A couple talking under a railway arch in the Elephant and Castle district of south London, January 1949. Image via Getty Images
Please be aware that this post concerns some discussions of sex and violence
How do memoirs help us understand attitudes and experiences relating to sexuality in the past? On the one hand memoirs give the assumption that most working-class communities were morally conservative with an emphasis on avoiding premarital sex and with an ignorance around homosexuality. And there is certainly some truth to this – many working-class girls were kept in the dark about sex and their own bodies for fear that such knowledge would lead to sexual immorality, particularly those from religious backgrounds. Yet memoirs also tell us that knowledge and understandings of sexuality was complex and contradictory – sexual immorality was often widely condemned and women, particularly, were placed under great scrutiny and their behaviour and bodies were policed more diligently by their families and neighbours than men’s. Maggie Clark’s memoir of growing up in 1930s Liverpool described the shame she felt for having premarital sex with her boyfriend, explaining that ‘there wasn’t much worse you could do in our community.’[1.] Nevertheless, whilst illicit sex and unmarried pregnancy was condemned, neither were uncommon. I suggest that discussions of sexuality in memoirs shows that concepts about illicit and licit sexuality help us understand how deviance and belonging were constructed within close working-class neighbourhoods and reflected broader moral codes and social mores that strictly shaped who was included and excluded, which helped reinforce claustrophobic ties that were devastating for those who were seen to be transgressive.
Memoirs show that families worked hard to ensure that young working-class women were not perceived as having any connection to sexual immorality, especially in the early twentieth century. Some connotations that clothing and appearance seemed to have to impropriety in these period may seem a little extreme to us. Edith Hinson, born in Stockport in 1910, recalled the trouble she got into aged seventeen when she bought a hat that she describes as being in the style of Rudolph Valentino. Edith kept the hat hidden however: ‘I dare not let mam see it, as her morals were so strict. If you showed even the top of your chest at neck level, you were on your way “over the fields”, where the girls who got into trouble went. I still don’t know where, “over the fields”, was.’[2] This is a helpful example but it gives a sense of the kind of coded language that people – often women – used as a way to instruct other women about the mores and accepted modes of behaviour whilst also maintaining silences and without actually explaining anything in detail. For Edith’s mother, even the wearing of a fashionable hat risked her daughter being seen as ‘fast’ – a term that implied sexual promiscuity – and risked the rumours, speculation and hostility of neighbours. When she caught Edith in the hat, she reacted furiously: ‘I was petrified as she caught hold of it, pulled at the brim until it came round my neck… She thumped me into the house, put the hat on the fire, and wouldn’t let me out for two weeks.’[3] This extreme response helps us understand that the fear of being perceived as sexually improper would have been devastating for young working-class girls. This concern was particularly acute during and after the First World War – when Edith was a teenager – because young women became the focus of broader social anxieties about unmarried sex and ‘khaki fever’ – the idea that young girls were drawn to have sexual relationships with soldiers without the protection and influence of their male family members during the War. The sexual double standard – that sexual permissiveness by men was tolerated and even encouraged but heavily condemned for women – was widely entrenched and attitudes like Edith’s mother’s gives some sense about the potentially devasting social impact for girls considered to be engaged in illicit sex.
A young woman on a street corner, 1949. Via Getty Images.
Women’s behaviour and clothing was carefully policed, especially by their family and neighbours, and they were widely condemned if they were seen as being sexually immoral.
By implication, women who were suspected of engaging in prostitution were often widely condemned. Women and their families strongly defended themselves against accusations, rumours and speculation about their possible engagement in prostitution. Karen Wilkes’s family memoir described her aunts’ horror when neighbours suspected they had been engaged in prostitution when they returned to Sheffield from working in service in Blackpool in 1938: ‘It was a common assumption that when girls returned home, dressed nicely or fashionably, that they were “on the game”.’[4] Women who were known to have engaged in prostitution where often subjected to a great deal of stigma and shame when it became public knowledge within their own neighbourhoods. Colin MacFarlane recalled the moment when he and his friends spotted a female neighbour soliciting: ‘In that brief flash of time, she realised that her secret was out and a look of terror and despair swept over her face. It was like watching a rabbit frozen in the headlights of a car.’[5] This extreme stigma helps explains the violent response by women like Edith, who was horrified by her daughter’s racy hat, because it had such negative consequences for women who relied on their neighbours for support, assistance and help, especially in times of poverty. As an example, it helps us understand how living in close-knit urban neighbourhoods could be claustrophobic and difficult for those who were cast out for transgressing the established boundaries of morality and propriety.
