Chapter 8 ‘The Pill for an unmarried girl is hardly going to improve her character’: The impact of changing sexual behaviours on the construction of adulthood in Scotland, c.1968–80¹

The development of family planning services in Scotland

The twentieth century witnessed a transformation in family planning and its place within British society. Perhaps the most significant development was the invention and introduction of the oral contraceptive pill. Developed by Drs Gregory Pincus and John Rock, the combined oral pill represented the first biomedical method of preventing conception.¹⁰ The drug surpassed all previous methods of contraception in quality and usability: it was novel, discrete, stylish, non-intrusive and reportedly had a ‘virtually 100 per cent’ effectiveness rate in preventing conception.¹¹ By 1964, around 480,000 married women across Britain were being regularly prescribed one of the fifteen brands of oral contraceptives available, each offering their own tailored balance of progestogen and oestrogen in order to prevent pregnancy.¹²

As emphasised by Elizabeth Siegel-Watkins, the pill represents a magic bullet of birth control, with the 1960s bearing witness to a ‘contraceptive revolution’ in which reproduction was medicalised and controlled by triumphs in science.¹³ However, the invention of oral contraceptives was precipitated by a broader shift in attitudes towards sex and family planning which gained momentum in the late nineteenth century and accelerated following World War I.¹⁴ In the decades prior to the oral contraceptive pill, family planning had gradually become normalised as a feature and emblem of healthy, middle-class married life. This was due, in part, to the efforts of birth control campaigners – including Marie Stopes, Stella Browne and Joan Malleson – and the uncomfortable alliances between eugenicists and first-wave feminism.¹⁵ The provision of family planning services further limited any public concern about new contraceptive technologies. Until the late 1960s, the NHS played no organised role in family planning. The majority of family planning clinics were operated by charities such as the Family Planning Association (FPA), who at their height were the second largest healthcare provider and the largest private healthcare organisation in Britain, providing 90 per cent of family planning services in Scotland in 1969.¹⁶ Lastly, in the early 1960s, the pill was only available for married women for medical reasons, such as to prevent a medically dangerous pregnancy.¹⁷ As a result, the technological revolution of the oral contraceptive did little to disrupt the established cultural status quo in Scotland.

However, following the introduction of the oral contraceptive pill, legislative changes occurred throughout the 1960s that gradually eroded barriers to contraceptive access, described by Audrey Leathard – a former chairperson of the FPA – as a ‘rationalisation of family planning provision – a slow movement from confusion to order’.¹⁸ The NHS Family Planning Act of 1967 removed the barrier of marital status on contraceptives and allowed doctors to include societal factors for prescribing the pill in England and Wales. It also compelled local health authorities to pay and provide for family planning. Shortly thereafter, the Health and Public Services Act of 1968 provided the same family planning provisions for Scotland, which had delayed implementation until 1972. In 1974, the NHS Reorganisation Act formally enshrined family planning under the umbrella of the NHS – removing the private prescription fee and transferring all FPA clinics to the health service. The state was formally responsible for providing family planning services. Family planning, even for the unmarried, became state sanctioned. Unlike most forms of healthcare in Britain, family planning remained a dually provided service: women could access prescription birth control services either via their general practitioner (GP) or through NHS-funded family planning clinics.

Yet, while the initial introduction of oral contraception garnered little public outrage, the shift from third-sector provision to state-funded provision – and, more significantly, the increased availability of contraceptives for the unmarried for social purposes – created a moral panic across mainland Britain. Tensions were heightened in Scotland: a nation described in 1969 by Mass Observation, a prominent British social research organisation, as at the ‘other end of the moral scale’ in comparison with ‘London – the centre of permissive society’.¹⁹ As Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis note, ‘within the British context, the Scottish public was the least supportive of free birth control and a more proactive role by the state in the provision of family planning’.²⁰

In part, this was the result of the increasing conflation made between contraceptive use and increased sexual activity by the unmarried. Moreover, the unmarried were increasingly represented as juvenile in debates around their contraceptive use. This served a political purpose: as perpetually adolescent, the unmarried were viewed as incapable of making their own decisions and asserting their own sexual and reproductive autonomy. As Marcus Collins colourfully argues, the pill came to be viewed as a means for unmarried men and women ‘to engage in guilt-free, conception-free, no-strings-attached sex’.²¹ By removing the fear of an unwanted pregnancy, the assumption was that unmarried people would engage in greater promiscuous activity, sanctioned by the state. In a letter written in 1970 to the secretary of state for Scotland, William Ross, one Miss. E. Lewis – not her real name – from Glasgow commented:

