Seven Standen
In 2024, there has been a slew of viral memes about what it means to be a ‘teenage girl’. Whether these are born from nostalgia or feelings of hopelessness about the future, the widespread appeal of these posts has made one thing startlingly clear.
Being a teenage girl is about more than age or even gender. It’s a unique identity within itself. Girlhood, especially during the transition from childhood to adult, is a culture, experience and challenge different from anything else.
Being able to summarise such a complex identity in simple terms, such as “I’m just a girl”, may be new. But the distinctive ‘teenage girl’ character and corresponding culture has existed for over a hundred years. Born in the rubble of the First World War, the teenage girl has grown and shifted into something unlike any other phase of life. It has been explored countless times in different forms of media and studied by academics from a variety of fields. No matter how much society changes, the experiences of teenage girlhood seem to stand out as fundamental to everyone who went through them.
Despite the universality of being a teenage girl, it’s easy to track down how and why this core identity was created by the girls themselves. So, let’s look back to the early 20th century and consider how we got to where we are today, with adolescent girls becoming the centre of endless movies, self-help books and marketing campaigns. How exactly was ‘the teenage girl’ invented?
The Birth Of The Teenage Girl
In the aftermath of World War One, society began to change. The divide between child and adult was no longer so clean, as ‘young people’ began to forge their own identity as a group. During wartime, the UK lost 6 per cent of the workforce, creating a demand for young, cheap labour to rebuild the country.
Young people became crucial wage earners — and there was plenty of new opportunities to spend their income on. Many embraced modern technology, such as moving pictures and the radio, and rejected the harsh, traditional way of living they’d experienced during the war. They celebrated the newfound freedom of the Roaring 20s with jazz music, sports and dance clubs.
“These young women rejected childhood”
Although most young women had little freedom, the birth of the ‘teenage girl’ began here. There was a literal shedding of the corset. Victorian fashion was rejected in favour of loose clothes and bobbed hair, which made movement easier. Unlike her mother before her, the ‘flapper’ girl wore makeup, drank, smoked, partied and voted. She had a thin, shapeless figure but exposed her arms and legs in public. Many British girls became fascinated with American soldiers and the implications of America itself.
For the first time, the jump from child to woman wasn’t a direct one. Now, there was a transitional stage of physical and psychological development, with its own hobbies, ideas and interests. These young women rejected childhood, not interested in toys or games, but still hesitated to embrace womanhood, rebelling against everything their mothers believed. Despite this, the concept of the ‘teenager’ wouldn’t gain traction for another 20 years.
Bobby Soxers And Teenyboppers
A fresh version of the teenage girl emerged in the 1940s, named after their white ankle socks. Bobby soxers listened to pop (notably Frank Sinatra) and loved to dance to jazz or swing music. They wore loose clothes, labelled as “sloppy”, and were criticised as being brainless for their interest in pop culture.
In many ways, bobby soxers represent the birth of ‘teenage girls’ as a monogamous group. By the end of the decade, the term came to mean teenage girls obsessed with contemporary fads. The ‘teenage girl’ became a specific figure for companies to market to.
Largely, this was due to teenagers were spending less time at home and more with their friends. Public leisure spaces, such as movie theatres and dance halls, increased during the 1920s and 30s. Young women became more interested in consumer culture: going to movies, listening to music, and buying clothes.
This lead to the rise of teenyboppers in the 1950s. They followed adolescent trends in music, fashion, and culture. Teenyboppers became a catch-all for “girl culture” in general. Girl culture was private and practiced in the safe space of the bedroom away from the mockery of male peers.
Teenyboppers could not have existed without modern consumerist culture and the way it was advertised to adolescent girls. Changing music trends, made accessible by radio and vinyl players, allowed girls to pursue interests away from their parents. By 1954, 3.2 million homes in the UK owned TVs and viewers spent nearly 40 per cent of their evenings tuned in. The 1950s also marked the boom in magazines aimed at girls, with Bunty starting in 1958 and Boyfriend in 1959. Girls created a culture around the media they liked, including the magazines they read, pop stars they idolised, and television they watched.
The Teenage Girl Enters The Swinging 60s
By the 1960s, pop culture became central to teenage girlhood.
Magazines were not just a form of entertainment, but a space to distribute information and discuss topics central to ‘girlhood’. The weekly magazine Jackie was launched in 1964 and became the best-selling teen magazine in Britain by the 1970s. In addition to beauty tips, gossip, and short stories about contemporary issues, Jackie had a problem page that received up to 400 reader letters a week. The inclusion of pull-out posters of film or music stars, which teenagers could decorate their bedrooms with, demonstrates the growing importance of pop idols.
“Teenage girls are patronised by the media and society”
Beatlemania is one of the most famous examples of widespread fanaticism, taking place from 1963 to 1966. The hysteria of teenage girls was well-documented by the press. The Beatles were followed everywhere, around the world, by screaming young women who worshipped the ground they walked on. Like today, fangirls were belittled for their disproportionate reaction to seeing their idols. Using the words “hysteria” and “mania” are an example of how teenage girls are patronised by the media and society at large for their interests. Despite the reactions to the 1966 World Cup being identical to Beatlemania, one is still seen as credible while the other is dismissed.
