by Abrams, Fran
Natalie’s parents had met through a rock band in which her mother’s brother had played, and their world did not seem so far removed from her own world as maybe their parents’ had to them: ‘They lived in a council house and on a Sunday the kitchen was converted for band practice. Nan just let it happen, she was quite good like that – I think it was quite a noisy household.’
There was a sense, by the 1970s, that children were being brought up by parents who were somehow more youthful than the previous generation of parents. Parents who had experienced war only as children, and who had been afforded the opportunity to be young themselves before settling down. This was leading to a gradual narrowing in the generation gap, with some parents, at least, beginning to relate to their children at least partly in a way which betokened friendship rather than authority.
‘We used to go out often as a family on Sunday, in the car,’ Natalie recalled. ‘I remember we’d listen to music and all four of us would sing along. My dad would play ELO, Doctor Hook, things like that. Even now – my parents still say they don’t really want to grow up, they still buy music – my Mum will get a CD sometimes, and I’ll copy it.’
For Natalie, there would be wider opportunities too. Unlike many teenagers of their parents’ generation, she and her sister did not feel the need to work to earn pocket money. On the face of it, then, it might look as if the sky was lightening around childhood as the 1970s drew to a close. Yet in reality the opposite was the case. A combination of factors – the apparently growing incidence of abuse, fears that television, divorce and the modern world were corrupting children and drawing them to violence, a sense of uncertainty about where childhood was headed – were combining to create a sense of impending crisis in the world of the child. There was something in it, too: the 1970s were a more dangerous decade for children, in terms of vulnerability to crime, than any other before or since. The child murder rate rose to an all-time high of 200 a year in 1974 – about three times the level at which it would officially stand in the early years of the next millennium.2 Natalie and her sister would follow strict rules about where they should and should not go when they left the house alone: ‘When I went to comprehensive school, there was a short cut through the woods to get there. It took forty-five minutes to walk there by the road, but if you went through the woods it took twenty. We had to walk through together – never alone. We pestered our parents because we didn’t want to walk the long way round. There had been incidents – someone I knew had been attacked. So I knew it could happen.’
For girls, the 1970s were a time of flux. Most had never read the works of Shulamith Firestone and her like, of course, and so were largely unaware that as female children they were thought to be living a life weighted by multiple oppressions. Yet there was a sense of a desire to grasp opportunities that were just out of reach; a sense that the role of the girl was changing. When Natalie told her school she wanted to study art, the response was not enthusiastic: ‘I remember they were setting up work experience, and we had to go and see a teacher masquerading as careers adviser. I sat there and said I’d like to do something creative, or go to art college. And the teacher said: “What about hairdressing? That’s creative.” I had a friend who wanted to be a hairdresser, so I said: “OK, maybe I could be a hairdresser.” I spent three weeks sweeping up and making coffee. I was probably quite timid, and I didn’t have the strength to say it was really boring for me. I remember having this conversation with my dad while we were doing the washing up: “I’m really confused, I thought I wanted to go to art college but now I think maybe I should be a hairdresser.” And he said: “Well, you’ve wanted to go to art college for a long time. So why don’t you go to art college, and if you don’t like it you can go into hairdressing?” He wasn’t going to tell me what to do, but he was giving me the strength to do what I wanted.’
Natalie, who had always been artistic, would take A-levels, go to art college and spend her life creating extraordinary, intensely coloured pictures of sunlit childhoods that were perhaps not unlike her own. While the images her mother would have seen while growing up had been of perfect family lives, the young Natalie would be fascinated by strangely androgynous Soviet gymnasts such as Olga Korbut and Nadia Comǎneci, who competed in the Olympics during the seventies, and by the tough, muscular girls who were pictured manhandling huge horses over fences. Later, her artist’s studio would be full of her pictures of them – frozen images painted from television screen grabs, exuding a strangely alluring mix of glamour and sadness.
‘I had a book with Nadia Comǎneci’s picture in. I was told they went to sport schools and I thought that was really exotic and special. I think a lot of girls wanted to be her – she was magical, doing amazing, dangerous things. I wonder if children associated them with being children – Olga Korbut was actually seventeen years old at the 1972 Olympics, but she looked pre-pubescent. And I used to beg and beg and beg to have a pony. My friend had a horse, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t have one. I remember putting little notes under my dad’s pillow, so when he pulled it back it would say: “Please can I have a horse?”’3
The gymnasts were pure political propaganda, of course – a Cold War instrument designed to show the West how invincible the Soviets were. But something happened in the translation: the message that was being sent was quite different from the one that was being received by little girls in the Western world. To them, these were images of children exercising undreamed-of powers. These were girls who did things girls had not previously been seen so publicly to do; girls with superpowers. A gymnastics craze swept the United Kingdom, and tens of thousands of little girls queued to join, hoping they might be admitted to this newly empowered cadre of females.