I deplore deeply that fornication is encouraged among the unmarried by the giving of contraceptives and by the most evil of all the murder of the unborn … Scotland retains enough of its Christian principles to prevent it from sinking to the depths of permissiveness and evil.²²

Her correspondence highlights that the removal of marital status as a barrier to contraception was seen to promote premarital sex. As further demonstrated, reactions were often intersected with concerns over religious values, with clergy members of both Protestant and Catholic Churches arguing that giving the pill to the unmarried was a ‘threat to the Christian way’ and was sending Scotland into ‘a post-Christian age in an increasingly Pagan society’.²³ However, even outside of secular spaces, there were anxieties about the ‘destructive’ effect of contraception on the unmarried, with newspaper articles arguing that ‘sex on the rates’ – a euphemism for contraceptives on the NHS – was ‘a licence for widespread immorality’.²⁴ These accounts demonstrate that it was the provision of contraceptives for the unmarried which caused the backlash to oral contraception, and its conflation with promiscuity led to panic around the age and conditions at which sex was, or should be, permissible.

Who were ‘the unmarried’ in 1970s Scotland?

Although the term could refer to anyone of any age, the majority of opposition to birth control for the unmarried was both implicitly and explicitly focused on young people throughout the 1970s. This was not exclusive to Scotland: as Caroline Rusterholz has shown, journalists ‘used “unmarried” and “young people” interchangeably’ in discussions of unmarried promiscuity in England.²⁵ Yet, this phraseology obscured the small but significant distinctions between a broad and varied category of people who concurrently garnered increased legal attention in Scotland following the late 1960s. Specifically, increasing attention was being paid to the age at which young people were given the legal status of ‘adult’ during this time.

In 1969, the ‘age of majority’ – the threshold at which a person is granted legal status as an adult – was reduced in Britain from twenty-one to eighteen.²⁶ Yet, the age of consent and the age at which a young person could marry remained at sixteen, and in 1972 the school leaving age was raised to this age as well. Thus, young people were in secondary education for longer, but attained legal adulthood status much earlier at the turn of the 1970s. Between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, they could get a job, get married, have sex and have children, yet would still not be regarded as ‘adult’ in the eyes of the law. Moreover, Scots law further distinguished young people into two categories of legal capacity – minors and pupils. This was a distinctive legal system from England and Wales. While ‘pupils’ – ‘boys under the age of 14 and girls under the age of 12’ – were deemed to have ‘no legal capacity whatsoever’, minors – ‘boys and girls between those ages and 18’ – had ‘limited’ capacity and could act on their own behalf in certain situations without the consent of a parent or guardian. This included medical consent. Moreover, unlike in England and Wales, a sixteen-year-old did not need the permission of their parents to marry in Scotland. Ultimately, this created an ambiguous and malleable legal climate for defining an ‘adult’, as demonstrated in a Memorandum by the Scottish Law Commission in 1985:

The law ignores the fact that many young people become economically active before they reach the age of 18, either simply by having pocket money to spend, or by taking a full-time job and becoming financially independent of their parents, or by getting married and leaving home.²⁷

In the above conclusion, the Scottish Law Commission epitomised the difficulty of defining an adult in the late 1960s, owing to societal expectations which did not always align with the legal framework. Their conclusion reflects Jordan Stanger-Ross, Christina Collins and Mark J. Stern’s assessment that:

Beginning in the mid-1970s, young people … were the first twentieth-century generation to make decisions about marriage and establishing procreative households in positions of relative autonomy … reinvent[ing] their transitions to adulthood … [and reflecting] how the world around them had changed.²⁸

The increased access to both higher education and oral contraception purportedly led to delays in obtaining a career, getting married and starting a family by having children without a delay to sexual activity.

