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History of Education,

Vol. 36, No. 2, March 2007, pp. 227–246

ISSN 0046-760X (print)/ISSN 1464-5130 (online)/07/020227–20

© 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00467600601171468

A Uniform Identity: Schoolgirl

Snapshots and the Spoken Visual

Stephanie Spencer

and Francis Ltd

HED_A_217071.sgm

.1080/00467600601171468

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History of Edu

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print)/1464-5130 (online

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Taylor & Francis

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2007

March

StephanieSpencer

[email protected]

This article discusses the possibility for expanding our understanding of the visual to include the ‘spoken

visual’ within oral history analysis. It suggests that adding a further reading, that of the visualized body, to

the voice-centred relational method we can consider the meaning of the uniformed body for the individual.

It uses as a case-study reflections on a photograph taken of a group of girls on a school outing and their adult

interpretation of the meaning of the modifications to their school uniform. Extracts from oral history inter-

views with girls who left school in South London in the late 1950s are also used to demonstrate the frequency

with which respondents refer to how they looked in order to express in more detail how they felt.

Introduction

This article discusses how we might further extend our use of the visual and the repre-

sentation of the body of the schoolchild within research into the recent history of the

female experience of secondary education in Britain. I argue that the ‘visualized body’

can take two forms: the familiar photograph, often used as photo elicitation or to

accompany a researcher’s account of an oral history interview, and the respondent’s

use of a vivid description of how she/he looked, in order to describe in more detail

how she/he felt. The place of the school uniform is central to this debate. Following

the 1944 Education Act in England and Wales, which ensured secondary education

for all, during the 1950s and 1960s identities of class and gender became written onto

the body of the adolescent schoolgirl. The demand for a corporate identity by

(

usually) grammar schools came at a time in their lives when young teenagers were

also forming their individual identities and did not always sit easily with the expecta-

tions of their families or their peers.

‘Identity’ is a slippery term and Morwenna Griffiths has used the metaphor of a

web in order to tease out the multiple strands which contribute to making a ‘self that

is comfortable with itself’.

1

In using the term ‘uniform identity’ this article highlights

the experience of formal schooling as one of the strands that might contribute to the

1

Griffiths, Morwenna.

Feminisms and the Self: The Web of Identity.

London: Routledge, 1995.

formation of an adult female identity. Griffiths’s metaphor is particularly useful in this case as she notes how the self is formed autonomously but ‘not in circumstances of our own choosing’—in this case the relationship between school and individual. The metaphor of the web also enables an understanding of identity that is fluid and constantly under construction as the individual reacts to (sometimes conflicting) circumstances that surround her. As oral historians explore the meaning of schooling for the individual, respondents frequently use the ‘visualized body’ to explain some of the ambivalence and contradictions within the formation of their schoolgirl selves.

The following discussion suggests combining the use of interview narratives with photographic data into a concept of the ‘spoken visual’. This inevitably involves the use of two different theoretical frameworks, those of oral history analysis and visual analysis. The article discusses how Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity might help to create new frameworks that enable us to use the visual (spoken and photographic) in order to uncover the significance of the appearance of the schoolgirl in the formation of her identity and her relationship to the wider world of the school. One approach to identifying this hybridity might be to add a further ‘reading’, that of the visual, to Andrea Mauthner and Natasha Doucet’s voice-centred relational analysis.[footnoteRef:1]Through doing this it may be possible to expand our understanding of the significance of the body of the schoolgirl when considering the gendered nature of secondary education in England post-1944. [1: Mauthner, Andrea, and Natasha Doucet. “Reflections on a Voice-centred Relational Method.” In Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research, edited by J. Ribbens & R. Edwards. London: Sage Publications, 1998.]

This line of enquiry was generated by a reunion with four school friends (see Figure 1). Despite the vast number of photographs of our schooldays in our possession, this particular photograph of a school outing featured in all our collages or photo albums. We remembered vividly the circumstances of its production and then proceeded to ‘read back’, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, the experience of our teenage selves and our attempts to subvert the strict uniform rules imposed by our girls’ South East London direct grant school in the 1960s.[footnoteRef:2] In the photograph we appear to conform; there is nothing very outrageous in any of our clothes, yet the subtle details which might easily be overlooked spoke to us of our determination to customize the uniform in defiance of the strict uniform code. Our account might be further interpreted by a researcher who could read the photograph as evidence of the homogenizing effect of school uniform in grammar schools of the period. Between the two interpretations emerges a third ‘hybrid’ that includes past and present, individual and collective meanings of the uniformed body. [2: Direct Grant schools were part funded by central government, entry was by 11+. The schools were similar to grammar schools and followed primarily an academic curriculum.]

Figure 1. School outing, London c. 1964.On the occasion when we discussed the photograph I had just completed a series of 20 interviews with women who had left school in South East London in the late 1950s. A majority of them had passed their 11+ and attended grammar schools. Like us, they remembered their secondary education with varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Figure 1. School outing, London c. 1964.

As I began to analyse the interviews I noted the frequent detailed references to school uniform. Again, as with our photograph, women described how their uniform looked in order to explain how they felt and how they reacted to the sometimes conflicting aspirations and values of their parents and their schools. In addition they had to reconcile the difficulties they encountered with the demand for a ‘uniform’ schoolgirl identity, at a time when the ‘teenager’ became a recognized consumer group with its own set of representational practices.[footnoteRef:3] [3: Abrams, Mark. The Teenage Consumer. London: Press Exchange; Springhall, John. Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain 1860–1960. Goldenbridge, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan.]

