By K ATHARINE WHI.TEHORN s, _ Lind stunts in the
Festival Gardens. And National. Union of Women Teachers reacted scalded cats to the Crowther Report's sug- ar% that girls should receive training for the M's of Men, Marriage and Motherhood, %ma : , —Y that order. The events are not anected.
e TAP elaborations are in an early stage, are mainly to be regarded as a straw in the a wind that was blowing strongly enough, aaiti IruaY, to keep most of the teenagers away. ever, five buxom American girls braved the and modelled nightwear and playsuit, —esses and cotton frocks; there was a ore hunt; and a Queen of the Week was by a young girl who works on Date. Later, qk n Production will be taken to Butlin's and kier haunts of the teenage animal; in the mean- tioe'enage panels are being set .up to test the ihei2s of the young things to. products aimed ' fancy. One of the American girls, who had allowed chubby grin to be lipsticked for a make-up astration, was all for it. 'You can't get 461 pretty simple things over hers,' she said.
4111e.lerica, it's dierent: t teenagers have carved out a plaffce for them he selves.' • ' Germaine, who runs TAP, is herself an cr erie: 411 ith a long training in the ways of rican teenagers; and it is clear that a good of her work will simply enable the British UfitetUrer to catch up. She left. America to e new life for herself after her divorce; tied *,at eighteen, she is dead against early v. 'I had no opportunity to make my own atons,' she said. 'I hadn't lived, I hadn't done thing.' She has two teenage daughters, who as guinea-pigs for the enterprise; they, she Pes, will wait till their mid-twenties before 'lig married.
1c en Age Promotions would presumably be the favourite hates of Mr. H. W. Owen. said, at a teachers' conference, that the worst enemies were 'the men who want r money.' And a Miss Stewart deplored the that they spend their money on records, qes, drinks, records, sweets, cinemas and dIt! ,„ 111g • It is easy to feel a kind of moral resent- at the mere a»tount of spending power the t."4gers have (£900,000,000 according to the '44ge monthly, Honey). There is a general feeling among those who are worried about teenagers (like their teachers) or frightened of them (like me) or even slightly awed by them (like their parents) that the whole buSiness of the Teenage Idea is all wrong.
But what, exactly, are we objecting to? The teenagers' tastes are really very innocuous; it seems rather absurd to complain because young- sters like loud noises and blight colours; and it is hardly reasonable to expect them to stock- pile large sums of money for the future—after all, the very fact that 'We never had that sort of money when we were your age' shows that one can perfectly well get along without it. One cannot in justice complain about what is supplied to the teenage market; Geri Germaine's suggestions are usually entirely sensible (she turned down the approaches of a cigarette firm).
It is not just the tastes of the teenagers that raise alarm and despondency in adult breasts. No, what alarms us about the teenagers is that they are organised. We feel about teenagers the way the nineteenth-century industrialists felt about trade unions (even the word is suspect: adolescents are just people who want to grow up). So we blame the manufacturers for build- ing them up as a group. If they were only selling a product, we would have nothing to worry about. What is alarming is that they are selling a neurosis as well : it is the method of advertis- The effect of the spotlight on the teenagers' financial power makes them conscious of them- selves as a class. Those of us who were just schoolgirls, not teenagers, used to say : 'They don't understand me' — today's girls say 'they don't understand us.' The more they are conscious of themselves as a group, the more they care what the group says and thinks. If one of them gets a hat because the others have it, it hardly matters. But if one of them feels she must get a man to keep up with the others, it means trouble.
And the trend of the advertising and the blandishments is just this way. The girl from Date put her finger on it when she said: 'We try to appeal through the "you and your boy friend" approach—he won't like you unless. . . .' Mak- ing girls worried too soon about whether they have a man or not is a sure way to bounce them into ill-considered marriages: they build an obsessively ideal picture of marriage that nothing in real life can match; and they far too readily overlook the drawbacks -of the boy next door and settle for less.
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