However, this assessment has been critiqued by Jeffrey Weeks, who asserts that ‘Changes were apparently taking place largely within traditional frameworks of marriage … rather than breaking them.’²⁹ Weeks suggests that while premarital sex was demographically on the rise, it was reconfigured within a conservative, heteronormative moral framework. Indeed, despite the fact that the age of first marriage in Scotland increased dramatically in the second half of the twentieth century, there was a distinctive dip in the aftermath of the so-called ‘sexual revolution’. Between 1951 and 1960, the mean age at first marriage for men decreased from 26.4 to 24.3 by 1970. Respectively, the mean age at first marriage for women declined from 24.0 between 1951 and 1960 to 22.8 by 1970. Between 1971 and 1980, there was only marginal change in the average age for both men and women.³⁰ This suggests that young adults were getting married earlier than in previous decades. However, the heightened affluence and social mobility of this generation did provide them with an opportunity to move out of their parental home and live independently from their parents. As Lindsay Paterson has shown, ‘the proportion [of young adults] living in their parental home decreased from 57 per cent in 1950 to 41 per cent in the 1970s’.³¹ Consequently, the mid-1970s represented a time of legal and social tensions surrounding what constituted an adult in Scotland. Yet, as this section will show, concern over the changing attitudes of young people did not always align with demographic reality.

Within the broader context of changing legal and social understandings of what constituted an ‘adult’, marriage remained a keystone event which solidified and concluded transitions to adulthood in Scotland. Consequently, the ‘unmarried’ remained a person who had not obtained adult status. This had a significant impact on debates and attitudes towards increasing contraceptive access for the unmarried. Indeed, the issue with conflating ‘unmarried’ with ‘young person’ was epitomised by a letter to the editor written by Valerie Riches to The Times in 1974. Riches was a prominent anti-abortion campaigner and then-secretary of the Responsible Society, a social hygienist pressure group formed in 1971. In the letter, Riches used a case study from Aberdeen to argue that ‘the wider availability of contraceptives has not been proved beyond a doubt to have reduced the number of unwanted pregnancies and may have had the reverse effect’, echoing broader sentiments circulating during this time. Yet, more significantly, Riches further argued that:

Perhaps the most important factor in the controversy is the implied approval, almost amounting to encouragement by the Government of sexual relations outside of marriage and below the age of consent.³²

Her statement egregiously depicted the unmarried not only as young people but as teenagers under the age of sixteen. This transformed the issue from unmarried sexual behaviours to the sexual activity of minors still under the legal protection of their guardians. The conceptualisation of unmarried people as juvenile was also shown in debates in Edinburgh in 1971, when it was reported that ‘several thousand anxious parents’ had signed a petition to oppose plans by Edinburgh Town Council to prescribe the oral contraceptive to ‘unmarried girls over 16’. Despite the fact that the age of consent for both sex and marriage at the time was also sixteen, the petition’s organisers argued that ‘parents who feel responsible for the moral and physical welfare of their family consider it very irresponsible for the council to pass legislation which obviously undermines their authority’.³³ The quote explicitly places parents of young adults in a power role, with ultimate control over their children. These examples show that the unmarried were disproportionately represented as non-adults, heightening the anxieties surrounding the availability of birth control for this demographic. Within these debates, marital status remained the linchpin of adulthood.

The emphasis on adolescence within growing opposition towards the availability of birth control in the late 1960s is of further significance because teenagers represented only a small portion of total family planning service users. Scotland had a unique system of family planning service distribution, within which unmarried young people faced particular issues of access that were distinct to the rest of Britain. This can be shown by the lack of specific family planning services for teenagers in Scotland, which in England and Wales were delivered largely by the third sector. In 1966, the Brook Advisory Service was set up specifically to provide young people with sexual health advice and support and was particularly attractive to those under sixteen. However, Scotland only had one Brook Advisory Service clinic, located in Edinburgh. The only other Scottish clinic operated by Brook, located in Glasgow, was absorbed by the FPA in 1970.

Because of their lack of locations in Scotland, the FPA clinics were the only option for most unmarried persons until the mid-1970s. After this point, clinics remained the most popular family planning provider, as many unmarried people were reluctant to visit their GP. In the FPA’s 1968 Annual Report, the Scottish branch showed that just 10 per cent of all attendees were under twenty, with 40 per cent aged between twenty and twenty-four, and 25 per cent twenty-five to twenty-nine.³⁴ It was not until 1970 that the FPA formally provided family planning support to unmarried men and women; however, it is clear that many individual clinics offered advice and products clandestinely. By 1974, the percentage of those attending FPA within the twenty to twenty-four age range had increased to 75 per cent.³⁵ Thus, the vast majority of pill takers obtaining the pill from the FPA in Scotland, married and unmarried, were over the age of twenty. This demonstrates that teenagers, particularly those of school age, represented only a small minority of those accessing hormonal contraceptives, in part due to the inherent issues of accessibility.

