‘What a Difference it was to be a Woman and not a Teenager’: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain

Abstract

British working-class adolescent girls wrote about their imagined futures in thousands of essays throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Producing narratives that were intended for the eyes of teachers and researchers, these writers' attempts to reflect accepted narratives about growing up offer us a window into how wider societal ideas about adulthood were reinvented in post-war Britain. For these teenage girls, markers of adulthood remained traditional: marriage and motherhood were framed as the only route to becoming an adult woman. However, the category of adulthood itself was now conceptualised as the culmination of a series of discontinuous psychological stages of development, meaning that girls who did not achieve these goals could now be pathologised as psychologically and even biologically immature. This was especially problematic for young lesbians, who recognised that their sexual orientation both prevented them from straightforwardly conforming to heteronormative ideas of marriage and motherhood and was also identified as a 'phase' that was linked solely to adolescence. Nevertheless, these new ideas of adulthood shaped the choices of all adolescent girls, as they strove to prove that they were mature enough to no longer be defined as innately irresponsible teenagers.In 1963, a fifteen-year-old girl from St Albans, who planned to leave school within the next year, imagined what she might be like at twenty years old:It was my 20th birthday! What a difference it was to be a woman and not a teenager … a dignified young woman, thinking only of marriage and my position at work … When I was fifteen I used to drive Mum mad with all my boyfriends, the latest dances and my troublesome teenage spots. Dad used to get frantic with all the noise … But still they are happy now. 1 This teenager's account emphasised that stable adulthood would be very different from the transitional experience of adolescence; in five years' time, she would become both biologically and emotionally mature, no longer subject to the family tensions and 'teenage spots' that were characteristic of this developmental stage. Furthermore, the way that she phrased the significance of this future shift in her life was telling. While adolescent girls' lives in post-war Britain were fundamentally gendered, becoming 'a woman' and not a 'teenager' suggested that achieving adult status was contingent on