Growing up - Kathryn Hughes on why an exhibition about girls' bodies is not revealing enough
Teenage girls were not invented in the 1950s. While Queen Victoria was gearing up for her Golden Jubilee, a good proportion of her subjects was worrying not about Empire or falling exports but about spots, boys, hips and kissing. Nor is there anything new about the fierce need of other people - older women, usually - to tell young girls just where they are going wrong. Eliza Lynn Linton, a journalist whose reactionary cattiness made her the Lynda Lee-Potter of her day (there must be something about tripartite names), wrote a series of scathing articles on "The Girl of the Period" in the 1860s in which she took middle-class girls to task for their bold, bright sexiness. It is the descendants of Linton, as well as their more empathetic and self-aware colleagues, whose words of warning, advice, condemnation and help to young women are presented in the Women's Library exhibition "Grow Up!".
The exhibition draws on the holdings of the library (formerly the Fawcett Library), which means, inevitably, that women's magazines are overrepresented. Magazines such as Jackie, Cosmo Girl, Mizz and, from much earlier, Girl's Own Paper, are bulging with advice about how to manage the tricky business of being 15. "Should kissing be left until the end of the evening?" one feature asked urgently in 1960. Twenty years later and the worries have evolved: "Am I lesbian or is this just a passing phase?" asks a correspondent to a problem page. (The frequency with which this query appears makes one wonder not so much about the sexual orientation of generations of adolescents as their ability to absorb and retain information.)
Other correspondents to the magazines are bothered about facial hair, the Amen Corner and, most crucially, Being Late. Being Late, at least from about 1956, had nothing to do with whether you were keeping people waiting at the tennis club. Rather, it meant the sickening realisation that you were probably pregnant without meaning to be. The magazines from the 1960s are full of girls wearing Alice bands, looking anxiously at wall calendars and counting on their fingers, trying to find out whether their lives have been ruined forever. Alongside these exhibits, awful in their warnings, are upbeat, demythologising offerings which assure girls that they can't get pregnant by sitting on a boy's knee (they can, however, get a face rash by lounging on wet grass).
Alongside this worry about the female body, and the trouble it can get you into, runs a strand of hopefulness and pleasure in its powers. Girl Guides are urged to run around, the League of Health and Beauty insists that there is nothing self-indulgent about wanting to look good. Meanwhile, one pre-Second World War champion swimmer proudly shows off her medals, as well as a hefty swimming costume that, once wet, must surely have dragged her beneath the waves. Best of all is the advice from the Girl's Own Paper in 1884, which tells its larger readers not to worry when people make sly remarks about their weight: "Simply be thankful," says the magazine briskly, "that you assimilate and thrive upon your food."
"Grow Up!" is particularly good on the making and meaning of clothing. The Singer sewing-machine, once a tool that bonded late-Victorian mothers and daughters over the accomplishment of traditional femininity, becomes the means of rebellion for girls in the 1960s and 1970s. With a good, cheap paper pattern from Butterick or McCall's, the handy 15-year-old could knock off copies of Mary Quant for a fraction of the price that it would cost her in the high street. Home dressmaking no longer involved labouring over a nasty corduroy smock under the watchful eye of the domestic science teacher. Instead, it had become the 1970s equivalent of diving into Top Shop on a Saturday morning and getting something that made you look at least a little like one of the girls in Pan's People.
As well as the cased exhibits of magazines, artefacts and ephemera - haircutters, mobile phone fascia and eye pencils - the exhibition includes two multimedia installations. One is a video of local teenagers speaking straight to camera about their experiences of school, football and bad, sloppy kissing. The girls are wise and watchful, too careful about their life chances to throw anything away (two Asian girls agree that there's no point in bothering about boys until you're 24 and then you might as well have an arranged marriage to avoid wasting time). The boys are big and hopeful, keen on teeny tank tops, but unforgiving about too much make-up. The second installation involves a single bed - clean and neatly made, with no Emin-type evidence of disturbance or distraction - and an audiotape that runs together prim and preachy voices in a seam- less loop.
"Grow Up" is not mapped along chronological lines, presumably because that would be too pinching. Instead, there is a cluster structure, a set of subject points around which the material is organised - make-up, consumerism and so forth. As a result, history pretty much disappears from the picture. The Second World War is barely present, the Great War not at all. Economics and politics become a dull, distant landscape against which to show off the quaintly amusing (such as knitting patterns from the 1950s or the pamphlet from 1926 which warns that getting your hair bobbed may cause you to grow a moustache). Thus, the exhibition feels thin and random. Many of the items - an old Tommy Steele single or a copy of Jackie from the 1960s - are the sort of thing that you can pick up in the more knowing kind of junk shops of Brighton or Norwich. Without a strong historical spine on which to hang them, they remain a series of jokily nostalgic artefacts, not quite revealing of anything beyond the way times change.
"Grow Up! Advice and the Teenage Girl" is at the Women's Library, London Metropolitan University (020 7320 2222) until 26 April
Kathryn Hughes is a biographer and critic
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