A further factor which emphasises the persistent centrality of marital status in transitions to adulthood during this time was that teenagers were not the only category to be disproportionately focused on in debates around contraception for the unmarried. Just as teenagers caused alarm during increasing contraceptive availability, students were also the focus of both anxiety and vitriol. Between 1960 and 1970 in Scotland, the number of students at university doubled as a result of the introduction of state grants and the expansion of universities.³⁶ While the pill was seen to corrupt and harm minors, students who were using contraceptives were conversely seen as sexually indulgent and reckless, further contributing to increased promiscuity. This rendered ‘the unmarried’ as either incapable of consenting or incapable of making responsible choices surrounding sex and reproduction. Concerns over their sexuality grew throughout this period as many began to question the moral welfare of university campuses.

Yet, equally, students were presented in the Scottish press as selfish and hedonistic, as one anonymous columnist named ‘Alma Mater’ in 1968 stereotyped:

The student population appears to be a collection of social misfits, hippies, ill-dressed, ill-mannered louts, living off the charity provided by the working population, and intent only on spending a few promiscuous years at university, living on drink and The Pill.³⁷

This statement reflects the intergenerational tensions and opposition to oral contraceptives during this time. Class also featured heavily in this attitude, as broader resentments surrounding the growing affluence and social mobility of young people in this period clearly influenced the bitterness surrounding their access to contraceptives. Scottish education was defined by its ‘democratising’ nature, with Lindsay Paterson highlighting that over a quarter of all university students were from working-class families by the mid-1970s.³⁸ Although not insignificant, it nevertheless highlights that the majority of students were middle class. Perhaps because of this higher affluence and assumed homogeneity, Jane O’Neill argues that in Scotland ‘students of the period were often assumed to be at the forefront of liberalisation in sexual behaviour’.³⁹ This compounded the disdain towards students.

Commentators saw contraception as a means of escaping the ‘punishment’ of premarital sex – namely, an unexpected pregnancy – and its socio-economic consequences. This was further shown in another response to a petition against opening a family planning clinic on an Edinburgh University campus in 1967:

This time they [students] have gone too far. Not the married ones … the ‘Pill’ is for the unmarried couples on the campus who feel that it is needed because there have been so many illegitimate births among university students … May I suggest another way of curing the increase in illegitimacy? A good hard kick on the posterior for you and all your kind!

I am not going to pay good money so that you can spend four years of your life having sex with a few of your fellow students, with the blessing of the country and a free supply of contraceptives.⁴⁰

The author explicitly focused on unmarried students in their discussion. It is clear that the state provision of family planning, coupled with a general resentment of the student population, fuelled the anger permeating through the article. In contrast, married students were excluded from the author’s haranguing. Consequently, unmarried university students – the vast majority of whom were over the age of eighteen – were denied the status of adulthood.

Ultimately, unmarried men and women were presented either as innocent children in need of protecting or reckless, affluent adolescents who had little regard for the community social mores. Teenagers, despite being a broad category, were almost always considered minors, thus deemed impressionable and asexual, thus in need of protection. University students, in contrast, were typically of the ‘age of majority’, and yet were still considered inherently juvenile. Scottish university students were frequently presented as indulgent and reckless in the press, thus limiting their adulthood status. As argued by J.J. Arnett in the context of American youth culture during the 1990s, ‘making the transition to adulthood [meant] avoiding behaviour that might be harmful to others … [including] reckless behaviour concerning crime and sexual behaviour’. Within this definition, unmarried university students were dispossessed of adulthood status by ‘character qualities [viewed] as part of adolescence’ such as ‘egocentrism and selfishness’.⁴¹ These two categories demonstrate that marital status above all else acted as the delineation between adult and non-adult, in spite of the demographic changes occurring throughout Britain during this time.

Gender and the unmarried

While the unmarried were universally considered to be non-adult, unmarried women were disproportionately represented within debates around the consequences of permissive society. On one hand, the fact that the pill was the first effective contraceptive for women played a significant role in the heightened emphasis on female sexuality, as the responsibility for family planning reversed from male-controlled birth control to female-controlled.⁴² However, it is evident that unmarried women’s sexual activity remained highly stigmatised socially, with Carol Dyhouse commenting that ‘young women [were] represented as the victims of all manner of social trends’ including ‘sexualisation’ during this time.⁴³ Their presumed victimisation presented unmarried women as perpetually adolescent and in need of protection, thus further denying their passage into adulthood.

