The great yellow golliwog panic of 1961

The golliwogs in question were (or would have been if they existed at all) little handmade yarn dollies from scraps (we made our own entertainment in those days, but  I see that there are still instructions available on how to make these).

But, anyway, in the summer of the 1961 there was a panic about schoolgirls wearing yellow golliwogs as badges, which had sinister import. This first appears to have surfaced in a speech at the British Medical Association Annual Representative Meeting, 17 July 1961, by Dr R. G. Gibson, a member of Council, who averred that 'at a girls' school in England' (unnamed and not more specifically located, no indication of who might have been his informant) a yellow golliwog pinned to a girl's chest 'indicated to [her] fellow pupils that [she] had lost [her] virginity'. And this was a sign of the loss of moral discipline that was sweeping the country. He went on to advocate a return to corporal punishment instead of all this soft psychiatry. (Supplement to the British Medical Journal, 22 July 1961, p. 48)

This was quite immediately taken up by the press - e.g. 'Doctors discuss loose living: Moral Problem of the Yellow Golliwogs', Birmingham Post, 18 July 1961, p. 4), and a question raised in Parliament: 

The newspapers this morning contained a terrible indictment of the kind of society in which we live. Girls in one of our schools are now putting yellow golliwogs on their tunics to show that they have lost their virginity.  (William Hamilton, Fife, West:  Hansard 18 July 1961)

A question that springs to mind is, had anyone, at this point, ever actually seen a schoolgirl wearing a yellow golliwog, or were these entirely chimerae of fevered minds? 

Nonetheless, this was a moral panic with traction, a trope about moral decline as embodied in those perennial figures of concern, adolescent girls. In a letter to The Times in September of the same year, the Rev Leslie D. Weatherhead (a veteran writer of sexual advice from a religious angle), wrote expressing his anxieties over the alleged rise in venereal infections among young people, the increase in teenage single mothers, and the claim by the unnamed headmistress of an unidentified 'large girls' school in London' that not one of the sixth-formers was a virgin (paging Dorothy Parker: 'How could she tell?') ('A Nation in Danger: Need of Moral Challenge: To The Editor of The Times', 20 September 1961). 

The announcement of a 'searching and enlightening enquiry' by the Sunday Times - 'Your Teenage Daughter: Dilemma of the Middle-Class Parent', opened by invoking 'the much publicized yellow golliwog on the gym-slip... a sad little badge of non-chastityamong young British schoolgirls' (The Times, 8 December, 1961).

Leading one to wonder whether, whatever the truth of the original sightings of the yellow golliwogs, they did in fact get taken up by schoolgirls wishing to seem in the swing of things? (Whether or not they signalled actual sexual experience.)

The trope went muttering on and being invoked for several more years, although, a rather more realistic and cynical note was injected a couple of years later at a conference of sixth formers by an actual schoolgirl: 'Yellow golliwogs do not necessarily mean that the wearer has had an affair: only that, not wishing to seem different, the wearer wishes other people to believe them unchaste' ('Sixth Form View on Chastity', The Times, 18 February, 1963).

And the consequence was: the X-rated  movie The Yellow Teddybears (aka Gutter Girls) 1963: 'embarrassingly inept' (Daily Herald, 13 July 1963, p. 6) - 'mediocre entertainment' (Sunday Mirror, 14 July 1963, p. 23).

Were there ever yellow golliwogs?  Were they ever sighted being sported pinned on a gymslipped bosom?

However, maybe younger generations turning out attics and old boxes wonder what this old faded yarn dolly of granny's was and why she kept it... Any findings, please report!

New Directions: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in C20th Britain

This was an excellent small and focused conference that took place today at University College London.

It reflected several things currently happening in history of sexuality - the spatial turn, from postwar planning of domestic spaces to produce new forms of masculinity to the very specific space of Cardiff's Butetown associated with prostitution and cross-race sexuality; the recognition of the continuing significance of religion, both in the panel dedicated to it and in Sean Brady's compelling paper on the role of sectarianism in attitudes towards on homosexuality in Northern Ireland; the importance of popular media (in this case the tabloid press) as a means of circulating sexual knowledge, not necessarily in the way the editors intended. Material culture also made an appearance in the form of the repositioning of the condom in the 1970s.