For women recalling their experience of secondary education and some of the difficulties of being a postwar teenager, collective memory is full of ‘flashbulb images’ or snapshots that become the property of the group. In her discussion of oral histories of traumatic events in Italy during the Second World War Francesca Cappelleto notes how visual imagery is fundamental to the process of the narratives. Memory does not, then, become a group project but the symbolic content of the visual becomes integral to the retelling of an event. Cappelleto concludes: ‘We [should] conceive of visual imagery as central to the view of the past. Research on the role of visualisation and emotions in the sociological process is still at an early stage. Here, it is envisaged as a fundamental part of the processes of memory making, in which perceptual images run through the narratives and link the group memory’.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Cappelletto, Francesca. “Long-Term Memory of Extreme Events: From Autobiography to History.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9, no. 2 (June 2003): 257–58.]

In the following discussion I consider how we might move forward in our understanding of the ‘visualized body’ of the schoolchild. As Grosvenor et al. have noted it is extremely difficult to reach the lived experience of schooling.[footnoteRef:5] However detailed our examination of policy and practice may be, the ‘lost history of the classroom’ is still elusive. I argue that by paying close attention to informal photographs of schoolchildren and the way they are ‘read’ by both interviewer and respondent together with the word pictures created in oral history interviews, we may extend our appreciation of the role of the school in the formation of the individual. This sometimes difficult relationship between school and individual can be explored through the imposition of school uniform and the pupils’ attempts to challenge its very uniformity. Social class and gender expectations of the school may have sat uncomfortably with the individual as she struggled to make sense of who she was in the face of limited opportunities for self-expression within the formal school environment. [5: Grosvenor, I., M. Lawn, and K. Rousmaniere, eds. Silences & Images: The Social History of the Classroom. Canterbury: Peter Lang, 1999.]

The article focuses on a theoretical discussion of how analysis of the ‘spoken visual’ might be framed. While it draws on some of the interviews completed for a study of the relationship between education and career choice for girls in the 1950s, it is not the intention to focus extensively on an analysis of the interview transcripts. They are used in conjunction with some already published autobiographies of schooling in the same era, that of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Additional photographs were considered in the original conference paper on which this article is based, but the discussion here focuses on how we might usefully begin to theorize the spoken visual and significance of the body of the schoolgirl.[footnoteRef:6] Interdisciplinary work necessarily demands the use of a number of approaches, and in doing so we lay ourselves open to charges of cherry picking. This article suggests that by employing Bhabha’s notion of hybridity and his concept of the ‘in between’ spaces we can make a tentative move towards a framework for understanding the ‘spoken visual’.[footnoteRef:7] By focusing on the issue of school uniform with the spoken visual narrative the gendered nature of the body of the schoolchild becomes apparent. Visual and oral history methodologies are briefly examined before turning to consider the embodied codes of meaning within schoolgirl identity. The discussion concludes by considering a case study of the significance of school uniform in late 1950s and early 1960s England in terms of the formation of gendered and classed identity of the schoolchild. [6: This article is based on a paper given at ECER 2005, Dublin. I am grateful to the discussion following the paper and to the anonymous reviewers for their thought-provoking comments.] [7: Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.]

Visual Methodologies

Ken Plummer details the numerous ways that photographs have been used within oral history, sociology and anthropology. The methods range from the illustrative to more complex integration and interaction between the text and the visual image.

Photographic theory adds further dimensions to the analysis.[footnoteRef:8] Kate Rousmaniere has noted that visual images are often ‘dropped in’ to reinforce existing historical accounts rather than creating new methodologies.[footnoteRef:9] The following discussion makes some suggestions as to how we might begin to address this problem and extend the use of the concept of the ‘visualized body’ within our research. It discusses the relationship of the visual representation of the body of the schoolchild to the way that experience is articulated by the interview participant and interpreted by the researcher. [8: Plummer, Ken. Documents of Life 2: An Introduction to Critical Humanism. London: Sage Publications, 2001: 64–66; Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000; Evans, Jessica. The Camerawork Essays. London: Rivers Oram, 1997; Alvarado, M., E. Buscombe, and R. Collins, eds. Representation and Photography. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.] [9: Rousmaniere, Kate. “Questioning the Visual in the History of Education.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 110.]

The inclusion of the visual in histories of the classroom has been the focus of much of the ECER network 17 group. Indeed a special edition of History of Education highlighted both the need for, and the problems associated with, the analysis of the material and visual world of the school.[footnoteRef:10] The distinction between material, visual and documentary sources is not easily defined, as the use of the visual as metaphor within spoken accounts demonstrates. [10: History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001).]

The use of photo elicitation within oral history is well established as a way to further interrogate or prompt the account given by an interview participant.[footnoteRef:11] It would be one way to interpret the photograph accompanying this paper; a visual image takes the participants back, to remind them of specific moments in time and the account of events perhaps long forgotten. John Prosser and Terry Warburton note: [11: Prosser, John. “Photographs within the Sociological Research Process.” In Image Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, edited by J. Prosser. London: Falmer Press, 1998; Dein, Alan, and Mark Burman. BBC radio 3, Sunday Feature, “You must remember this.” 23. October 2005.]

[T]he assumption is that images will be meaningful to interviewees who will provide their particular insight into the significance of the image(s). What is important is the capacity of images to dispose respondents to talk reflectively and to ‘trigger’ unanticipated comments.[footnoteRef:12] [12: Prosser, J., and T. Warburton. “Visual Sociology and School Culture.” In School Culture, edited by J. Prosser. London: Sage Publications, 1999: 87.]

These ‘unanticipated comments’ cannot, however, be read as transparent; they also become part of the data for analysis. In the same way that we acknowledge the mutual construction of the stories of schooling within the general interview so we should recognize that the analysis of visual evidence (spoken or photographic) is also subject to an interpretation produced as a result of the interviewer’s and respondent’s individual readings.

