats. ‘They shout with fear and terror and dance about in their places.’ There was a danger of young people becoming ‘over-sexed’, she thought.62 The National Council of Public Morals had set out to investigate the influence of cinema on the young in 1916–17, and fears of this kind were much in evidence.63 The concerns were amplified over the next couple of decades. Cinemas themselves became bigger and more luxurious, with deep-pile carpets and exotic fittings. They were places where people could dream, and escape temporarily from the hardships of everyday life. Mo
ralists worried that Hollywood glamour would lure girls astray. Seduced by their desire for luxury, they might become restless gold-diggers, painted hussies, scornful of homely virtues.
The flapper herself was often defined as ‘pleasure-seeking’, hankering after sweets, cocktails and new sensations. Young women were emerging as an important group of consumers in the economy of the 1920s and 1930s. Their spending power was increasing. The demand for cosmetics, inexpensive clothes, rayon stockings and underwear shaped the growth of a range of new industries. The film historian Jenny Hammerton has shown how images of girls enjoying fashionable new products were a regular feature of Eve’s Film Review. In one sequence, for instance, a young woman resplendent in a feathery negligée reclines on her bed, reading magazines, eating chocolates and smoking cigarettes at the same time. Her indulgence in these multiple pleasures is made easier by a ‘novelty magazine holder’ and a gimmicky little gadget which both dispenses – and lights – cigarettes at the touch of a button. The mood was playful, and tongue-in-cheek: girls were shown as having fun.64 But some social observers fretted over the easy availability of new pleasures. Negative descriptions of working-class girls often described them as hungry for cheap amusements. Indeed, the very idea of girls seeking pleasure seems to have discomfited many people. Their imaginations often pictured a swift descent from ‘easy pleasures’ to ‘easy virtue’. Moreover, the fact that cheap, mass-produced clothing and cosmetics enabled working-class girls to look good unsettled hierarchies. Novelists such as J. B. Priestley and George Orwell picked up on the idea of factory girls looking like actresses as one of the most startling developments of the period.65
These anxieties certainly impacted on contemporary attitudes to sexuality. It wasn’t just columnists in the Daily Mail who were likely to hint at a connection between confectionery and immorality. The academic psychologist Cyril Burt, reporting on ‘The Causes of Sex Delinquency in Girls’ in 1926, insisted that some of the youngest girl delinquents on his lists ‘have become habitual little courtesans for the sake of sweets or the money with which to buy them’.66 Girls’ desire for new products and pleasures was suspect in a moral sense. This might feed into an undercurrent of social disapproval of women who looked too glamorous, or appeared to have too much worldly success, who might be seen as being ‘no better than they ought to be’.
3.5 Factory girls in Walthamstow, north London, mid-1930s, modelling carnival hats. Many young women preferred factory work to domestic service. Factory work could provide more space for spirited independence and camaraderie (photograph © Fox Photos/Stringer/Getty Images).
Some of this pursed-lip social disapproval was evident in the trial of Edith Thompson in 1923. Edith Thompson was a highly intelligent, attractive and successful businesswoman. Bored with her husband Percy, she had been having an affair with Freddy Bywaters, a sailor and shipping steward. Freddy was eight and a half years younger than Edith, who was twenty-eight. The pair exchanged passionate letters about life, literature and their love, and fantasised about how they might be together. Percy was the obstacle. One night Edith and Percy were returning from the theatre when Freddy intercepted them. He got into an angry row with Percy and stabbed him. Percy died from the wounds. There was no evidence that Edith was other than horrified and confused by the attack. Bywaters shouldered all the blame, insisting that she was completely innocent. But the letters – where Edith had fantasised about ways in which she might be rid of Percy – were seen as condemning her. The pair were jointly charged and tried for murder. Both were found guilty and hanged. Many authorities have since concluded that Edith was effectively hanged for nothing more than having fantasised about the death of her husband, or indeed, for the ‘crime’ of adultery.67 What was clearly evident in this sad and horrifying case was that the massive outpouring of public sympathy which followed the announcement of the death penalty was all for Freddy, not for Edith. Freddy was seen as a decent, loyal young man who had been led astray by a designing and worldly woman.68 As the contents of the romantic correspondence between the pair became public, attitudes to Edith had hardened. Her lifestyle and appearance were scrutinised and found less than ‘respectable’. Her love of dancing, her flirtatiousness, her pleasure in new hats and expensive perfumes were all seen as suspect. Even her own brother-in-law denounced her as ‘a flighty, forward flirt, pleasure-loving … loud and vulgar’.69 Edith had no children. This gave the press the opportunity to portray her as an unnatural or selfish woman. Others saw in her a warning of the moral dangers of cheap literature and the appetite for mass consumption. In a neat reversal of earlier anxieties about women’s education, one writer in the Daily News asserted that what girls needed was more, not less schooling. Edith, he claimed, had been ‘educated to a point’, but not enough to restrain her wayward imagination. She had left school at fifteen:
Then, when what she needed was God and William Shakespeare, she was given cheap sweets and Gloria de Vere … The Thompson case is a symbol of what happens to a State which attains to a certain degree of material prosperity, but lacks a genuine passion for art and religion.70
Sexual relationships were still often fraught with danger for girls. In 1921 the sad case of Edith Roberts, ‘the Hinckley girl-mother’ attracted controversy and outrage among feminists. Edith lived in Leicester and was described as ‘a factory hand’ in the hosiery trade. Aged twenty-one, she looked about fourteen. She was a shy and quiet girl. Her father, a foreman dyer, said of her: ‘no father in the world ever had a better daughter’. Edith was indicted for having murdered her newly born female child. The baby was said to have been suffocated with a camisole. Edith’s baby had been born while she was in bed with her sister Lily. She had been too frightened and too ashamed to own up to the pregnancy, and had told herself that the baby had never drawn breath. She was clearly traumatised and probably in denial. Found guilty, she fainted while the judge was summing up. According to the press reports, she had to be held up, apologising, crying and moaning as the judge donned his black cap and pronounced upon her the death sentence (though with a recommendation to mercy).71 There was an outcry in Leicester, with feminists and other protesters outraged by the fact that there had been no women on the jury, and by the double standard of morality demonstrated in the case. The father’s responsibility had been ignored completely.
Edith Roberts’s case was contentious enough to lead to a change in the law. The 1922 Infanticide Act allowed for cases of this kind to be judged manslaughter rather than murder, because of disturbance to the ‘balance of the mind’ at the time. Edith was sent to Walton gaol in Liverpool, where she was described as quiet and gentle, ‘of a refined and reserved disposition’, and as ‘a good devout church-woman’. Pressure for her release continued, and she was eventually discharged in June 1922.72
Unmarried mothers were frequently driven to desperation by their situation. In Brighton, in 1931, Eva Garwood, ‘a picture palace assistant’, was convicted of strangling her newborn son and dumping his body in a local churchyard.73 Because of the 1922 Act, she was convicted of infanticide and not subjected to having the death penalty pronounced on her. Coroners’ records and records of forensic investigations (such as those of the famous pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury) show that it was not uncommon to find the remains of newborn infants stuffed up chimneys or buried under floorboards.74 It was even more common for women to attempt abortions, either hazarding the procedure themselves or subjecting themselves to dangerous interventions from amateurs or backstreet abortionists. It is difficult to find out how many such abortions were successful, but coroners’ records make it clear that many young women died trying to rid themselves of their unwanted pregnancies.
Stories of young women’s vulnerability were not hard to find. The literature of the period abounds with images of ‘odd women’; sad unmarried types, housemaids in basements, shop-girls and waitresses lonely for romance. Indeed the novels of George Gissing, Arnold Bennett, George Orwell, Patrick Hamilton and Graham Greene are replet
e with vignettes of such women.75 They are depicted as easy prey for unscrupulous male fortune hunters or wide boys. Rose, in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock (1938), is putty in the hands of the scheming Pinkie. These are fictional characters, of course, but they resonated with aspects of contemporary reality, and were also a reflection of individual writers’ outlook and views about the world they lived in. They were in themselves comments on social change. Arnold Bennett, for instance, like George Gissing, was markedly uneasy about social change. In Our Women, published in 1920, he contended that it was a good thing that women should now expect to earn their own living. Women had been too parasitic on men in the past. Middle-class women with nothing to do had faffed around playing the part of ‘that odious creature’, ‘Lady Bountiful’. Nevertheless, he pontificated, women needed charm and domestic skills if they were to please men. Modern young women were in danger of losing these. Their education, he thought, should teach them to be home-builders, and maybe there should be Chairs at Girton in ‘womanly subjects’ such as ‘coiffure’? A woman without a man was unhappy, Bennett contended: she was incomplete and vulnerable.76
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