The reading material available to girls at the time reflected this change, too. Now it was acceptable, maybe for the first time in many social strata, for girls to consider their future careers. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes – actually written before World War Two – was enduringly popular, telling the tale of three sisters who dream of a life on the stage or – in one case – of flying aeroplanes. By the end of the book, career glory appears to beckon for all three, and they vow to put their names in the history books. Similarly, White Boots told the tale of two girls striving to become champion ice-skaters – and underlined the message that hard work and determination were the keys to success. There was also a whole genre of ‘career novels’ in which girls became seamstresses, hat-makers, publishers’ assistants. In most cases, though, the endings of these novels were just the same as the girls’ mothers’ endings – most of their heroines finished up marrying the boss – or better still, his handsome son – before settling down to a life of domesticity.4
While comprehensive schools were now throwing most girls into the company of boys, the private school system was still largely segregated. And it was struggling to chart an appropriate course in this newly ambitious atmosphere. The selective girls’ schools had been founded, back in the late nineteenth century, by women who were closely linked to the suffrage movement, and so they had their roots in a kind of traditionalist feminism which had little to do with the separatist, angry brand which was now growing up. Heather Montgomery, born in 1969 and attending a private school run by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust in Surrey, found that while she was encouraged to excel academically, the range of career options on offer still seemed strangely limited: ‘If you were a scientist, then you should go and be a GP. If you were arty, you could join the BBC. You have to remember, the teachers at my school trained twenty or thirty years earlier – I don’t think there was anything at my school that would have been unfamiliar to a visitor from the fifties.’5 Heather would go on to Oxford, where she would meet a very particular breed of girl whose education had been similar to her own: ‘We had been educated to compete with men in the workplace, and certainly to compete academically, but the downside was that I didn’t meet boys until I went to university. The girls were all beautifully groomed and v
ery socially competent – until you put them with men. They were really strong academically, but socially quite gauche. They found it very difficult to sit in tutorials and be taught with men. They tended to defer to them.’
And just as young women were beginning to wonder if there might be other options than a couple of years’ office work followed by marriage and children, another major problem was creeping up on the young: unemployment. Since the war, children growing up in Britain had had no cause to worry about what they would do when they left school because there were always jobs available. In the 1970s, that began to change as the UK’s manufacturing sector began to shrink. By the last years of the decade, youth unemployment had become a constant spectre, and a generation of children had begun to understand that their lives would lack some of the certainties their parents’ generation had enjoyed. Between 1971 and 1979, 600,000 manual jobs disappeared from the British economy.6 And at the same time, the number of children leaving school was growing. There had been an increase in births in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and migrant workers from the Caribbean and from southern Asia, arriving to take up vacant manual jobs in times of full employment, had brought their children too. The cohort which finished its compulsory education in 1980 would be the largest ever. About half that cohort – a much higher proportion than in other Western countries – would expect to go straight into work rather than continuing in education. The result: thousands of unemployed teenagers, many of them angry and dispossessed. The inner-city areas where immigrant communities lived were among those with the highest proportion of teenagers, and also among those where jobs were disappearing at the highest rate. The Economist pondered a question: was it more dangerous, in terms of social unrest, to tolerate unemployment among the young than among adults? The answer was already clear: In the summer of 1981, riots broke out in impoverished areas of London, Liverpool and Manchester. Four out of ten school leavers were able to find work; but for the black youth of the inner cities the chances were virtually nil.7
Nor was it just the unemployed and impoverished young who were feeling alienated. The sense of grievance ran right through every stratum of society. Heather Montgomery, at her private girls’ school in Surrey, picked up on it: ‘I got very interested in politics, which wasn’t considered very respectable. I certainly had a strong sense of injustice about being a child, and being a teenager and not being listened to and having very limited choices about what I wanted to do. It was a very academic school – the only choice was about which university you went to. Polytechnics were not an option. I just did have the sense that I had absolutely no agency at all, and I pushed very hard to go to a sixth-form college – but that wasn’t allowed. I did have this sense of unfairness, of always being told what to do, having no say over anything, having to wear a boater in the sixth form, those sorts of stupid things.’
Life in the early eighties was political – and mostly it was political with a capital ‘P’. Heather Montgomery found herself caught up in it: ‘You had all the last great causes. You had apartheid, you had Thatcher, you had pit strikes. I wanted to feel connected with those sorts of things even though I was a middle-class schoolgirl in Surrey. My crowning moment was appearing on Question Time with Robin Day, asking about secondary picketing. I was interested in party politics and big issues. I wouldn’t have known a miner if one had bitten me on the nose, but it was a cause I cared about.’8
The older generation had failed to see this new politicization coming. ‘Youth have traditionally been seen but not heard,’ wrote Simon Frith in Marxism Today in 1981.9 ‘As the media’s bewildered response to the riots made clear, no one had been listening to youth’s rough music except the young themselves. The young had been talked about more than ever in the last decade, but they had not been heard.’ While earlier generations of rebellious youth had been kicking against their parents’ safe, comfortable lifestyles, this generation felt angry and let down. And the adult world began to feel a rising sense of panic.