Oral History Methodology

The collection and analysis of oral history data presents some challenges. The problems of how to account for the vagaries of memory, how to establish a ‘truth’, how to find common ground in a number of disparate stories have been widely debated, especially with regard to those voices most commonly marginalized.[footnoteRef:13] The advent of postmodern approaches, which allow for a diversity of accounts within the parameters of different discourses, ameliorates these problems somewhat.[footnoteRef:14] In the process of interviews either the respondents or the interviewers may use photographs in order to expand upon a point being discussed; in this case the use of visual evidence serves to underpin and illustrate the spoken narrative.[footnoteRef:15] At other points in the interview the narrator may create a verbal picture in order to explain an emotion or an expectation, or to clarify a point. [13: Perks, R., and A.Thompson, eds. The Oral History Reader. London: Routledge, 1998; Armitage, S., with P. Hart and K. Weatherman, eds. Women’s Oral History: The ‘Frontiers’ Reader. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2002.] [14: Summerfield, Penny. Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998.] [15: Prosser, “Photographs within the Sociological Research Process”.]

The oral history transcripts that are used as examples here come from a series of 20 interviews with women who left school in the late 1950s. They were asked about their career choices on school-leaving. The respondents were self-selected following an advertisement placed in the South London press. Their proximity to London shaped their early career experiences but did not seem to have been significant in their education.[footnoteRef:16] Most of them went to grammar schools and might therefore be categorized as middle class but, as becomes apparent in the interviews, for those who were firstgeneration grammar school the uniform often acted as a marker of difference between home and school values rather than confirming a homogenous ‘schoolgirl’ group identity.[footnoteRef:17] [16: Spencer, Stephanie. “From Schoolgirl to Career Girl: The City as Educative Space.” Paedagogica Historica 39, nos 1/2 (2003): 121–33.] [17: Gary McCulloch notes how despite the meritocratic intentions of the 1944 Education Act a majority of middle-class children attended the grammar schools. McCulloch, Gary. Failing the Ordinary Child? The Theory and Practice of Working-Class Secondary Education. Buckingham: Open University, 1998.]

The interviews were semi-structured and began with: ‘Did you like school?’ Most of the quotes used here come from this early stage of the interviews.[footnoteRef:18] Feminist analysis of oral history transcripts in particular demands a reflection on the part of the interviewer and author on their position and place within the interview process.[footnoteRef:19]Mauthner and Doucet suggest four readings of an interview transcript in order to highlight the multifaceted nature of the oral history approach. These readings enable the researcher to identify plot and the respondent’s relationships to external factors in addition to highlighting the place and the attitude of the interviewer her/himself in the process of the construction or composition of the narrative. They argue persuasively that those of us who engage in this sort of work should be aware of our reaction to interviews; whether we feel sympathy or antipathy towards the individual can affect how we interpret the data as well as the more proactive nature of our interference in the way that we direct the way memories are presented. Although providing a variety of readings none of those suggested by Mauthner and Doucet pays attention to the visual. [18: For a more detailed discussion of these interviews and the methodology employed see Spencer, Stephanie. Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.] [19: Gluck, S. Berger, and D. Patai. Women’s Words, The Feminist Practice of Oral History. London: Routledge, 1991.]

Ian Grosvenor and Martin Lawn have highlighted the need to address the material cultures of schooling in order to answer Harold Silver’s challenge to consider the life of the school.[footnoteRef:20] Traditional accounts of schooling have not been able to include the experience of schooling from the point of view of the schooled. Oral history offers a way into exploring the pupils’ and teachers’ world,[footnoteRef:21] but this is, of course, accompanied by caveats around memory and hindsight.[footnoteRef:22] Narrative analysis[footnoteRef:23] and discourse analysis[footnoteRef:24] both look beyond acceptance of a story ‘as it is told’; the more transcripts are read, the more multilayered and multidimensional the meanings appear.[footnoteRef:25]Responses to questions or reflections on life histories create neat narratives that are necessarily selective and are products of the moment of telling as much as an account of the past. [20: Grosvenor, I., and M. Lawn. “Ways of Seeing in Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies.” History of Education 30, no. 2 (2001): 106; Silver, Harold. “Knowing and Not Knowing in the History of Education.” History of Education 21, no. 1 (1992): 97–108.] [21: Cunningham, P., and P. Gardner. Becoming Teachers: Texts and Testimonies 1907–1950. London: Woburn, 2004.] [22: With the wider acceptance of oral history within academic research the methodology has become increasingly nuanced and theorized. See Oral History Society website, available from http: //www.ohs.org.uk; INTERNET; Yow, V. R. Recording Oral History: A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences. 2nd ed. California: AltaMira Press, 2005.] [23: Cortazzi, Martin. Narrative Analysis. London: Falmer Press, 1993.] [24: Summerfield, Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives.] [25: Mauthner and Doucet, “Reflections on a Voice-centred Relational Method.” 27 Mauthner and Doucet, “Voice relational analysis”, 119.]