In debates around unmarried women’s contraceptive and sexual practices, an over-emphasis on their ‘girlhood’ emerged. This infantilisation of unmarried women within the Scottish context was demonstrated in 1972 through comments made by the Conservative MP for East Aberdeenshire, Patrick Wolridge-Gordon. In a newspaper interview, he argued that ‘the Pill … for an unmarried girl is hardly going to improve her character’.⁴⁴ Wolridge-Gordon’s comment conflated the pill with sex and promiscuity and demonstrated the concerns over the degeneration of Scottish youth during this time. In fact, rarely were young women over the age of sixteen represented as adults in the Scottish press. As shown previously, in 1971 parents protested against Edinburgh Town Council for making ‘family planning services available to unmarried girls over 16’. Later on in the article, it was stated that ‘to provide these facilities is to encourage girls to engage in physical relationships which they would otherwise avoid’.⁴⁵ Similarly, in Banffshire, in the north-east of Scotland, a local councillor unsuccessfully opposed the opening of a family planning clinic because they felt that ‘the fact that a school girl could go to the clinic and get the pill, without this being disclosed to her parents, was “horrible”’ and that the clinic would be ‘a place to license immorality’ for ‘problem girls’.⁴⁶ There is a slight shift in emphasis between these two case studies, with one presenting unmarried women as ignorant and in need of protection and another presenting them as a social issue.

This dichotomy was further represented throughout the Scottish press. Girls who engaged in premarital sex were either presented as ‘bad girls’ and ‘problem girls’ – who were being given ‘a place to licence immorality’ through family planning clinics – or ‘bewildered girls’ and ‘lonely … young unmarried girl[s]’.⁴⁷ Often, this emerged in tandem with discussions surrounding illegitimacy: while ‘bad girls’ were ‘too selfish to take risks and know too much about birth control’ to have an unexpected pregnancy outside of marriage, other girls were ‘girls … with a real sense of shame’ or ‘real, ordinary girls … faced with a tragic personal problem’.⁴⁸ This again denoted the class differences between middle- and working-class women: presumptuously organised as those with purported knowledge of, and access to, contraception and those without, respectively. This reflects Dyhouse’s assessment that ‘in the minds of the moral right, girls tended to appear as either victims or sluts … they were chaste or they were promiscuous’.⁴⁹ Yet, in all cases, unmarried women were defined as ‘girls’ regardless of age. Even in cases where age could be determined – such as one instance concerning university students – ‘girl’ was still used throughout.⁵⁰ In contrast, unmarried boys were rarely mentioned. In 1962, the general secretary for the National Council of the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (latterly Gingerbread and the National Council for One Parent Families) wrote that:

We might well consider how best to help the teenage schoolboy father whose complicated reactions to the predicament in which he has placed his girl may jeopardise his whole future.⁵¹

Here, the emphasis of the emotional conflict experienced by the unmarried boy lay not in premarital sex, but in managing the presumedly volatile reaction of his partner. The agency in the above quote remained with the ‘schoolboy’ who had led his partner into a stigmatised ‘social problem’.⁵² Thus, differences existed in accepted sexual behaviours between unmarried men and unmarried women.

The use of the term ‘girl’ to describe unmarried women during this period denoted the lack of maturity and agency placed upon single, sexually active women, suggesting that they had not yet reached adulthood in the eyes of Scottish society. As Michael Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan and Kerry Jensen note, the use of ‘girls’ linguistically ‘reflects the lower status of women’. It is used to ‘sexualise … trivialise [and] … infantilise women’, as well as ‘to (often subtly) re-construct gender and racial hierarchies’.⁵³ By putting unmarried women in the position of a minor, women remained sexually subordinate – or even asexual – and so remained vulnerable, requiring the guardianship of their parents until marriage. Consequently, the status quo of the immediate postwar period was maintained through denying women the right to assert their contraceptive choices.

The gendered differences between attitudes to unmarried women’s sexual activity in contrast to unmarried men further suggested that sexual activity before marriage was seen as potentially more ‘dangerous’ for single women. Women were seen to face not only greater consequences by becoming pregnant but also greater emotional consequences for engaging in sex outside of a stable relationship. Indeed, medical doctors often pathologised what was perceived to be a growing prevalence of female promiscuity at this time, including one Dr Murdoch from Glasgow, who wrote a letter in 1972 to the British Medical Journal titled ‘Sex and the Single Girl’. In this letter, he argued that:

They say that the patient must get what she came for … There are so many doctors who believe that obedience to the moral law of God is as important as obedience to His physical law … they act, therefore, in their patient’s best interests when they advise her to contain her sexual experience.⁵⁴

As shown by his letter, Murdoch opposed ‘single girls’ having the legal ability to access contraceptives because of the moral consequences of women having the ability to engage in sex freely outside of marriage. He explicitly viewed the role of the doctor as providing moral ‘treatment’ to their patients as well as physical care, and so saw the prescription of contraceptives to the unmarried as antithetical to his profession and against the value of ‘do no harm’. His letter demonstrates the consequences of perceiving unmarried women as inherently juvenile: they were unable to consent to medical intervention and required moral, emotional treatment.