These attitudes and criticism towards women who engaged in – or who were considered to be likely to engage in – premarital sex came to the fore when a woman became pregnant outside of marriage. Lydia Hoare, born in Mossley in Manchester, 1920, was six when her widowed mother died shortly after giving birth to a child. Her mother had refused to name the father and Lydia described the hostile and horrified response of her twenty-year-old sister, Alice, to her mother’s illicit pregnancy, explaining that Alice refused to leave to house or see her friends ‘or do anything.’ Lydia believed that the same meant that ‘Mama wanted to die.’ Her sister Alice still refused to see their mother even when she was told that she was dying, and although the son was sent away Alice send the boy money occasionally but he never became part of the family. Alice claimed she did not regret say that she’d treated her mother: ‘Later she said she would do the same thing again.’ Reflecting later in life, Lydia recalled that. ‘It’s a strange thing that I don’t talk much about cause I remember her vividly and loved her dearly. But after she died I don’t think I ever mentioned her again, which I think was a psychological thing. I’ve never been able to fathom that one. Maybe I thought it was taboo. I don’t know. Come to think of it, nobody mentioned her to me either.’[6] This sad family story would not have been unusual with illegitimate children being brought up elsewhere and silences around those who were understood to have transgressed boundaries of morality. Despite these attitudes, neither premarital sex nor unmarried motherhood were unusual. Returning to Maggie Clark, she recounts her terror of finding she was pregnant by her boyfriend, Thomas, and the kindness shown to her by her neighbour who reassured her ‘ ‘Yer Thomas’ll do right by ye or he’ll have me and yer dad to face. Ye aren’t the first girl around these parts to fall in the family way.’[7] Thomas did marry her prior to going to sea but deserted her, which avoided her baring the shame of illegitimacy, but also gives a sense of how these kinds of situations were often not spoken about aloud but existed in many families and neighbourhoods.
The emphasis on avoiding women’s exposure to premarital sex is illustrated by the violent responses, especially by mothers, when there were concerns about young girls being assaulted. The folk singer and activist Ewan MacColl’s (b.1915) account of growing up in Salford includes a dramatic incident when he was a child when he saw ‘a mob of howling women racing as fast as they could go, filling the road, bringing traffic to a halt. Many of them were still wearing their aprons and all were armed, some with knives, some with sticks, others with hammers, chisels, shovels, and whatever else they had been able to lay their hands on.’ He describes the whirl of rumours and the belief that the offender was a Jewish boxer who was believed to have assaulted an 8 year old girl: ‘The enraged women had besieged the house of the boxer’s mother and after smashing all the windows had been persuaded by the police to disperse.’ MacColl explained that it transpired that the boxer was in Birmingham when attack occurred but experienced the angry wrath of the local women anyhow.[8] This example is a relatively rare reference to sexual assault and, whereas memoirists quite commonly talk about domestic violence, particularly between their parents, there are notable silences around sexual offences. One exception is the autobiographical account of Mary Turner (b. 1921) who became a typist for the police in Manchester as the Second World War broke out. ‘the place was full of servicemen and it was great. You always looked round in case you weren’t being followed. I once fought for my virginity in a barn with about six soldiers – and won, partly because I didn’t know what there was about me that I was fighting for.’[9] This portrayal of the incident – partly self-deprecating and partly making light of it – helps the narrator to talk about what must have been a terrifying incident. You wonder if she had ever told anyone of it previously – bearing in mind the stigma she risked if she talked about it openly – and perhaps the opportunity to write her life story, over forty years later, gave the author a way to acknowledge such an awful ordeal.
There is also some evidence to suggest that the Second World War helped women to challenge some of the parental control that they were subjected to. The arrival of American GIs, and especially Black American GIs, exacerbated anxieties about women’s moral welfare but the opportunities young women experienced to have more freedom because of their wartime jobs helped some women defy the otherwise entrenched expectations around behaviour. In her account of women and the war, Pat Ayers includes an interview with a Liverpool woman who recalled defying her parents’ opposition to her social life and emphasised that they were merely having fun and not engaging in relationships with the men she met: ‘I used to get murdered, “I’ll teach you (smack) to walk (smack) out with sailors (smack, smack).’ You’d think we were on the streets at least (laughing).’[10] It is hard to know if the War led to less hostility towards unmarried mothers – perhaps because they could more easily pass as widows and secrets could be kept more easily amid the turbulence, loss, and upheaval caused by War, which perhaps loosened neighbourly ties.
London Nightclub Scene In Wartime, 1943. Via Getty Images.
World War Two both exacerbated anxieties about women’s moral welfare an d empowered women to challenge the some of the restrictive social mores that they had been subjected to.
Northern Irish novelist Mary Beckett describes the experience of a young woman in the war in her short story ‘Theresa.’ The eponymous heroine ‘was so recklessly gay’ and socialised with American soldiers to the consternation of her neighbours and her own mother. Theresa found herself to be pregnant, and when told, ‘her mother sat down and cried’ and remained unmoved by Theresa’s protestations that ‘I’m not the only one.’[11] Her mother was horrified when the baby, named Dierdre, was born and it became clear that the father was a Black GI and Theresa is pressured to send her to an orphanage. Yet a sermon from a priest at Mass encouraged her to retrieve Dierdre from the orphanage, after marrying her boyfriend Harry who became an affectionate father to Dierdre. The story narrates Theresa’s complex feelings towards Dierdre as she feared the racism she would experience and her own ongoing sense of shame about Diedre’s race – perhaps as an ongoing reminder of her own sexual transgression: ‘She kept telling herself that she enjoyed having Dierdre with her but she was such a big boisterous child, and she always made her feel so ashamed with Harry.’[12] The story also shows Theresa’s acknowledgment of the kindness shown to Dierdre by the local priest and to other children in the neighbourhood, suggesting a sense of hope around the shifting mores and social attitudes.