There was a very welcome attention to differing regional experiences. Besides Brady on Northern Ireland, and Simon Jenkins on transgressive sex in Cardiff, we had a taster of Helen Smith's impressive work on working-class men in South Yorkshire who related sexually to other men in the pre-Wolfenden era, and Jane O'Neill's work on Scottish young peoples' negotiations around sexuality since World War II.

There were also plenty of opportunity for informal interactions over lunch, coffee, and eventually wine.

The organisers can be congratulated on a very successful day.

Continuing to get out and about

This week there was a lovely book launch at the Artworkers' Guild in Queen Square of Carol Dyhouse's exciting new book, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (Zed Books):

Horror, scandal and moral panic! Obsession with the conduct of young women has permeated society for over a hundred years. Be it over flappers, beat girls, dolly birds or ladettes, public outrage at girls' perceived misbehaviour has been a mass-media staple with each changing generation.

 O so very true. It just goes round and around. A journalist was asking me about 50 Shades of Grey the other day, and my mind immediately went to a rather obvious, when you think about it, historical parallel, EM Hull's notorious The Sheik, with its sado-masochistic themes and very similar plot trajectory (now available free through the good offices of Project Gutenberg).

From girls to ordinary devoted mothers: yesterday evening to an excellent and very thought-provoking paper by Anne Karpf in the Psychoanalysis and History seminar series, 'Constructing and addressing "the Ordinary Devoted Mother": Winnicott's BBC broadcasts, 1943-62', which I found particularly fascinating for its elucidation of the important part played by his BBC radio producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie, in the production, not just in style but in content, of these broadcasts, which formed the foundation of Winnicott's acclaimed work on motherhood and good enough mothering, and eventually published by Penguin as The Child, the Family and the Outside World. My mind went to a rather tangential place about women and BBC radio, following some archival encounters with Hilda Matheson's work in the 30s and a paper at the Women's History Network conference last year on early women's work at the BBC, and this possible unsung tradition of women pioneers in the field. But it was also interesting about the circumstances of production as very situated within a particular (popular) context rather than within the more elevated realms of psychoanalytic theory.

Project getting out more

In the past couple of weeks I managed to get to two excellent seminars at the Institute of Historical Research.

I don't think I've ever been to the Sport and Leisure History seminar before, but was tempted by Michelle Johansen's 'Good Feeling and Brotherliness: Leisure, the Suburbs and the Society of Public Librarians in London, 1895-193', which turned out to be extremely interesting and evoked a lot of fascinating questions. The cultural place of the oft-stigmatised 'suburbs' is surely overdue for historical re-evaluation, and the public librarians discussed by Johansen were pivotal figures in creating vibrant cultures of leisure and recreation both in the areas in which they were librarians and in their professional association. Their class origins were also fascinating: the kind of lower-class self-improvers for whom public libraries were intended, though with what appears to have been a significant degree of status anxiety, such as tweaking their family backgrounds a notch or two higher on the social scale.  A downside to this group, however, was that they had all achieved the pinnacle of their profession (i.e. head of a London or metropolitan borough library service) at relatively young ages (late 20s/30s) and basically had nowhere further to go - it was not a jumping-off point for other areas of librarianship - so they tended to stay there blocking opportunities for more recent incomers to the profession. I also had a slight cavil with the notion that public library users were either recreational readers or earnest self-improvers - I think it probable that those are two reasons for using libraries that could have been combined at different times and in varying proportions in the same individual.

I have more often been to the Life-cycles seminar in which last week there was a riveting paper by Hilary Marland (even though I missed the beginning due to a confusion over rooms in Senate House and nearly ended up at the Latin-American seminar by mistake), 'Managing Health, Managing Behaviour: Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920', which brought a good deal of nuance and complexity to ideas around girlhood, exercise, and health at a time of rapid social change and new roles for women. She demonstrated that while there was a good deal of concern expressed about the dangers of new forms of sport being indulged in by the adolescent girl there was also a new paradigm of the fit and healthy young female body being contrasted to the fainting wan mid-Victorian specimen and fitting in to the wider fin de siecle anxieties about national fitness. 

I thought that I had, regretfully, due to work commitments, had to miss a paper on Anna Freud's war nurseries and their influence in the Psychoanalysis and History series, but in fact that is not happening until next month.

