Youth Working with Girls and Women in Community Settings

A Feminist Perspective

Janet Batsleer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781409425793
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351870528
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

This fully revised and expanded edition of Janet Batsleer's (1996) Working with Girls and Young Women in Community Settings provides a significantly updated text, incorporating new research, which will serve practitioners and academics well into the twenty-first century. Youth work with girls and young women has taken inspiration from feminisms and THE women's movement, focussing on the strength and potential of girls as beings in their own right, rather than as carriers of social problems. Autonomous community-based projects of can affirm young women's lives and creativity and seek to challenge oppression. Addressing the significant shifts in the social, political and professional context for informal education, this book makes clear the continuities in community-based informal education with girls and argues for its continuing importance. The impact of neo-liberal approaches to empowerment is highlighted throughout. Drawing together historical, theoretical and practice-based work, including case studies from a range of projects, Batsleer offers an analysis of the significant issues that will affect practice in the future and the significance of feminist inspired informal education rooted in specific community contexts. These include: The impact of violence, coercion and resistance, across a range of practices Female sexuality as a contested space The impact of poverty and the creation of networks of care and mutual support Difference and cross-cultural work, including inter-faith work and practice which challenges racism. This is an important source book for youth workers, social workers, and others involved in education outside of school as well as researchers in the practice and politics of youth work. It is an essential reference tool for researchers, as well as for both lecturers and students involved in the education and continuing professional development of youth and community workers and for those who wish to keep alive a radical alternative

1 Girls in the Modern World: Moments of Danger and Delight

The 1880s: The Girls’ Clubs

Maude Stanley’s volume Clubs for Working Girls, published in 1890, contains a mixture of handy hints and ideological resonance which characterises much writing about youth work. She wrote for ladies who were interested in the rapid spread of girls’ clubs – ‘this most modern of schemes’:

… it is from the repeated requests of ladies who wish to form new ones, who consult us as to how they should begin, what rules they should have, how often they should get together the girls, that these pages are written, in order that they may assist others in the work of which we have such pleasing experiences. (Stanley 1890: 14)

However lady-like her approach, Maude Stanley – founder of the Soho Club and recorder of the work of the Girls’ Club Union – clearly knew her business. Anyone who has tried in the face of lack of support and understanding to establish provision for girls in a youth club or other youth project will recognise her account of disruption and near anarchy. One hundred years later, we can still hear the boys banging at the windows and barging through the doors:

We remember one sad night when two bigger girls who were sitting happily at work round a little table with a bright lamp, while a story was read to them, suddenly quarrelled about a thimble and in a passion one girl threw the table over; others, mad with excitement, began to act in the wildest, utterly indescribable fashion. The unfortunate teacher seized the dangerous lamp, which went out in her hands and came downstairs to get help. Meanwhile the girls threw up the window, and hanging out of it, with loud shouts and rude laughter presently had a crowd underneath, with whom they exchanged chaff and abuse. Downstairs the crowded kitchen was too noisy in its play for any upstairs sounds to be audible. They, however, were cautioned to be quiet while the ladies went upstairs with a lamp to quell the disturbance and close the window. Coming down with the subdued and sulking girls, found hiding in corners and tolerably ashamed of themselves, as soon as the light came the horrified workers found the lower room in still worse confusion. Boys were banging at the shutters and door, the girls inside shouting and singing, and even fighting, slates, books and sewing being used as missiles; and one or two of the girls were reading the books at the desk, and finding out who had paid the club money and who not, and other interesting details, One of the ladies went to speak to the lads outside and one threw his cap in and getting his foot in the doorway prevented the door being closed. Remonstrances were of no use. They wished to come in and play with ‘the lasses’. At last the cap was thrown out, and the door shut and locked for fear any girl might open it. An attempt was then made to get peace restored, but the boys had taken up the cellar grate outside, had dropped into the dark cellar, groped their way up the stairs and three grinning lads emerged through the cellar door into the kitchen amid shrieks of terror from the girls. The ladies greeted them with silence, and locking the door through which they came, put that key too in safety. The boys struck across the kitchen to the outer door and found themselves trapped. They didn’t like it. ‘Now’ said the lady, ‘I suppose we must give you in charge for house breaking. You know what the house has to say about burglars?’ (She didn’t, but the effect of these was just as impressive) (Ibid.: 196).