Having established the significance of the inclusion of the visual (as photoelicitation and as metaphor) within an analysis of oral history the problem remains how to incorporate it into the already complex matrix of researcher, researched, narrative, story, context and speech patterns that make demands on the oral historian: ‘The processes through which we transform respondents’ private lives into public theories are clearly critical to assessing the validity and status of these theories’.27 One way might be to add another reading to the voice relational analysis by Mauthner and Doucet. This method employs multiple readings of one transcript and was first used by Carol Gilligan and Lyn Brown within the field of psychology.[footnoteRef:26] Mauthner and Doucet developed the framework into one that was appropriate to interdisciplinary and sociological projects. They noted that this method has been used by a number of researchers who have each adapted it according to ‘their individuality, their particular topics, their samples, the theoretical and academic environments and social and cultural contexts in which they work’.[footnoteRef:27] In analysing oral history transcripts the researcher reads for content/information; for dependence on discourse; for her/his individual reaction to the subject and looks for repetitive use of phrases, figures of speech, repetition and hesitation. It can identify specific trends that can be pursued in analysis of additional data. It should be possible to include a further reading, that of the visualized body, to the four readings suggested by Mauthner and Doucet to give a comprehensive analysis of an interview.[footnoteRef:28] In the same way that oral historians have been scrupulous in attending to the analysis of their transcript material in order that the collection of oral data is seen as a valid historical practice, so a theorized use of photographs of the body of the schoolchild together with the ‘spoken visual’ moves the visual from the position of accompanying illustration to centre stage. [26: Brown, L. M., and C. Gilligan. “Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development.” Feminism and Psychology 3, no. 1 (1993): 11–35.] [27: Mauthner and Doucet, “Voice relational analysis”, 126.] [28: Ibid.]

Photographs act as spurs to conversation but used in that way it is difficult to include them within the analysis. The significance of the visual deserves more. A further reading of the transcript for the visual can enhance our understanding of what the body means, in this case to the history of the schoolgirl. The spoken visual and mutual reflection on a snapshot can interrogate remembered individual emotions, and it can emphasize turning points differentiating between youth and age, between the naive and the experienced self by identifying the ‘in between space’ between the visual and the narrative and between the narrator and their audience. The focus of the ‘spoken visual’ in this article is that of the uniformed body of the schoolgirl. The role of the body, especially the female body, as a site of meaning is one that has also attracted much debate.

Uniform Bodies /Bodies that Matter

The difficult relationship of the physical body with ideas of sex and gender and the formation of identity has been the focus of much of Judith Butler’s work. She highlighted the impossibility of separating socially constructed attributes of gender from the ‘natural’ attributes of a biologically sexed body. The dominance of the heterosexual matrix troubles the concept of socially constructed gender as open to change. The sex/gender aspect of girls’ school uniform is complex. On the one hand it repressed any expression of individual (hetero)sexuality by its demands for uniformity, yet there were mixed messages inherent in the compulsory tie (marker of masculinity) and conservative-length skirts, gloves and hats (markers of femininity) in school uniforms of the period under discussion.

Chris Shilling’s discussion of physical capital derived from Bourdieu’s ‘socially shaped embodied subject’ argues that within Bourdieu’s analysis of physical capital there is little room for the individual to escape her/his class-based habitus.[footnoteRef:29] In terms of the body of the schoolchild, middle-class schools may have imposed a class-based appearance at odds with the home environment and burgeoning youth culture of the successful 1950s 11+ entrant. Shilling identifies the centrality of the body to our sense of self-identity and individuality and the way that the body has become a ‘project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual’s selfidentity’.[footnoteRef:30] The body project can be identified as one of the main strands within Morwenna Griffiths’s metaphor of the web of identity. Iris Young has also recently explored the relationship of the body to the formation of a gendered identity; she argued that earlier feminist attempts to dissociate the physical from social constructions of gender were not satisfactory in explaining ‘lived experience’.[footnoteRef:31] Body image and experience then become integral to understandings of the self and subjectivity. The customization of school uniform provides a powerful example of the uneasy relationship between the formation of individual selves and expectations of a homogenous, sometimes overpowering, identity of schoolgirl. [29: Shilling, Chris. “Physical Capital and Situated Action: A New Direction for Corporeal Sociology.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 25, no. 4 (2004): 473–87.] [30: Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: Sage Publications, 1993: 5.] [31: Young, Iris. “Lived Body vs. Gender: Reflections on Social Structure and Subjectivity.” In On Female Body Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. See also Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London, New York: Routledge, 1990.]

Most recently, Carrie Paechter’s analysis of the meaning of the Cartesian mind/ body dualism for education practice has further highlighted the need to include the gendered significance of the body in an analysis of the relationship between the individual and the institution.[footnoteRef:32] Paechter argues that the legacy of Cartesian dualism has resulted in the marginalization of the significance of the physical body in favour of the intellect. The hierarchy is clear: the body is to be controlled in order to nurture the mind. The association to the female with physical functions of reproduction thus excludes her from the realm of the intellectual and her identity as ‘female’ is allencompassing. Again the issue of school uniform offers an insight into the complexity of this relationship. The academic priorities given to a grammar school education resulted in the imposition of a uniform that repressed any reference to burgeoning sexuality. At the same time the traditional ‘feminine’ nature of the code, skirts and dresses, served as a constant reminder of the ultimate prioritization of their gender role. Penny Summerfield has also noted the difficult balancing act performed by grammar schools in the early 1950s. While encouraging girls to pursue academic careers and denying their likely future gender roles they also confirmed their project of cultural reproduction of the next generation of middle-class wives and mothers.35 The Uniformed Body [32: Paechter, Carrie. “Reconceptualizing the Gendered Body: Learning and Constructing Masculinities and Femininities in School.” Gender and Education 18, no. 2 (2006): 121–35. 35 Summerfield, Penny. “Cultural Reproduction in the Education of Girls: A Study of Girls’ Secondary Schooling in two Lancashire Towns, 1900–1950. In Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, 1850–1950, edited by F. Hunt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.]

