Spare Rib, Shocking Pink and the Politics of Age in 1980s Feminism

By Laura Tisdall

Much has been written about how ‘second-wave’ feminism dealt (or did not deal) with the intersectional identities of race, class and sexuality. However, there has been little or no consideration of how second-wave feminists reckoned with chronological age. In this blog post, I’m going to offer some initial, speculative thoughts about how the second-wave feminist magazine Spare Rib addressed childhood and adolescence in the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, how these age-stages were conceptualised by this particular feminist project, and how female children and adolescents themselves engaged with the magazine.

In the first few years of Spare Rib, age was rarely dealt with directly by the magazine, and usually only arose as an issue in the letters page. Even then, as the magazine provided no template for the discussion of ageism per se, especially ageism that was directed towards younger rather than older women, letter-writers tended to argue that the magazine should focus more on teenagers because they were most vulnerable to misogynist exploitation and coercion, rather than suggesting they experienced a different kind of oppression because of their age. In 1976, 17-year-old Barbara wrote in to suggest ‘if you want the next generation of women to have a new conception of themselves, you must speak to the young girls, who are I feel the most pressurized group in society’ [SR 42]. Sporadic letters like this from teenage girls throughout the magazine’s first few years indicated that some read and bought it, but, until the 1980s, Spare Rib did not produce any of the kind of material that Barbara had desired, instead confining itself to publishing analyses of play and friendships that were aimed at the adult reader [e.g. SR 58].

Following a steadily increasing number of one-off articles in the early 1980s that addressed ‘teenage’ issues, a semi-regular page aimed at young women, ‘Typical Girls’, was introduced in Spare Rib in October 1986. This may have been at least partly inspired by the greater visibility of young women’s activism after a series of 1985 protests against Victoria Gillick’s campaign to require doctors to gain parental consent before prescribing contraception to under sixteens, an ageist issue that Spare Rib perhaps connected with more easily because of its links to second-wave feminists’ original demands.

At the same time, however, teenage feminists had already found new outlets, such as the magazine Shocking Pink, which was produced by different collectives of young women between 1979-1983, 1987-1989, and 1989-1992. The first collective acknowledged the help of Spare Rib in getting the magazine started, with Sally, one of the first members, saying ‘they were very, very generous about trying to explain how to literally make a magazine. We didn’t know how to make a magazine’. Nevertheless, young women’s concerns still did not really impinge on Spare Rib itself.

Shocking Pink, from its very first issue, laid out the issues facing young women by explicitly reckoning with age as an axis of oppression in a way that Spare Rib tended to avoid. In this way, although the magazine set itself up as in opposition to mainstream eighties teenage magazines like Jackie, Oh Boy and Blue Jeans, it also posed a challenge to adult-led feminist movements. The age of consent was an especial focus for activism in the early 1980s, with the first collective arguing in the first issue that ‘women under sixteen’ had the ‘right to determine their own sex lives’ (Unlike Spare Rib, the writers of Shocking Pink deliberately used the term ‘woman’ rather than ‘teenager’ or ‘adolescent’). In the second issue, a response to a reader who argued that under-sixteens were not ‘mature’ enough to have sex gave the collective the opportunity to develop their argument more fully: ‘the idea of “maturity” in our society is a bit contradictory – young people in general aren’t treated as people or as adult so how can they be mature? The whole idea of “maturity” stems from adult prejudice; it’s people and their attitudes that matter regardless of age’.

The experiences of young female activists, as recounted in both Spare Rib and Shocking Pink, indicated how ageism prevented them from having their voices heard in the wider women’s movement, as Anna Gough-Yates has argued. One recurring complaint was that ‘young’ women’s events and workshops were, in reality, dominated by older women who saw younger women as in need of help and protection, and didn’t listen to what they had to say. Sara, Melanie and Kate attended a Young Women’s Conference in 1979, and wrote in Spare Rib: ‘we were all struck by the number of women who we thought didn’t identify as young women… one of us who is 13 felt dominated and patronised by the attitude of the older women there, some of whom came as teachers and social workers in an organising role. This aggravated us more and more throughout the day’ [SR 90]. The first Shocking Pink collective noted in their third issue that it was at this conference that the idea of Shocking Pink first emerged.

Education was an issue that young women, unsurprisingly, often engaged with passionately, but which was usually taken out of their hands by adults, even those adults who claimed to be committed to forms of education that gave students more power. Discussion of the sexist school curriculum was a continuing thread in Spare Rib, but there was little attempt to elicit students’ views or to involve them in activism. Indeed, when young women offered opinions that did not fit with received feminist views on schooling, these could be dismissed by the adult editors. 15-year-old Sandra wrote into Spare Rib in 1974 to complain about her CSE History syllabus:

‘For this I have to do a topic on something that has or is affecting our day to day lives. Most of the girls are doing the different things that affect their mother’s lives, for instance, the History of the Washing Machine, and all different so-called household things, while the lads do all the interesting things like the history of the Atom Bomb. (That was what I wanted to do but the teacher said it was more of a boy’s topic and to choose something else.)’ 