American GIs in Belfast 1942, via Getty Images.
The arrival of American troops , especially Black soldiers, exacerbated fears about women’ s sexual morality during the Second World War.
Finally, men were by no means exempt from strict codes about sexuality and whilst they were not condemned or criticised for engaging in premarital sex, men suspected of being homosexuals were often subjected to hostility and violence. There does seem to have been a distinction between the tacit acknowledgement of men who had sex with other men, which was largely not discussed and seemed to attract less overt acknowledgement or hostility. The Birkenhead comedian Paul O’Grady described his first romantic encounter with another boy that he met at school, but emphasises that they did view themselves as being similar to the homosexual they knew of men who ‘were old and hung around the men’s lavs (toilets) at Woodside Ferry’.[1] Men who seemed effeminate or who transgressed gender roles could be subjected to significant hostility and violence. Ewan MacColl acknowledged how little he and his friends knew about homosexuality or sex beyond procreation but recalled a local youth named Frankie who lived locally: ‘He was about seventeen when he first appeared on the street wearing lipstick and rouge… He ignored our shouts of derision and the catcalls of the big lads…. We would fall in behind him and imitate his mincing steps. My mother always spoke of him as if he was in the final stage of a terminal illness. “That puir laddie, that puir demented thing.”’ The sense here is that youths like Frankie were pitied and Ewan’s observation that his mother treated him as if he had an illness probably points to the way that homosexuality may have been seen as a disorder, rather than a crime. Yet Ewan describes how other youths violently confronted Frankie: ‘some big lads went after him, stole his trousers and covered his genitals with dye.’ The same youths tried to attack Frankie again, but he was armed with a kitchen knife and his self-defence ensured that the youths no longer abused him. ‘He would sail down the street refusing to be intimidated by our puerile insults, the big lads’ silent hatred and the grown-ups disapproval… he should have been a figure of fun and I suppose that in a way he was – but he had a kind of absurd gallantry which led him dignity.’[12] This account is interesting because it suggests that Frankie’s violent response helped him to conform to more conventional codes of masculinity, which redeemed him to some degree in the eyes of the other youths. It suggests that sexuality was not so much about the act itself but what it was seen to have represented in terms of gender roles and concerns that their denigration would cause larger forms of upheaval and unwelcome change.
These examples show that life was not easy for men or women who were seen to transgress codes of acceptable sexuality and it illustrates that ideas of moral welfare and sexual deviance were key to the close, claustrophobic neighbourly bonds in working-class areas. It also points to how challenging it can be fore memoirists to write about sexuality as many navigated difficult memories, family secrets, and ongoing taboos and silences. We must avoid imposing contemporary ideals and frameworks about sexuality on the past but using memoirs to think about illicit sexualities helps us understand how ideas about morality and deviance have shifted over time and that in working-class neighbourhoods, moral codes existed in different spheres to that of state legislation and formal methods of policing. Rather the beliefs and mores within these neighbourhoods had immense influence on how their inhabitants lived their lives and to transgress such codes could be personally devastating for both men and women.
[1] Maggie Clark, Jam Butties and a Pan of Scouse: Hardship and happiness in the Liverpool docks (Trapeze: London, 2016), 75.
[2] Edith Hinson, Mary Ann’s Girl: Memories of Newbridge Lane (Stockport Metropolitan Borough, 1984), 5.
[3] Hinson, Mary Ann’s Girl, 5.
[4] Karen Wilkes, Ada- A Sheffield Lass: Growing up in Sheffield in the 1920s and 30s (NP, ND), pp. 83-4.
[5] Colin MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow’s Meanest Streets (Mainstream Digital, 2011), 20.
[6] Lydia Hoare, Memories of a Mossley Childhood (Michael Marland, London 2003), 15.
[7] Clark, Jam Butties and a Pan of Scouse, 75.
[8 Ewan MacColl, Journeyman: An autobiography (Manchester University Press: Manchester,1990), 104.
[9] Mary Turner, Untitled (1987), Burnett Archive of Working-Class Autobiography, Brunel University, London, ref. no. 2.77, 2.
[10] Pat Ayers, Women at War (Liver Press: Liverpool, 1988), 47-8.
[11] Mary Beckett, ‘Theresa’, A Belfast Woman, (Poolbeg Press: Dublin, 1980), 12.
[12] Beckett, ‘Theresa’, 19.
[13] Paul O’Grady, At My Mother’s Knee and Other Low Joints (Transworld: London, 2008), 169.
[14] MacColl, Journeyman, 102.
Living on Poverty Street: Working-Class Memoirs and Life-Writing in Britain, 1918-1979 
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