The ladies who began with a feeling of sympathy for the girls and who had themselves a set of high moral values they were concerned to share, found themselves threatening to call the police. In this way, care, concern and control have run hand-in-hand along the path of charity for more than a century.

Maude Stanley well recognised some of the qualities necessary in workers who would run along that path and for whom her book was written. She advised ladies to start slowly and to give some consideration as to whether the club should be organised on a neighbourhood basis, whether it should be limited by the girls’ occupations, and whether it should be linked to a particular church. She made many useful organisational points early on – concerning age groups, bookkeeping, the establishing of a girls’ committee – and her book contains what must be one of the earliest discussions of the role of volunteers and paid workers. She stressed the importance of recognising that the role of the philanthropic organisation must have priority over the need of the lady helpers, especially over the desire of ladies to be of assistance.

She saw the role of the club as primarily concerned with raising girls’ standard of education. The curriculum reflected that provided by the school boards and aimed to provide girls with the means to fulfil their female role, within the context of their station in life. Cooking, needlework, pattern cutting, laundry and Bible classes formed the staple subjects: singing, dancing and drill supplemented the curriculum.

The First Women Youth Workers

The ladies themselves ‘must have a dignity in themselves which will command respect’ and must be able to encourage a love of learning.

Our work with many girls is to help them find out their own powers and to raise them more in their own estimation, for if a girl is stupid the fact of being thought so will put out even the small spark of intelligence that remains in her. (Stanley 1890: 72)

At the same time, the club might find it necessary to employ a superintendent: a full-time worker who would inevitably become closer to the girls than the ladies of the committee. The question of the social class of the superintendent was considered carefully by Maude Stanley, but, in the spirit of cross-class influence which permeated the philanthropic initiatives of the time, she hesitated to opt firmly for the employment of a lady:

We have had the experience of a lady as a superintendent and also one of the same class of the girls and we do not recommend either one or the other as absolutely the best; the essential is to find a woman with great friendliness, love for the girls, warm sympathy, order and liveliness, who will never be tired or who rather will never let her feelings, mental or physical, interfere with the work of the club. (Stanley 1890: 31)

This job description for a saint is usually written in more detail nowadays and with less direct emphasis on personality. Yet Maude Stanley’s account contained one of the central elements of a contemporary definition of professionalism: an ability to prioritise the work and the project rather than the worker’s own needs, when they are in conflict. Unfortunately, her account continued in a vein which is still all too recognisable, especially when the status of part-time workers who comprise the majority of the workforce is discussed:

The salary required for a superintendent will be some consideration when funds are low, but as it will only occupy the evenings of a working woman, a very large pay should not be required. Should the superintendent be a lady, her salary need not be much more, as it would not be wise to engage one who would have to depend on this salary for her maintenance. (Ibid.: 32)

Maude Stanley clearly intended the girls’ clubs to be run with scarcely a voice or a salary being raised.

Keeping Girls Off the Streets

Maude Stanley also relished a challenge to her authority. In a chapter dedicated to the discussion of differences in social position among the work girls, she is not afraid to name them:

But there are other classes of work girls, factory hands, who after the day’s work are always in the street, who are rude, vulgar and boisterous. In one part of London, where a girls’ club has been established they have been seen on a Saturday night fighting with one another bared to their waists, and yet these, by the gentle and kindly influence of a good matron in a girls’ club, have been, may we not say, tamed and civilised. Many of our readers may never have seen the class of girl I now refer to – girls who will roll about the pavement three or four together, their hair cut straight over their foreheads, shawls over their heads, insulting every decent woman they meet; but even these, if they can be brought to the club, may become quiet and well-behaved. (Ibid.: 193)

Keeping girls off the streets was clearly as much on the agenda of the girls’ clubs as it was of the lads’ clubs in the same era and the distractions of drinking, dancing and other ‘commercial’ opportunities were real. Cleaning up the slums, similar to present-day regeneration, also meant cleaning out the population of the slums, and yet Maude Stanley spoke warmly of her relationship with the ‘wild girls’, rather as Baden Powell would later declare that ‘the best sort of boy is the hooligan’ (Pearson 1983). Writing of Newport Market and Princes Row in Soho, Stanley comments:

These abodes, formerly the possessions of princes, had become so low in their surroundings, that we are thankful they are now swept away with the improvements of Charing Cross Road and Shaftesbury Avenue.