Rather than reckoning with the progressive educational assumptions about girls’ ‘natural interests’ that had limited Sandra’s choices, Spare Rib’s answer prioritised ‘women’s history’ agendas that had little relevance to what Sandra was experiencing at school and implicitly informed her that she was not protesting in the ‘right’ way: ‘To women whose history has been ignored, the idea of the history of household things sounds quite interesting’ [SR 22].

In the 1980s, young women encountered similar problems even when they tried to engage with supposedly radical, left-wing educational groups or with schools and local authorities that seemed open to new ideas. In 1988, Sheffield Young Lesbians Group [YLG] were originally welcomed by a local secondary school who wanted them to speak to students about the experience of being a young lesbian, but the school failed to adequately brief their students in advance and the first session did not go well. As a result, the school not only stopped the sessions but liaised with Sheffield City Council to prevent the YLG using facilities that had previously been available to them through the council’s Girls and Young Women’s Project. One member of the YLG wrote angrily that while Sheffield might have a reputation as a ‘trendy socialist council’, it was actually bigoted. In the same year, one member of the Shocking Pink collective attended a Libertarian Education Conference but found it was not as libertarian as it was made out to be: ‘There wasn’t very much in depth communication between the young women (the “worked with”) present and the women working with them… a workshop about girls/young women should surely focus on what we want from those in the powerful position of “working with” us (a power/authority usually not recognised by those who have it)’.

The limited influence of young women’s analysis of ageism on the wider movement was evident in how Spare Rib addressed issues of age outside a few isolated articles by writers like Susan Hemmings who took a special interest in the topic. While the magazine ‘dealt with’ adolescents in the later 1980s and early 1990s by giving them their own page – visibly isolating them from the adult discussions rather than fully integrating issues of age throughout the magazine – children who engaged with Spare Rib fared even worse. Female children occasionally wrote into the magazine throughout its lifetime, often inspired by having read their mother’s copy or having talked to their mother about some of the issues raised by second-wave feminism. As 11-year-old Rachel from Swansea wrote in 1983, ‘I am involved in a girls’ group which meets on a Wednesday evening. I read Spare Rib sometimes as mum buys it every month… I did this graffiti [on a Cosmo advertisement] as I am sick and tired of sexist advertisements. They, men, think women are dolls… If they think this magazine [Cosmo] is feminist, they are thinking wrong. Yours angrily…’

However, Spare Rib treated letters from children quite differently from letters from adults or adolescents. Often (though not always) spelling mistakes in the letters were not corrected, and the salutation and/or sign-off were presented as a photograph rather than typed out. This preserved the writer’s original spelling and ‘childish’ handwriting, presenting the letter as a cute, funny ‘exhibit’ rather than as a serious account of an experience or as a contribution to discussion, as in this 1979 letter from an 8-year-old, H:

Overall, therefore, while Spare Rib increasingly paid lip-service to the needs of young women during the 1980s and early 1990s, the magazine’s editors tended to conceptualise them as a vulnerable sub-group rather than as a group experiencing intersectional oppression, and this was especially evident in their dealings with female children, who were not considered to be serious correspondents, but instead presented as amusingly precocious. Attempts by young women to combat this through the Shocking Pink collective and through involvement in organised events were not ultimately enough to cause adult feminists to seriously question their attitudes to their younger counterparts, at least insofar as these attitudes were expressed in the pages of Spare Rib.

Primary Sources

“Odds and sods,” Spare Rib 22, p.33, April 1974.
“Letters page,” Spare Rib 42, p.4, January 1976.
“A girl’s best friend,” Spare Rib 58, p.38, May 1977.
“Letters page,” Spare Rib 82, , p.4, June 1979.
“Young women’s conference,” Spare Rib 90, p.10, January 1980.
“Fury over bid to make sex under 16 legal,” Shocking Pink 1, p.17, 1981.
“Letters page,” Shocking Pink 2, p.3, 1981.
Editors’ letter, Shocking Pink 3, p.3, 1982.
“Letters page,” Spare Rib 128, p.23, March 1983.
“Report from Libertarian Education Conference,” Shocking Pink 4, p.38, 1988.
“Young lesbian women,” Shocking Pink, issue number unknown, p.18, 1988.

Secondary Sources

Cazz Blaise. “A shocking shade of pink,” in The F Word, 13 August 2011.
Anna Gough-Yates,. “‘A shock to the system’: feminist interventions in youth subculture – the adventures of Shocking Pink,” in Contemporary British History 26/3, 2012.

About the Author

Dr Laura Tisdall is a Leverhulme Early Career/NUAcT Fellow in History at Newcastle University. Her monograph A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester University Press, 2020) argues that there was a significant shift in concepts of both childhood and adolescence in Britain after the Second World War.  She works on childhood, youth and adulthood in twentieth-century Britain, and she is especially interested in medical and psychological ideas about chronological age and the history of schooling and education.

Cite this article as: Laura Tisdall, “Spare Rib, Shocking Pink and the Politics of Age in 1980s Feminism,” in Changing Childhoods, 19 January 2021, https://changingchildhoods.com/politics-of-age-in-1980s-feminism