Trying to get out more

I was thinking the other day of the times back when I had just begun working at what was then the Wellcome Institute, and the huge number of associated seminars and symposia I used to attend, whether or not they related directly to my own academic concerns (the remembrance that brought this to mind was of a seminar on, to the best of my recollection, Biblical views on leprosy). This is something that has rather fallen by the wayside of recent years.

Now that the pressure which did not seem to relent during pretty much the whole of 2012 has let up a bit, and given that there are currently a number of attractive seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research, just down the road, I am trying to schedule in getting to at least some of them.

The Life-Cycles Seminar has some intriguing offerings this term: last week I went to Victoria Bates' '"The Breakers that Separate Childhood from Youth": Medicine and Sexual Development in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Britain'. Although rather thinly atttended, it generated a vibrant discussion around puberty in history. I'm hoping to get to a couple of the others.

Yesterday evening, at the Psychoanalysis and History seminar, Chris Waters gave a very rich presentation on

'Edward Glover and the Politics of Homosexual Law Reform'. There was a lot in this paper, but one of the take-home reflections was the tension between Glover's belief (he was a strict Freudian and in this he followed Freud) that homosexuality was not a disorder to be cured, and, increasingly, that any problems gay men had were largely to do with societal homophobia, and the requirements of the situation in his day that making a case for psychiatric referrals of men accused of homosexual conduct was a humane expedient to avoid imprisonment on the one hand, and, on the other, the use of chemical castration (as in the case of Alan Turing - Waters made some passing comments on this cause celebre which make one eager to read the book of which this and the Glover material will form part). The condemnation of the psychiatrisation and medicalisation of homosexuality in the post-1967 era demonised figures who had been doing work that fed into the Wolfenden Report recommendations and thus led to decriminalisation. A number of other intriguing seminars are forthcoming in this series. Other IHR seminar series that are tempting me are Modern British History and Sport and Leisure History, although there is nothing much in the current Women's History schedule that speaks to my particular interests. I also draw attention to the Archives and Society series, in particular the seminar on 26th February at which my Wellcome colleagues will be presenting on 'Ethics, Access and Digitisation'.

Catching up on journal literature VIII

Stefan Slater, 'Pimps, Police and Filles de Joie: Foreign Prostitution in Interwar London', The London Journal, Vol. 32, No. 1, March 2007, 53–74: why did foreign, esp French, women come to London, particularly Soho for sex work? 'Frenchness' as titillating USP. Article uses records of the Metropolitan Police relating to foreign prostitution and the racket in arranged marriages by pimps, and also considers why this was a site for the expression of concern: Englishness/foreignness and prostitution. (A longstanding set of connections, from the 1850s stuff about French impures to the traffickers of today.)

T G Ashplant, 'Dis/connecting Whiteness. Biographical Perspectives on Race, Class, Masculinity and Sexuality in Britain, c. 1850-1930', L'homme 16 (2005), p. 68-85: useful about how ideas of the Other and playing with masquerade as the Other were about defining the hegemonic male identity: though the examples given are limited, and perhaps rather idiosyncratic figures, e.g. Munby, I think there's something there - the idea of the hegemonic male who can 'pass' and is a heroic figure rather than the masquerading subaltern trying to deceive... Complexity about the contrasts and dynamics.

Sam Pryke, 'The Boy Scouts and the "Girl Question" Sexualities 4 (2001), p. 191-211. Fears that associating with gurllzz was prematurely sexualising Edwardian/Georgian boys and leading them astray into unmanly ways. Very classed view of the appropriate and inappropriate young woman (cf Baden-Powell in Rovering to Success) . 'Walking out' as a bad habit if participant too young. Association with urban life and its problems. Not monolithic within the Scouting movement - some thought women (at least of the right kind) could be a good influence.

Stephen Brooke, 'Bodies, Sexuality and the "Modernization" of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s' :International Labor and Working-Class History (2006), 69. Actually that is women's bodies, and he posits a change from the overburdened worn-out multiparous mother of interwar birth control movement rhetoric to a new healthier fitter woman with a smaller family and a companionate marriage  - although there were regional continuities with the older model of the oppressed victim working class wife. Possibly rather slides over except in a couple of paragraphs the agency of working class women between the wars (it really wasn't all middle class women with an agenda). New meanings of sexuality post-war? (Difference here between rhetoric/ideology and people's experience