The meaning of school uniform, both to the institution and to the individual, has been the focus of some interest. The wearing of school uniform is not a universal requirement. Ines Dussel, in a detailed analysis of school uniform as a disciplinary practice and one of the technologies of power within the cultural history of schooling, identifies the practice as deriving from early sumptuary laws, which demanded that an individual’s appearance should reflect his/her position in society.[footnoteRef:33] The discussion here builds on Dussel’s assertion that ‘school uniforms are signs and signifying practices that carry along meanings of identity and difference, and that enact the disciplining of the body by a power that subjects and subjectifies’.[footnoteRef:34] [33: Dussel, Ines. “School Uniforms and the Disciplining of Appearances.” In Cultural History and Education, edited by. S. Popkewitz, B. Franklin and M. Pereira. London: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001: 206.] [34: Dussel, Ines. “The Shaping of a Citizenship with Style: A History of Uniforms and Vestimentary Codes in Argentinean Public Schools.” In Materialities of Schooling Design, Technology, Objects, Routines, edited by M. Lawn and I. Grosvenor. London, Oxford: Symposium, 2005: 98. 38 Swain, Jon. “The Right Stuff: Fashioning an Identity through Clothing in a Junior School.” Gender and Education 14, no. 1 (2002): 53–69; Meadmore, D., and C. Symes, “Keeping Up Appearances: Uniform Policy for School Diversity?” British Journal of Educational Studies 45, no. 92 (June 1997): 174–86.]

Recent articles on the Australian experience, which may have inherited the school uniform system from its colonial past, indicate that school uniform—while one of the less popular topics of education research—is the site of meaning-making by pupil and school alike.38 The interviews and autobiographies cited here focus on the female experience but further work might consider the significance of uniform within the production of male as well as female identity. Jon Swain’s research notes how school uniform can confirm gender hierarchies and therefore gendered identity even within primary school children. He concludes that current primary schoolboys modify their school dress code as part of their self-construction in order to conform to the demands of hegemonic masculinity. The significance of uniform to both wearer and the institution is indeed neither ‘trivial nor inconsequential’.[footnoteRef:35] The maintenance of elite (male) influence in British institutions is acknowledged to be down to the networking strength that is represented by the ‘old school tie’. In the case of the ‘old school tie’ the tie acts as both metaphor and artefact. Traces of the uniform confirm social hierarchy and elite networks. The tie eloquently writes both past and power onto the adult male body and it is interesting that a majority of girls’ (winter) school uniforms in the 1950s and ’60s also included the tie as a marker of belonging and an integral part of the compulsory uniform. [35: Swain, “The Right Stuff: Fashioning an Identity through Clothing in a Junior School”, 53.]

The reflections and interviews that provide the case-study data for this article are focused on the decade between 1955 and 1965 and come largely from women educated in girls’ grammar schools.[footnoteRef:36] It is not the intention of the author to suggest that the significance of school uniform to the individual is a transhistorical phenomenon. The record of the development of uniform policy in Britain is limited. The early boys’ public schools developed modes of dress that marked them as ‘belonging’ to an elite institution. Whereas by the twentieth century boys’ uniform was largely distinguished by distinctive ties, caps and blazer badges worn with standard grey flannel trousers or shorts dependent on the age of the pupil, girls’ uniforms were more dependent on wider changes in women’s fashion. School uniform necessarily lagged behind some of these changes with hats for example being worn by schoolgirls long after they ceased to be everyday wear for adult women. In the Girls’ Public Day School Trust schools, which were established in the late nineteenth century, the uniform developed slowly, initially with a distinguishing hat band and later, following fashion in the 1920s, they introduced regulation blazers and gymslips, also adopting the distinctive tie.[footnoteRef:37]The advent of state secondary education from 1902 and then universally from 1944 resulted in the wider adoption of the school uniform principle for all pupils. Despite recent relaxation in regulations and a move towards ‘dress codes’ uniform clearly still provides a recognizable marker of gender as illustrated by the furore recently when a school banned girls from wearing skirts and insisted they wear trousers.[footnoteRef:38] [36: Women replied to a request for interview participants in the South London Press. They were asked to discuss their career choices on school leaving. Although the area was chosen because of the variety of schools, a majority of those who replied had attended grammar secondary schools.] [37: The gradual introduction of uniform into schools is difficult to trace but can be found in the governing body minutes of individual schools. Some governing bodies included uniform subcommittees to deal with this issue. (This research was made possible by a grant from the Spencer Foundation for ‘Women and the Governance of Girls’ Secondary Schools 1870–1997’. The data presented, the statements made, and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.) Other sources of information may be school magazines, and school photographic archives.] [38: The ban at Broadstone Middle School in Poole, Dorset, was scheduled to be introduced in January 2006, after governors decided skirts were not suitable for some lessons. The headteacher said the ban was ‘to give girls the same opportunities as boys’ and to ‘maintain their modesty’ (Guardian 22 June 2005).]

As the example above illustrates, it is the imposition of a uniform of any style that creates a site for conflict. Debbie Epstein observed the way that girls especially were able to rebel against the controlling power of the institution through modifying their uniform with reference to popular fashion. Epstein notes the multicoloured bags carried by the girls and significantly the relevance of identity to the external representation of self: ‘More is going on than resistance here. There is also much hard work around identities in all this play—including an overtly competitive seeking after “street cred” amongst a significant minority of students’.[footnoteRef:39] The school bag is rarely part of the prescribed uniform and as such gives the individual permission to introduce a note of self-expression into her/his appearance. In terms of the visual resource it also enables the historian to locate a visual image within its historical context. Epstein notes the images of ‘Take That’ on school bags as representative of popular culture of the early 1990s. In Figure 1 the ubiquitous ‘tote bag’ is itself emblematic of the 1960s. The final section of the article focuses on a case-study of reflections on school uniform in the late 1950s and early 1960s in order to consider how the visualized body of the schoolgirls in both spoken and photographic material can lend an insight into the role of the school in the formation of teenage female identity. [39: Epstein, D., and R. Johnson. Schooling Sexualities. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1998: 114.]

