Girls’ Own Story: The Search for a Sexual Identity in Times of Family Change

Abstract

The last twenty to thirty years have seen complicated shifts in many family and household structures. Such shifts are likely to have affected social behavioural norms, concepts of marriage and sexual standards, but we have little information about how they have impinged on the development of young people. My current empirical research focuses on the academic, social, and sexual identities of adolescent girls in sixth forms, and the contribution made to these constructions by relationships within the family. The Economic and Social Research Council’s 16–19 initiative (Banks et al., 1992) has suggested that, in Britain, sixth-formers constitute an elite, regardless of their class background, and that they tend to share similar values. The authors suggest that, whatever their class background, the most highly educated in both sexes were found to be most likely to endorse both egalitarianism and sexual liberalism, concluding that for many sixth formers sexism was viewed as a working-class phenomenon;

At some parties, they just treated the girls as ‘objects’, like a can of lager! I don’t go to those sort of parties — well there is a bit of that, but in the sixth form we tend to talk to girls more. (Banks et al., 1992, p. 102)