Even in spaces where contraceptives for the unmarried were advocated for, unmarried women’s sexuality was disproportionately problematised. During a conference on family planning in Scotland in 1968, Professor Ian MacGillivray, an obstetrician-gynaecologist and vocal advocate of contraception for the unmarried in Aberdeen, stated:

We cannot ignore the rising incidence of extramarital and premarital sexual intercourse. It seems fairly certain that more schoolgirls have coitus today than did a similar group in the early years of this century.

His opening statement pervasively demonstrated the correlation between age, gender and marital status during this time. The interchangeable use of ‘premarital’ and ‘schoolgirl’ conjures the image of a minor within his discussion. Although ultimately in favour of increasing access to family planning – combined with a sex education programme focused on abstinence – MacGillivray’s final comment was:

I have deliberately concentrated on the unmarried girl in my talk … this is now a very permissive society and there is a great deal of sexual provocation in dress, and we can think in particular, of course, of the mini skirt … It should be emphasised to them that it is dangerous to experiment, not just because of the risk of pregnancy and venereal disease but because of the psychological hurt which they might suffer.⁵⁵

The paternalism which has been proven to be typical in debates surrounding female sexuality at this time is notable in MacGillivray’s speech, emphasising that premarital sex was seen as problematic for them. Dyhouse notes that ‘the style revolution … had obvious links to the widening gap between generations’.⁵⁶ Thus, MacGillivray’s analogising of the ‘mini skirt’ further genders his discussion, making a connection between women’s fashion, sexuality and the differences between his generation and the generation being discussed. The reference to the psychological harm – which he considers equal to the dangers of sexually transmitted disease – also suggests a pathologising of female sexual desire in the late 1960s. As he continues:

It should be pointed out to the girl that a feeling of guilt sometimes follows premarital intercourse and sexual unhappiness in marriage sometimes occurs because of this guilt associated with premarital experience.⁵⁷

His comments reflect the shame that women were expected to feel by engaging in sex outside of marriage. In contrast, there is no mention of the emotional or psychological harm of young boys engaging in sexual activity. The role of men is only discussed in relation to their sexual experience and knowledge in comparison to women’s sexual ignorance, as he states, ‘in a teenage affair the boy who asks the girl to have intercourse is willing to subject her to pain and grief from which he cannot rescue her’.⁵⁸ Within these discussions, unmarried women were continuously represented as lacking autonomy and sexual expression in comparison with their male contemporaries. Their naivety and vulnerability made them particularly significant in discussions around the dangers of increasing premarital sex. Yet, this construction and subsequent paternalism also denied them the independence characteristically necessary to develop into an adult during this time.

As Furstenberg notes, women played a significant role in shifting transitions to adulthood throughout the 1970s, due to a great extent to the availability of reliable birth control. The pill allowed women not only to enjoy sex without the fear of pregnancy but also to delay marriage and child-bearing in pursuit of education and a career. This ‘complicated the passage to adulthood’ but also led to a disproportionate reaction from Scottish society in which unmarried women were constructed as even less adult than unmarried men.⁵⁹ This demonstrates that gender further influenced and complicated the construction of adulthood in 1970s Scotland.

Conclusion

As this edited collection as a whole has argued, the contemporary transition to adulthood is an intently subjective and emotional experience. The status of ‘adult’ is not met according to the arbitrary age limits defined by law, nor is it a goal which can be achieved in a singular moment. Rather, it is a gradual progression of life events which intersect legal capacity with emotional maturity and culminates in the creation of a contributory, socially responsible citizen. Yet, an adult is not simply the act of ‘being’; it is a performance. Adulthood can be observed, assessed, ascribed and denied by others within the community, and so plays a crucial role in the formation and functioning of society. While simultaneously being an inherently personal, private process, in the modern period key social indicators continue to designate a person the status of adult: having a career, getting married, owning a house, having children. More abstractly, characteristics such as responsibility, conscientiousness and altruism further differentiated the adult from the adolescent in the twentieth century, which in turn aligned with the accepted moral framework of a given nation.

