Gypsy Creams
Drama Queen
Woman's Weekly / 27th June 1969
“Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman…”. All of these letters are significant in their own way, as none of these problems are issues for men. The 16 year old girl is probably being a bit overwrought, but I stayed the night with my best friend more than once as a teen without being accused of meeting a boy by my parents! Both Mrs. C and Working Wife are suffering from higher expectations being applied to them than to their husbands, and naturally, poor Worried won’t see the father of her child for dust. In some respects, things haven’t changed all that much, but at least women have more options nowadays to either get themselves out of trouble, or to avoid landing themselves in it.
Tags: blatant sexism, Mary Marryat, pregnancy, problem page, teenagers
3 Comments
Matty on 5 February 2012 @ 8pm
To clarify, of course the parents of the time had experience of sex (their having children would be somewhat baffling without it) but the new cultural attitudes to sex must have seemed both bewildering and frightening and it’s easy to imagine 1960s fortysomethings worrying about sleazy pot-smoking males whispering about “free love” into their daughter’s ears. Now that all seems rather silly, especially given that we know that the cultural atmosphere of the “sixties” we’re always told about didn’t really reach beyond a few major cities in Europe and North America. The boys their daughters were seeing were, likely as not, pressed shirt and trouser types looking to bring a “nice girl” home to meet their mothers.
Tanya Jones on 11 February 2012 @ 12am
Heh! Actually, I’ve just been reminded of the stories both my parents told me about their experiences in their youth, and I have to concede that Iris’ parents may have had a point! My father lost his virginity at 12 years old, but he was a bit of a tearaway. I think it all comes down to good parenting; if Iris’ parents had known her friends better, then they probably would have been far more relaxed.
Matty on 5 February 2012 @ 7pm
Re: the 16-year-old, I think that, as Mary’s advice suggests, the generation gap was far greater, culturally, for those who were teenagers in the 1960s than it was for those born in the ’70s and their parents. Parents will always worry about their children but in the ’50s and ’60s the younger generation must have seemed unfathomable and the moral panics about drugs and sex must have been far more worrying for an older generation who largely had no experience of such things of their own to fall back on.