The British Library’s Newspaper Archive has added Jackie Magazine to their vast database of digitised newspapers. This means that, for a subscription, you can now log on and read through every edition of Jackie Magazine ever published.
For a social historian like me, this is an absolute goldmine of data, and I have spent the last seven days reminiscing about the early 1990s, and learning what it must have been like to be a teenage girl in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Here is what I have learned: it was absolutely horrific. I have no idea how anybody survived it. Don’t let anyone fool you with fuzzy nostalgia. It is so much better to be a teenager today. Spending time in the Jackie archives made me want to contact every woman I know over the age of 50 and ask them if they are ok.
For the youngsters in the room, Jackie Magazine was the first weekly magazine in the UK to cater exclusively to young, teenage girls. It was launched in 1964 and ran until 1993 when it found it just couldn’t compete with the likes of Sugar and Minx Magazine.
Jackie magazine 4 July 1987My dad brought me copies to read when it was in final decline in the 1990s and I didn’t like it at all. Even then, it seemed very old fashioned, twee even. At 13, I was far more interested in listening to grunge music and having things pierced, but at its height Jackie was an absolute phenomenon, selling well over a million copies a week. It became a bible for teenage girls up and down the country.
There were comic strips, hair and make-up advice, readers’ letters, pull-out posters of pop stars, and quizzes, but it was most famous for the problem pages where young girls wrote in to agony aunts Cathy and Claire (later it became “Dear Ellie” and then “Talk it Over”). In the 1970s, Cathy and Claire were receiving about 400 letters a week.
I can vaguely recall the problem pages as a young teen and wondering why anyone would trouble a magazine with problems such as “you may find my problem funny. But to me it’s no laughing matter. I have bandy legs”. (That one was from a February issue, 1985.) But looking back through it as an adult, it’s not the letters that I find disturbing so much as the answers!
I know Jackie was ‘of its time’ but I was frequently struck by the callousness being meted out to teenage girls under the guise of helpful advice. In one letter from 16 February 1985, a 17-year-old girl writes in because she’s lost her confidence after her mother put her on a diet. The solution? “You stand to lose a lot more if you don’t buck up.”
Jackie Magazine 11 January 1964In another letter from the 11 March 1978 edition, a 13-year-old girl writes in to say she has been lying to her parents about her 21-year-old boyfriend. The advice? “Explain to your parents, ask them to meet your boy and perhaps they’ll like him as much as you do. Also, if (and we do mean if, knowing how easy it would be to lie about your age) he knows your real age, he won’t take you to places that are too sophisticated for you, he won’t make you feel insecure and young and silly. If he cares for you enough, really deeply, that is.” My jaw was on the floor.
Or how about this one from the 6 June 1964 edition? “We six girls work together in an office. One of the men in charge, although married, pays a great deal of attention to each of us. Five of us take it with a pinch of salt, but the sixth, who is twenty, takes it very seriously… how can we make her see the light before she is heart-broken?”
This is a married manager sexually harassing teenage girls in the office! So, what was the response? “Tell each other what this man has said to you, making sure the girl can hear. Let her see that you people take it as a joke.” I beg your pardon! The solution is to joke loudly about how he sexually harasses everyone in the hope of publicly humiliating the one poor girl who actually believes him? Jackie!
Suddenly, the obsession women of my mother’s generation have with losing weight, bucking your ideas up, and “boys will be boys” came into sharp focus. I felt enormous empathy for all the Boomer and Gen X women walking about today who were schooled in such harsh advice. I know millennials and Gen Z are roundly mocked for being too sensitive, but I’ll take that over telling a teenager sexual harassment is a “joke” any day of the week. I wanted to reach into the magazine and scoop up all those confused teenagers and save them from the 70s.
Perhaps one of the reasons the advice was so limited is because, at least in the early years, the agony aunts weren’t real. They were young journalists, often only a few years older than most of the girls writing in! Years later, Gayle Anderson, who started working for Jackie in the early 80s, spoke about her time there and confirmed that the “problems” that were featured were not representative of most of the letters Jackie Magazine received.
Quite understandably, young girls were far more worried about sex and their changing bodies than they were about their friends falling out or bandy legs, but these letters were not published. Former staff have spoken about young girls sending in urine samples in perfume bottles and scabs sellotaped into cards, trying to get a diagnosis of things they were too scared to talk to a doctor about. This was a time when sex ed in schools could be called basic at best. The desperation of these young girls made me feel eternally grateful we live in an age where information is widely available and sex ed in school covers more than where sperm is made.
By the 1990s, the problem pages were addressing more adult subjects, such as having sex, periods, vaginal discharge, kissing, and pregnancy, but the advice could still be horribly brutal by today’s standards. In January 1990, two 15-year-olds wrote in because they got drunk at a party and two boys, who weren’t their boyfriends, had sex with them, now they were scared they might be pregnant.
The response acknowledges this could be statutory rape, advises the girls to get a pregnancy test immediately and urges them to tell their parents, which is all very sensible and what you would expect. But then it ends with the line: “and if it does turn out you’ve both had a lucky escape this time and I hope at least you’ll learn from it.” Yikes.
Letters from 16-year-old-girls dating men in their 20s and older are alarmingly common and a reminder about just how much our understanding around exploitation and grooming has changed for the better.
It isn’t until May 1992 that same-sex attraction makes it into the problem pages, when a reader writes in to declare “I have never felt attracted to boys and recently seem to have developed a crush on this girl at school”. The advice, however, is “lots of girls feel attracted to people of the same sex at one stage or another and it certainly doesn’t mean you’ll always feel like this or that you’re odd in any way… Just try to act as normally as you can, ignoring any comments or nastiness”. If that little lesbian is reading this today, I hope you ignored that entirely and lived your gay life loud and proud.
Then there is the fact that almost every face featured in a magazine that ran for 30 years is white. I counted only 25 cover models who weren’t white, and four of them were Michael Jackson in 1973. I fully appreciate just how important Jackie Magazine was to the myriad teenage girls who desperately wanted to talk about boys, snogging, and make-up, but there is no denying the entire thing was wildly heteronormative and very white.
Reading Jackies of yore as a historian was absolutely fascinating. The archive is a unique record of the British teenage experience in the 20th century. As an academic, it was revelatory to be able to observe just how much our attitudes to sex and gender have changed in a relatively short space of time. As a person, it made me want to call my mum and all her friends and ask if they are alright!
For all the anxieties the modern world has brought with it, I think we have created a far better world to be a teenager in.
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