In the context of changing social, economic and familial structures during the 1960s, the popular indicators of adulthood remained static, particularly the perception that marriage represented the apex of adulthood. Yet, the perception that young people were not mapping themselves neatly onto this enduring paradigm led to a conservative backlash against a seemingly ‘novel’ generation. This was heightened in Scotland, which had a distinctive legal and cultural framework to the rest of mainland Britain. The pill for the unmarried – provided by the British state – facilitated premarital sex and in so doing raised questions about the purpose of marriage as an institution. By removing marriage as a ‘culminating event’ which previously ‘provided an easy (though not always a successful) route out’ of adolescence, questions about the ability of ‘the unmarried’ to assert their sexual and reproductive (thereby medical) autonomy emerged.⁶⁰

Young people were disproportionately emphasised within debates about ‘the unmarried’, as they represented a tiny portion of total family planning users. Further and higher education students, most of whom were over eighteen – the new age of majority – were also infantilised and viewed as in need of paternalism, further demonstrating that age played a limited role in the construction of an adult. Rather, marriage socially remained a keystone event which delineated an independent adult from a dependent adolescent. The backlash to the pill for the unmarried thus acted as an extension of resisting the increasing autonomy and individualism within Scottish society and a rejection of changing familial structures and patterns.

Yet, even within the cohort of the unmarried, gender dynamics further resulted in a spotlight being placed on unmarried women to a greater extent than unmarried men. This demonstrates a consistency from earlier time periods: as Deborah Youngs noted earlier in this collection, gender has played a significant role in the construction of adulthood since at least the medieval period. The unmarried were almost universally represented as either a gender-neutral monolith or as the ‘single, unmarried girl’. Rarely were ‘unmarried boys’ named in the press or debated in medical journals. This influenced the construction of sex as a particularly hazardous activity for women, who were represented as lacking total knowledge of the physical, emotional and moral dangers of premarital sex. Women’s perceived ‘vulnerability’ and inability to assert their own sexual and reproductive autonomy reflected the characteristics of a non-adult who was incapable of making responsible choices, thus denying them adult status.

Notes

1. 1. This research was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

2. 2. Interview with Deborah conducted by author (23 November 2020), 9.

3. 3. Tom Devine, ‘The Sixties in Scotland: A Historical Context’ in Elizabeth Bell and Linda Gunn (eds.), The Scottish Sixties: Reading, Rebellion, Revolution? (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), 21.

4. 4. ‘The New Sexual Freedom’, Aberdeen Evening Express (13 December 1967).

5. 5. See Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

6. 6. John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg and Theodore Hershberg, ‘Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective’, Journal of Family History 1, no. 1 (1976), 7–19.

7. 7. Frank F. Furstenberg, ‘On a New Schedule: Transitions to Adulthood and Family Change’, The Future of Children 20, no. 1 (2010), 69.

8. 8. Claire Langhamer, ‘Love and Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England’, The Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007), 196.

9. 9. Carol Dyhouse, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (London: Zed, 2013).

10. 10. For a comprehensive history of the development of the oral contraceptive pill, see Laura Marks, Sexual Chemistry: A History of the Contraceptive Pill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001).

11. 11. GWL FP-11-6, FPA pamphlet, ‘The Pill’ (1973).

12. 12. Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex and Contraception, 1800–1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

13. 13. Elizabeth Siegel-Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives 1950–1970 (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 2.

14. 14. For more on the late nineteenth century, see Tanya Cheadle, Sexual Progressives: Reimagining Intimacy in Scotland, 1880–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

15. 15. Lesley Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) provides a thorough account of Stopes’s work. See also Angus McLaren, A History of Contraception: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) and Lesley Hoggart, Feminist Campaigns for Birth Control and Abortion Rights in Britain (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003).

16. 16. ML, HB77/3/12, ‘Annual General Meeting, North of Scotland Branch: Chairman’s Address’ (1969); Jane Silvermann and Elise Jones, ‘The Delivery of Family Planning and Health Services in Great Britain’, Family Planning Perspectives 20, no. 2 (1988), 69.

17. 17. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, 297.

18. 18. Audrey Leathard, The Fight for Family Planning: The Development of Family Planning Services in Britain, 1921–1974 (London: Macmillan, 1980), 157.

19. 19. Wellcome Library SA/FPA/C/E/16/2/3MO Press Release, ‘Morals Aren’t What They Used to Be’ (1969).

20. 20. Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–1980 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 144.

21. 21. Marcus Collins, Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic, 2003), 177.