The Visualized Body: Images, Autobiography and Oral History

Carolyn Steedman begins her well-known ‘Landscape for a Good Woman’ with a description of a dream, ‘the topography absolutely plain, so precise in details of dress that I can use them to place the dream in historical time’. She describes a woman in a New Look coat of beige gabardine and then notes the layers of meaning in this image that come with the passage of time: ‘children do not possess a social analysis of what is happening to them, or around them so that the landscape and the pictures it presents, taking meaning later, from different circumstances’.[footnoteRef:40] It is only the later adult who knows the significance of the New Look for the postwar world or even the details of gabardine material. Steedman suggests that we use the images to locate our memories within a time frame; were school days marked by stockings or tights, were skirts too full, too short or too tight? Each variation on the same uniform locks us clearly within a specific time and cultural context for our teenage selves. The modifications in the uniform in the photograph discussed here, the long hair, the bell sleeves, mark the group as sixties girls. In the cohort interviewed on school-leaving, the role of school uniform was frequently used as metaphor. Uniform proclaimed the status of the school and in many cases also marked the undermining of the sense of self and the mismatch between family and school values. [40: Steedman, Carolyn. Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History. London: Rivers Oram, 1992: 22.]

Within the reflections of school uniform here, issues of class and gender intersect. School uniform may have been designed to minimize both representations of femininity and differences in social class and yet as is apparent from the comments by authors and respondents that the uniform itself becomes the site where identities of class and gender become played out.

In the photograph which accompanies (and initiated) this article, four young teenage girls wearing summer dresses slump, pose, slouch, or look confidently at the camera. The similarity of the dresses and the straw boaters suggests that they are wearing a fairly standard English school uniform of the time. The length of the skirts, the long hair and the style of one of the dresses dates the photo somewhere in the mid1960s. It is a black-and-white ‘snap’ taken by one of their contemporaries, intended for circulation amongst themselves. It is clearly not part of the official record usually found in school archives of teams, classes or noteworthy special school celebrations. It might be best described as a record of relaxed friendship formed by individuals sharing a collective identity of same age, same sex, in the same school. It seems to be simply a record of an unremarkable school outing, yet it is a particular favourite with the group. The women we have become may reflect on the schoolgirls we once were and ask questions of conformity, rebelliousness, identity and self. What is the relationship of our present selves with the images in the photograph? Do we read the image with the benefit of hindsight or is the articulation of the relationship of the present with these past images a more complex act of meaning-making?[footnoteRef:41] The presence of the visual record of our schoolgirl bodies prompted the direction of the recounted narrative, which focused on the clothes worn and our attitude to the imposition of a school uniform. It prompted memories of teenage years and the awkward attempt to conform both to the demands of school rules and to media representations of the ‘sixties teenager’ and establish some claim to our individual identity.[footnoteRef:42] [41: Davies B., S. Dormer, S. Gannon, C. Laws, S. Rocco, H. L. Taguchi, and H. McCann. “Becoming Schoolgirls: The Ambivalent Project of Subjectification.” Gender and Education 13, no. 2 (2001): 167–82. Bronwen Davies explores the making of collective memory with her colleagues in order to interrogate the place that memories of education play in the formation of the individual adult subject.] [42: The author would like to thank the women who are the subject of the photograph who have consented to its use in this article.]

We all came from broadly middle-class backgrounds and parents were supportive of the ethos and demands of the school. We might expect to find little deviation from the standard uniform list, especially on a school outing when the girls’ bodies ‘represented’ their school to the general public. Rules stated that the boater was to be worn on top of the head tilting neither forward nor back with the brim slanting down. The uniform school dress was a shirt-waister with matching belt. Skirts were to be two inches above the ground when kneeling and subject to inspection. Hair was to be worn tied back into a ponytail or short.[footnoteRef:43] Annette Kuhn in her reflection noted similar rules with the addition of ‘no backcombing of the hair’.[footnoteRef:44] [43: Uniform list c.1967, Sutton High School (SHS GDST archives).] [44: Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination London: Verso, 1995: 92.]

Collective memory tells the women they were rebels, did not conform to the school codes, were always in trouble for various (minor) misdemeanours, and continually challenged school rules. However, all remained in school to A-level and took some form of higher education and training, and largely followed traditional careers and family lives.[footnoteRef:45] By subtly adapting the uniform, to the outside world and to any casual observer of the photograph they still conformed; their identity as ‘schoolgirls’ was clear, but from the remembered point of view they followed individual styles: navyblue belts, hats worn at rakish angles, hair long and loose, short skirts and bell sleeves, a fair adaptation to contemporary fashion trends—a group identity of ‘teenager’ rather than ‘schoolgirl’.[footnoteRef:46] Understanding the construction of the representation of a collective identity against which to identify the nature of the individual experience is complex. Ken Plummer notes the significance of the cultural in framing memories. Photographs, perhaps particularly ‘snaps’, are very much a product and a reflection of popular culture. This photograph is not one taken by a professional according to a template of how a group of 1960s schoolgirls ‘should’ be represented. It was taken by the visually absent fifth member of the friendship group, literally a snapshot that captured a moment in time. As adults we can recognize traces of those teenage identities in our present selves. Interpretations of that visual image to and by a third party merge the individual with the collective memory and the collective with the cultural and historical moment. In considering autobiographical accounts by women in a similar time period it appears that our reading of the role of uniform was not unusual. [45: Also in common with their age cohort three of the five, including the photographer, married soon after finishing their education or training and two were subsequently divorced.] [46: Osgerby, Bill. Youth in Britain since 1945. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.]