Everywhere there seemed to be a sense of dislocation, a sense that old orders were breaking down and without any clear sense of what was to replace them. In his 1983 book, The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman,10 an American cultural critic, argued that television was largely to blame. In the past, he said, children’s lives had a sort of hierarchy to them: learning to read was a process which could only be achieved, for example, by progressing from one stage to the next: ‘The literate person must learn to be reflective and analytical, patient and assertive, always poised, after due consideration, to say “no” to a text. But with television, the basis of this information hierarchy collapses. Television erodes the dividing line between childhood and adulthood . . . first because it requires no instruction to grasp its form, second because it does not make complex demands on either mind or behaviour, and third because it does not segregate its audience . . . The new media environment that is emerging provides everyone, simultaneously, with the same information . . . electric media find it impossible to withhold any secrets. Without secrets, of course, there can be no such thing as childhood.’
Others were noticing similar phenomena. Adults were even beginning to ask a new and shocking question: what were children actually for? ‘At a time when we were confident that our work was making their future brighter, it was easy to think of children as innocent and refreshing,’ wrote an American academic, John Sommerville.11 ‘But we have always known that they could also be messy, tiresome and cruel . . . children are more obviously a liability nowadays.’ He quoted an American columnist, Ann Landers, who found seven out of ten readers answering a poll had responded that if they had their time again they would not have children. ‘Our children now represent a time that will only have bigger problems and not a better life . . . we may resent the fact that these little citizens of the future are already compounding all our problems – energy, food, employment, pollution, crowding.’
After a century in which successive governments had urged the populace to reproduce, suddenly the accompanying sentimentality about children and childhood was beginning to break down. Women began, in growing numbers, to confess that they were not in fact maternal: ‘Finally, we non child-oriented types are coming out of the closet,’ wrote Tricia Stallings.12 ‘There is nothing wrong with not having children. The only wrong is when we, feeling as we do, have children as a result of society’s pressures. Then we become unhappy parents producing unhappy children.’ Parenthood, she wrote with a sense of revelation, was a choice.
And yet in place of the old, sententious attitudes about children and their preciousness, a new feeling was beginning to grow. In the coming decades, parents would find themselves unable to admit the truth about their situation – some of them weren’t even sure whether they wanted their children at all. This unease, underpinned by a deeply buried sense of guilt, would begin to manifest itself in diverse and unpredictable ways – renewed waves of moral panic; exaggerated concerns about children’s health and wellbeing; increasingly strange stories about danger and jeopardy surrounding children. And, as ever, regular outbreaks of opprobrium over the failings of the young. The problem was always in someone else’s home, someone else’s neighbourhood. But there was little doubt, now, that there was a problem.
‘Babies are the enemy. Not your baby or mine, of course. Individually they are all cute. But together they are a menace,’ Sommerville wrote.13 Child-rearing was about to become an increasingly uneasy, defensive business. Women would be unsure whether they should be at home, baking, or out at work, using their education. Fathers would be unsure of the same thing, too. Having had children, and not being entirely sure why they had done so, parents would feel increasing pressure to share their company. If children were to have no monetary value in the home, if the wider economy were to have little use for them once they had finished their increasingly pressured and expensive education, and if they were to represent an increasingly unsustainable burden on the planet, then what was the point of them? The answer which pa
rents increasingly gave was that children would have to be enjoyed for themselves. The next age of the child would be an age of over-enthusiastic parent–child relations. It would be an age, too, in which children would come under increasing pressure to please their parents – to please them by succeeding at school; to please them by being amusing company; to please them by being more attractive, more successful, better at everything than their parents’ friends’ children. The age in which children were a distinct grouping, left largely free to develop in one another’s company, was passing. In the coming decades, intensity and pressure would be the bywords of the Western childhood.
Sex and scares
To the children of the 1970s and before, sex was generally still something rather remote and frightening. Mary Hudson, writing in the Guardian,14 had described her discomfort, on arriving at university during the 1960s, at the discovery that there were young men there who wanted to sleep with her. ‘Only men who really knew me realised that I was still a terrified virgin who would go to any lengths to avoid seduction. I would carry a well-thumbed copy of Winnie the Pooh to parties and produce it in times of stress. I found a heartfelt rendition of Eeyore’s Birthday would cool the ardour of most young men.’
By the early 1980s, though, things were beginning to change. Access to contraception had become easier for teenagers, and although the number of teenage pregnancies had fallen, the number of abortions – legalized in 1967 – was continuing to rise. So it was hardly surprising, in an era of uncertainty, alienation and rapid social change, that promiscuity would be blamed for many of society’s ills. There was some confusion, though, about the precise nature of the problem. Were young girls becoming too promiscuous, even leading vulnerable young boys into temptation? Or were they, themselves, the victims of a new world which was propelling them too fast into adulthood? In a parliamentary debate on the subject in the mid-1980s,15 Viscount Buckmaster argued that the latter was the case: ‘For many young girls, early sex is more than mere physical gratification. It often leads to the awakening of the homemaking instinct; the longing for a child and for a fulfilling and permanent relationship. When those desires cannot be realised, depression often sets in—leading in some cases even to attempted suicide.’