The Death of Christian Britain

— The Death of Christian Britain —
hast cared.’ 123 Evangelical religion remained dominant. In the 1880s and
1890s, the paper had its own branch of the YWCA for readers and the
‘Girl’s Own Guild of Scripture Reading and Study’, each with their own
weekly columns. 124 As late as the 1910s and 1920s, the Girl’s Own Paper
had the familiar symbols and signs of the evangelical discourse on femininity.
The magazine had an unrestrained piety, including weekly ‘Prayers
of Unfolding Womanhood’ contributed by a clergyman (‘consecrate to Thy
service my womanhood’s strength and grace’ 125 ), and editor’s lead articles
entitled, ‘The Joy that Remains: One of the Miracles of the Spiritual Life’,
and ‘Our religion will bring us no real joy until Jesus Christ becomes the
Personal reason for all our actions.’ 126
But in the mid-1920s the Girl’s Own Paper entered a period of extraordinary
transition, in large part because it faced competition from a
plethora of more populist magazines for elementary, secondary, and
working girls, though many did not survive the slump. 127 Romantic and
‘schoolgirl-gang’ fiction predominated in these competitors, and started to
lead teenage girls away from preoccupation with marriage. The Girl’s Own
Paper responded, largely in the 1930s. In 1926 it still had stories like ‘The
Adventures of a Homely Woman’ and ‘The Better Man: It’s not always a
Misfortune to be Jilted’ (which compared closely to a 1917 story on ‘The
Barrier to Intimacy: The Joy that Followed a Broken Engagement’), and
contained items on the Women’s Institute, prayers, ‘Facts and hints for the
Reading Girl’ and ‘The Verse Book of a Homely Woman’. But it also
had features on ‘Things for the Bachelor Girl’ (primarily furniture for the
bachelor-girl flat). 128 The discourse on spinsterhood was beginning to disappear.
By the late 1930s, the transition was in full swing, with remnants
of evangelical discourse heavily muted by a new editor who gave the magazine
a revised subtitle: ‘Stories of adventure, mystery and school: articles
on careers, handicrafts, hobbies, sport and travel.’ The lead fictional stories
were now school japes, led by ‘The Jays’, a group of fourth-formers, their
silly dormitory activities and their amazing adventures. Sports were now a
central item, with every issue carrying photograph strips on how to play
games: netball, skipping, rounders, lacrosse. Career opportunities as barristers
and photographers now provided a thoroughly modern image,
enhanced by colour plates of fictitious historical heroines in modern clothes
and make-up. One colour painting was of an attractive blonde girl on the
beach, dressed in loose and sleeveless beach blouse, a ball in one arm and
her other hand on her hip in a muscular, brash and sexy pose. This is
nothing short of a pin-up, but it is of a girl not a boy; indeed there were
virtually no pictures of men in the magazine of the late 1930s. The image
is that of a cheerleader. 129 Teenage girlhood was no longer an interlude
between school and marriage, a period of mere preparation for the domestic
role. It was now a period for expressing independence and developing
contentment with the physicality of the female body. With religion now
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