Having considered reflections on a specific visual image it is possible to identify similar sentiments being presented within autobiographical accounts. These accounts depend heavily on descriptions of physical appearance to explain the emergence of a teenage self. The school authorities placed high importance on the wearing of uniform and the presentation of a collective identity at the very time when girls were trying to move towards an autonomous individual adult identity. This could be an uncomfortable process, as Annette Kuhn observed: ‘To wear the school’s uniform was to subordinate yourself to the organisation and its rules’.[footnoteRef:47] Ines Dussel has noted how this apparently marginal aspect of school life determines ‘the ways in which people relate to themselves and each other in school settings’.[footnoteRef:48] Autobiographies of schooling reflect the contentious nature of the school uniform; here Mary Evans in her reflections on life in a girls’ grammar school in the 1950s is clear about the relationship of the gendered body to individual identity: [47: Kuhn, Family Secrets, 92.] [48: Dussel, “The Shaping of a Citizenship with Style”, 97.]

The wearing of uniform for those seven long adolescent years bred in all of us, to varying degrees, an intense self-consciousness about how we looked. Adolescents of both sexes are anyway preoccupied with their physical appearance; being forced to wear uniform made us not less aware of the clothes and body but more aware of both … the denial of difference produced an opposite effect—an interest in the development of difference through dress and personal adornment.[footnoteRef:49] [49: Evans, Mary. Life at a Girls’ Grammar School in the 1950s. London: Women’s Press, 1991: 68.]

Cyril Norwood expected the state grammar schools to be modelled on the public school system and uniform therefore appears to have been part of the creation of the grammar school identity.[footnoteRef:50] McCulloch noted how schools tend to copy the institutions immediately above them and this habit is also reflected in the wearing of uniform after the 1944 Education Act.[footnoteRef:51] Initially secondary modern schools did not require their pupils to wear uniforms but many did in practice follow the grammar schools in an attempt to create a specific institutional identity and perhaps to mitigate the apparent differences in social class in the two types of school that became apparent during the 1950s and early ‘60s. Mary Evans describes how at grammar school they were frequently told how fortunate they were to wear uniform in comparison with their secondary modern school peers.[footnoteRef:52] The wearing of a school uniform as the outward representation of the school was (and is) not part of official education policy. It was up to governors and the head teacher to design and enforce the dress code and at a time when dress codes in society were becoming more relaxed it seems that secondary schools in England became more not less prescriptive in what their pupils wore.[footnoteRef:53] [50: Board of Education. Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools (The Norwood Report) London: HMSO, 1943.] [51: McCulloch, Gary. Educational Reconstruction. London: Woburn, 1994: 79.] [52: Evans, Life at a Girls’ Grammar, 55.] [53: Gardiner, Juliet. From the Bomb to the Beatles: The Changing Face of Post-War Britain. London: Collins & Brown, 1999.]

The most frequently cited reason today for wearing school uniform is that it is an equalizer. When all pupils are dressed the same there can be no distinctions of social class or wealth.[footnoteRef:54] Evans commented that ‘the wearing of school uniform was publicly and frequently defended and rationalised on the grounds that this compulsory and universal regimentation in navy blue serge would keep our minds off our appearance and our bodies’.[footnoteRef:55] [54: Dussell, “Shaping of Citizenship”, 98.] [55: Evans, Life at a Girls’ Grammar, 54.]

Annette Kuhn remembered being bought a uniform that was several sizes too big ‘to allow for growth’. As she grew the uniform became shabby but ‘luckily though, since infringement of the uniform rules in countless ways was practically de rigueur, being slightly unkempt was not utterly unacceptable within the peer group’.[footnoteRef:56] By being unkempt Kuhn fitted more with the image of the ‘teenager’ than that of the neat schoolgirl. Sheila Rowbotham, discussing her own schooldays, recalls finding ‘the largest black sweater I could’ as part of her beatnik look—‘some social pressures were impossible to resist’.[footnoteRef:57] [56: Kuhn, Family Secrets, 93.] [57: Rowbotham, Sheila. Threads through Time. London: Penguin, 1999: 39.]

In the mutual construction of narratives of schooldays during an interview the clothing of the body of the schoolchild can provide a focus for shared experience between researcher and researched. In these interviews any mention of the hated navy knickers worn for gym by English schoolgirls in the 1950s and ’60s inevitably provoked shared expressions of dismay and dislike of the control of the body by an authoritarian dress code. Memory in the company of others becomes ‘a socially shared experience’.[footnoteRef:58] Women interviewed may have had problems articulating their subjectification but it was clear that within the accounts of their uniform modification, however apparently minor to the interviewer, they encoded meanings of resistance to school authority and collective identity. Their resistance to the clothing imposed upon their teenage bodies acted as a symbol of both ‘cultural and social conflict’.[footnoteRef:59] [58: Plummer, Documents of Life, 234.] [59: Dussell, “The Shaping of a Citizenship with Style”, 99.]

By demonstrating the way that the visual and the spoken interact it may be possible to determine the way that wider expectations of society can be written onto the body of the schoolchild. The place of the school in either confirming or challenging these expectations may also be found inscribed in visual appearance. As such these meanings and interactions can be articulated through the spoken description of the visualized body as they are so intricately linked with the representation and control of that body. The formality of dress codes was commented on, indicating that even after school a woman’s clothes were a sign that she conformed to the dominant matrix of heterosexuality discussed earlier. ‘You dressed like your mother; you dressed like your mother did. I can remember going for that first suit with my mother, for the interview and things, perms and things. Now it’s the last thing you’d do—look like your mother’.[footnoteRef:60] In the 1950s there was only a very narrow window of opportunity for girls to demonstrate any distinct teenage identity as young people were leaving school later and getting married and starting families earlier.[footnoteRef:61] [60: Interview transcripts are in the author’s possession.] [61: Ministry of Education. 15–18, A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England), (The Crowther Report), vol. 1. London: HMSO, 1959.]