The wild girls who used to call themselves the forty thieves and lived above these courts, and the lads who assumed the like designation, where are they gone to? We see them no longer about Soho. (Stanley 1890: 263)

The 1980s: The Girls’ Work Movement

Perhaps, a lifetime later, it was the grandchildren of these wild girls who returned to Soho and to many other places celebrating wildness and power in the name of the women’s liberation movement – not off the streets but on the streets instead. Maude Stanley wanted to tame the wild girls and send them off to domestic service, despite her nostalgia for them. In 1982, girls were writing for themselves in a collection called Girls are Powerful, edited by Susan Hemmings at SpareRib, the women’s liberation magazine. This collection of lively, aggressive essays found its way on to the shelves of many young women’s projects in the 1980s, where women workers were attempting to understand young women’s perspectives on the world and to work out a new language for talking about discrimination and oppression. This involved a new vocabulary, and the word ‘sexism’ in particular became shorthand for a whole burgeoning understanding of how women are oppressed.

There are certainly persistent themes from the earlier attention to girls in the 1880s: particularly lack of opportunities for education and employment of a satisfying kind, and the experience of low pay. Girls are Powerful contains pieces on hairdressing, babysitting and Saturday shop work. But on the whole, the spirit of the enterprise and the way in which girls are a focus of attention has been recuperated in a transformed and reinvigorated capitalism.

First, young women spoke and speak for themselves. No one is going to speak on their behalf or define their best interests for them. Young women who produced the magazine Shocking Pink wrote:

So no matter how much older feminists think it’s important to put their energy into young women’ s projects, girls nights in youth clubs and so on, it won’t work if they see their role as educators. That’s a patronising basis, neither equal nor conducive to trust.

What we are saying is that we are already feminists. There are at the moment many hundreds of young women, politically aware and active, defining their sexuality, organising women’s groups in schools and colleges, forming bands, starting magazines. Your ageist assumptions deny us our ability to think for ourselves, to create and make our own decisions. In your minds, you place our feminism on another level, below that of yours. We’ve all got it hard. We must stop turning it into some kind of competition and recognise each other’s struggles. (Hemming 1982: 155)

Secondly, it was clear that young women’s ambitions for change would extend far beyond the conventional definitions of politics into questions of personal life: looks and friendship, the age of consent, and lesbianism were, and remain, as relevant as themes for imagining a better future as educational and employment opportunities.

Thirdly, although many of the pieces did address and express a sense of threat and powerlessness experienced by young women (despite the courageous title), the source of danger was now understood on the whole to be in the workings of an unjust system. The appropriate response was to be found in collective organising. For Maude Stanley in the 1890s, the dangers facing girls were in the form of dancing, prostitution and drink. Her responses lay in a concern for morality and spirituality, religion and purity. Wider feminist responses in the same period lay, for example, in the agitation to raise the age of consent.

By the 1980s, the age-of-consent rules were being described by girls writing in Girls are Powerful as part of the problem. In a reversal of expectations, Asian girls, who are described as ‘Growing Angry, Growing Strong’, rejected the exaggerated lady-like passivity to which British culture seems to assign them. Racist and sexist expectations are the problem and the dangers. Organising collectively and speaking on our own behalves are the antidotes.

Early in the 1980s, it seemed as if the agenda for youth work with girls and young women might have shifted away from the philanthropic focus to girls as people with potential. The sense of excitement and movement made collective organising as women exhilarating and exhausting. Accounts of practice in a particular setting could always be framed by reference to a wider movement. For example, even as late as 1989, Dominelli and McLeod could claim that feminist campaigns and networks formed the basis of feminist social work, and feminist community work could only retain an identity if it was not totally incorporated within a professional community work network (Dominelli and McLeod 1989: 46).

In Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story, Trisha McCabe communicated this sense of movement by talking about the differences and arguments among feminists, in a way which current accounts of the movement’s history seem to erase:

With the WLM (Women’s Liberation Movement) there are lots of different politics and women put their energy and time into the areas that they see as the most important or relevant to them. We have big disagreements, not to mention rows. Women aren’t nice to each other all the time! Our ideas can be so different that it can make it difficult, or impossible, to always work together. And feminists outside the WLM may have different ideas again. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t listen to each other or that we aren’t all fighting for the same thing. The however-many-thousands-of-women that are involved in the WLM in this country (and there are millions more, in every country of the world) obviously don’t agree on how to end women’s oppression or exactly what kind of society we want to build. The WLM is a movement, not a political party or a social set, precisely because it can encompass so many different political positions. The movement has broad aims – not a political programme – and what we have in common is that we all want women’s liberation, we all want changes and we all want choices. (McCabe and McRobbie 1981: 14)

Girls are Powerful and Feminism for Girls: An Adventure Story are books which bridged the gap between a sense of a wider women’s liberation movement and the practice of youth and community work which became known as ‘the girls’ work movement’. Some of the history of this movement, particularly its connection with the Girls Work Unit at the National Association of Youth Clubs (NAYC), is recorded in detail in the book written by the NAYC workers who were subsequently made redundant by the Association: Coming in from the Margins: Youth Work with Girls and Young Women (Carpenter and Young 1986). What follows is only a brief and very partial snapshot. But it is undoubtedly the spirit of the girls’ work movement which informs the rest of this book.

Organisations of Women Youth Workers

In the mid-1970s, projects had begun to develop in London and Manchester. By the late 1970s, there was pressure on the NAYC to establish separate events for girls and women. These continued until the mid-1980s, along with the publication of the Working with Girls newsletter (Spence, 2010). The events and publications of the Girls Work Unit became a major resource for the work. The unit was closed very suddenly in 1986; the actions of the NAYC managers who made the decision to close the unit brought about a nationwide campaign of women workers and their allies in the trade unions to restore the unit, or at least to restore the organisation’s support for girls’ work. A ‘pirate edition’ of the Working with Girls newsletter, with the cover illustration ‘The Grass Roots are Bloomin’ Wonderful’, appeared on the desk of every committee member who attended the executive meeting in which the closure decision had been made. Women workers’ groups, trade union branches and young women’s groups picketed the hotel. Resolutions from regional organisations threatened to disaffiliate and break up the NAYC. All this collective organising was evidence that the movement did not belong to the NAYC, nor even to the Girls Work Unit.

Two other forms of organising had emerged: the Women’s Caucus within the Community and the Youth Workers Union, in which women had gained the right to organise autonomously within the trade union structure and were using their organising very effectively to promote the interests of women and girls with a particular focus on promoting the interests of part-time youth workers; and secondly, the National Organisation for Work with Girls and Young Women (NOWGYW) which was in existence from 1981 to 1994. The original working group for the NOWGYW circulated proposals for a constitution with the following aims in 1980:

Some of the aims which we aim to develop are:

• An information and resources unit

• A network of women youth and community workers

• Support for workers who are starting to work with girls in an alternative way

• The initiation of a training programme both for workers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Threat’
• 1 Girls in the Modern World: Moments of Danger and Delight
• 2 Autonomy and Relationship
• 3 Empowerment?
• 4 Informal Education and Feminist Pedagogies
• 5 Sexuality
• 6 Poverty and Motherhood
• 7 Independence and Dependency: The Politics of Disability
• 8 Violence Against Young Women
• 9 Community, Culture and Identity
• 10 Feminist Work with Girls: Professional Formation and Community-based Practice
• 11 Established Patterns, New Directions: The Organisational Context of Work with Girls and Young Women
• 12 The Politics of Globalisation
• Appendix 1 Every Girl Matters! Young Women Matter! A Feminist Comment
• Appendix 2 Questionnaire Based on Pearl Jephcott’s questionnaire in Girls Growing Up (1942)
• References
• Index