The 1960s was one of the UK’s most economically successful decades, granting young people more freedom than ever before. Taboos and restrictions, from the Victorian and post-War eras, began to lift. During the swinging 60s, brand new aspects of youth, such as drug culture, rock music, and political protests, blossomed.
The Liberation Of The Teenage Girl
The push for women’s liberation started to have a positive impact in the 1970s.
Some girls pursued education seriously, while others prioritised work over marriage and children. As early as 1919, women could become lawyers, vets, and civil servants. But discrimination against women at work wasn’t illegal until the 1970s. While birth control pills were introduced in 1961, unmarried women could only access them from 1967. Large numbers started taking it in the 1970s, prior to health scares in the 1980s.
Girls began to engage with progressive politics through university spaces and trade unions. It was made possible for women to take out current accounts, loans, and credit cards, granting more financial freedom. Teenage girls could aspire for more than becoming a housewife, which resulted in a shift in their interests.
Despite aspects of liberation, pressure on teenage girls increased regarding sexuality and their appearance. Many were expected to dress for the male gaze. This required teenagers to be desirable to men around them, while remaining childlike and conservative. There was also an increasing pressure for young women to be thin, hinting at the crazy diet fads and products which ruled the 1980s.
Society has always been placing pressures on teenage girls, using institutions like the family, health, and workplace to control them. But the increasing technological advancements and influence of the media made these pressures inescapable. Beauty products and fashion trends could be advertised in magazines and on TV, projecting them directly into people’s homes.
The teenage girl was an important consumer, willing to spend money on her insecurities. She was targeted with new inventions that promised her security and threatened that everyone else would be using them.
Lolita: The Teenage Girl As An Object Of Desire
Although the 1960s introduced the sexual revolution, including feminist ideas about the empowerment of female sexual pleasure, it also marks a shift. The abolition of the Hays Code, which prohibited “suggestive nudity” and “any inference of sex perversion” from being shown on screen, led to more experimental films. With looser restrictions regarding sexuality, Stanley Kubrick was able to adapt Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in 1962.
Lolita is an infamous movie, where 14-year-old Sue Lyon plays a teenage girl stalked and groomed by a man in his late 30s. Producer James B. Harris has stated repeatedly that the film aimed to portray Lyon as a “sex object”, despite her age. Reportedly, she was also groomed and raped by Harris while making the film. The release of Lolita marked an increasing trend towards teenage girls being sexualised under the male gaze. Other “nymphet” movies like Baby Doll (1956) and The Night Of The Iguana (1964), also starring Lyon, did the same.
“As women grew increasingly independent … teenage girls were preyed on more”
By the 1970s, the teenage (and even pre-teenage) girl was being portrayed as a taboo object of desire. Martin Scorseses’ Taxi Driver (1974) released to wide acclaim, despite it starring 12-year-old Jodie Foster as a sex worker. Similarly, Brooke Shields, who was only eleven-years-old at the time, also portrayed a preteen sex worker in Pretty Baby (1978).
As women grew increasingly independent, throughout the 60s and 70s, teenage girls were preyed on more. Music, fashion, art, and film started normalising their sexualisation, which opened them up to exploitation and violence. Today, it is ‘normal’ for young girls and women to be portrayed as “sex objects” in the media. But the teenage girl as the exemplification of the ‘Madonna-whore complex’ only started in the mid-20th century.
Hell Is A Teenage Girl
The life of a teenager has changed dramatically over the last hundred years. Instead of being seen either as irresponsible children or as adults who should work and marry, teenagerhood is now considered a unique life stage. As we have seen, this transition occurred slowly as economic and social circumstances allowed “growing up” to become a longer phenomenon. But several core aspects of teenage girlhood are remarkably familiar.
Most obvious are how teenage cultures is a response to their parent’s own experiences and values, often going in the opposite direction. In the 1920s, girls rejected uptight Victorian idealisms and wartime frugality. Later, 1970s adolescents turned away from marriage and children in favour of becoming working girls or pursuing higher education. Similarly, the thoughts and behaviours of teenage girls were dismissed, either as silly and meaningless or as proof society was on the verge of collapse. This still happens today.
No matter the outside influences, the experiences of teenage girls have remained largely the same. A combination of the strong emotions and changes brought on by puberty, as well as the conflicting impulses of childhood and adulthood, create an entirely unique phase of life. The confidence of girls drops below boys during adolescence. Many feel stressed, lonely, or a desire to fit in with their peers. But despite the perils of being a teenage girl, plenty of people reflect on that period of life with nostalgia. Girl culture remains alive and well, for people of all ages.
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Featured image courtesy of leah hetteberg via Unsplash. No changes made to this image. Image license found here.
Seven Standen
Seven (they/them) is a BA History and Sociology student at the University of Warwick. They are a freelance journalist, disability advocate, and lover of cats.