22. 22. NRS, HH61/1208 ‘Letter to Scottish Home and Health Department from [Miss. E. Lewis] Glasgow’ (21 December 1970).

23. 23. ‘Christ Gave No Licence to Sin’, Aberdeen Evening Express (19 December 1967).

24. 24. ‘Sex on the Rates: “A Licence for Widespread Immorality” Say Some’, Aberdeen Evening Express (9 August 1968).

25. 25. Caroline Rusterholz, ‘Youth Sexuality, Responsibility, and the Opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London and Birmingham in the 1960s’, Journal of British Studies 61, no. 2 (2022), 20.

26. 26. Age of Majority (Scotland) Act (1969), www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1969/39/body.

27. 27. Scottish Law Commission, ‘Consultative Memorandum No. 65 Legal Capacity and Responsibility of Minors and Pupils’ (June 1985).

28. 28. Jordan Stanger-Ross, Christina Collins and Mark J. Stern, ‘Falling Far from the Tree: Transitions to Adulthood and the Social History of Twentieth-Century America’, Social Science History 29, no. 4 (2005), 627.

29. 29. Jeffrey Weeks, The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life (London: Routledge, 2007), 67–71.

30. 30. ‘Annual Report of the Registrar General of Birth, Deaths and Marriages for Scotland’ (General Registrar Office for Scotland, 1996), 124.

31. 31. Lindsay Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 159.

32. 32. Valerie Riches, ‘Letter to the Editor’, The Times (1974). Emphasis included by author.

33. 33. ‘Parents Protest Family Planning Bid’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (14 March 1971).

34. 34. ML, HB773/12, FPA, ‘Second Annual Report, 1968’ (1968).

35. 35. ML, HB773/12, FPA, ‘Annual Report, 1974’.

36. 36. Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century, 156.

37. 37. ‘Readers’ Letters: Hypocrisy, I Detest!’, Aberdeen Evening Express (21 February 1968).

38. 38. Paterson, Scottish Education in the Twentieth Century, 158.

39. 39. Jane O’Neill, ‘ “Education Not Fornication”? Sexual Morality among Students in Scotland, c. 1955–75’, in Jodi Burkett (ed.), Students in Twentieth Century Britain and Ireland (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 77.

40. 40. ‘So You Want the Pill?’, West Lothian Courier (1 December 1967).

41. 41. J.J. Arnett, ‘Learning to Stand Alone: The Contemporary American Transition to Adulthood in Cultural and Historical Context’, Human Development 41, nos. 5–6 (1998), 309.

42. 42. See Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution.

43. 43. Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 2.

44. 44. ‘Why Patrick Is Afraid of the Pill’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (26 June 1972).

45. 45. ‘Parents Protest Family Planning Bid’.

46. 46. ‘Pill Clinic Is Defeated’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (16 February 1971).

47. 47. ‘We Are All to Blame: Our Modern Sickness Apathy’, Aberdeen Evening Express (24 October 1966); ‘Pill clinic is defeated’.

48. 48. ‘We Are All to Blame’; ‘Unwed Mums and Elderly Face Homes Crisis’, Evening Express (23 August 1973); ‘The Loneliness of the Unmarried Mother’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (1 December 1965).

49. 49. Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 182.

50. 50. ‘Edinburgh Pill Issue: Students Back Rector’, Aberdeen Evening Express (13 December 1971).

51. 51. ‘Social Problem No. 2: The Unmarried Mother’, Aberdeen Press and Journal (26 July 1962).

52. 52. ‘Social Problem No. 2’.

53. 53. Michael A. Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan and Kerry Jensen, ‘Separating the Men from the Girls: The Gendered Language of Televised Sports’, Gender and Society 7, no. 1 (1993), 128–33.

54. 54. J. Campbell Murdoch, ‘Sex and the Single Girl’, British Medical Journal 22, no. 3 (1972), 235–6.

55. 55. WL, SA/FPA/A16/24/62A; Ian McGillivray, ‘Opening Address’, in Family Planning for Scotland: Proceedings of the Conference, Glasgow, 1968 (Bristol: John Wright and Sons, 1969), 14–15.

56. 56. Dyhouse, Girl Trouble, 154.

57. 57. MacGillivray, ‘Opening Address’, 15.

58. 58. MacGillivray, ‘Opening Address’, 15.

59. 59. Furstenberg, ‘On a New Schedule’, 69.

60. 60. Furstenberg, ‘On a New Schedule’, 81.

References