Issues of social class are implicit within many of the accounts. In addition to a controlled academic curriculum the bodies of grammar school pupils were also controlled. I have suggested elsewhere that there was inevitably tension between the expectations of the school for academic excellence and professional training and the expectations of society of full-time motherhood and housewifery.[footnoteRef:62] Cladding the girls’ bodies in clothes that denied their embryonic sexuality and the girls’ determination to shorten and tighten their skirts may have been one further manifestation of this tension. The difference between the formality of the grammar school uniform and the relaxed dress code of the secondary modern girls (soon to leave school and embark on marriage and motherhood) was noted in the following extract: [62: Spencer, Gender Work and Education.]

… and the others didn’t have to …well they did have some sort of navy blue effort I seem to remember but it was all very casually put together, you had the skirt of your choice, whereas we had to have the whole gambit, we had the beret in the winter … the velour hat … the panama in the summer; we had striped dresses in the summer, we had a certain sort of skirt and a certain sort of jumper and we had to conform.[footnoteRef:63] [63: Interview transcript in the author’s possession.]

It was also the cost of the school uniform in the early days of the grammar schools that provided a daunting and sometimes unbridgeable barrier to be crossed by the first generation of 11+ ‘successes’. Although grants were provided towards the uniform these did not always cover the true cost. The grammar school uniform after the 1944 Education Act became a signifier of academic prowess; it marked the wearer as destined for a better job and higher earnings than the 70% of children who did not attain the high grades of the 11+.[footnoteRef:64] As one of the respondents to the school-leaving project noted: ‘I lived in a block of flats that were for railway people and I was like a sore thumb really. I trotted off in my uniform first day at grammar school kitted out from head to toe … I looked odd I think because nobody else had gone’.[footnoteRef:65] [64: McCulloch, Failing the Ordinary Child?] [65: Transcript in the author’s possession.]

Using visual references extends the recognition of difference articulated through experience most usually associated with an emphasis on language.[footnoteRef:66] In the oral histories the clear visual descriptions of how the women looked in their schooldays enabled them to analyse how their attendance at grammar school had shaped their individual lives. One respondent’s initial pleasure at passing her 11+ was soon followed by discomfort. She recounted how her family had bought her a non-regulation raincoat, which, despite being the same style as those provided by the school outfitters, was not acceptable to the school authorities. She was suspended. Clearly this issue of what the pupil wore, the collective identity, was more important to the school than the wellbeing of the individual. Later the same woman clearly articulated the significance of how she appeared to the way she formed her identity: [66: Riley, Denise. ‘Am I that Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988; Scott, Joan. “Experience.” In Feminists Theorise the Political, edited by J. Scott and J. Butler. London: Routledge, 1992.]

I remember being terribly ashamed—my mother and grandmother made me—my grandmother made it, it was so awful this terribly severe tweed suit with longish skirt, I must have looked pathetic in it and I do remember wanting to wear more teenagery clothes, but most of my contemporaries couldn’t afford. The things were suits. They wanted us to be miniature adults. Now I just wish I’d, it hasn’t done me any good, I thought if I behaved myself and did everything everybody wanted me to, it was the way to happiness and now I know it wasn’t. I didn’t know I had any choice.[footnoteRef:67] [67: Transcript in the author’s possession.]

In retrospect the importance attached to uniform and the sacrifices made to afford the kit appeared rather quaint to some of the respondents but it remained a strong visual memory and a way in which they could explain the expectations (for the parents) that came with the uniform. This respondent is able to dismiss what might be seen as a rather old-fashioned attitude, at the same time highlighting wider meanings of grammar school attendance:

It was an honour, and actually something of a privilege it obviously cost them quite a bit of money, the uniform, but they were thrilled, they had aspirations for me. I got a regulation swimsuit, waste of money. You had to go and be fitted for your uniform.[footnoteRef:68] [68: Transcript in the author’s possession]

The significance of wearing a uniform to denote ‘other’ than adult identity was not lost on those interviewed. At a time when a majority of pupils even in grammar schools had left by the age of 17,[footnoteRef:69] those who remained at school, even though destined for the higher occupations envisaged by Cyril Norwood, felt their lack of status amongst their peers who had left school and were perceived as having achieved adulthood. The same woman who made the comment about the swimsuit being a waste of money began her A-level course but gave up after a term: [69: Ministry of Education. A Report of the Central Advisory Council for Education (England) (The Crowther Report). London: HMSO, 1959, 15–18, vol. 1, Table 1:6.]

After a term of A-levels I was disillusioned … and everyone else seemed to be earning money. I wanted to buy records … still wearing school uniform you wore your uniform all the way up and they were very strict. They were out at work…. By that time I was into coffee bars and things like that.

Her identity as the grammar school girl was no longer ‘an honour’ but signified a lower status than the girls who had left school uniform behind and were wearing their own clothes. Once past the school-leaving age of 15 girls were more likely to aspire to the body image presented in magazines like Honey or Petticoat than the schoolgirl heroines in Girl and Bunty. In interviews that discussed the point of school leaving it became clear that as pupils passed from initial pride in wearing the grammar school uniform they began to chafe at the restrictions it imposed. Gillian Plummer notes how ‘being accepted by the school meant conforming to what we came to perceive as ridiculous rules such as the specifics of school uniform’.[footnoteRef:70] Girls then modified their uniform to follow fashion rather than school diktat.[footnoteRef:71] It was during the late 1950s and early 1960s that many girls’ grammar schools began to abandon uniform for their sixth forms.[footnoteRef:72] [70: Plummer, Gillian. Failing Working Class Girls. London: Trentham, 2000: 174.] [71: Dussel notes how in Argentina, where the uniform consists of a white smock, pupils still manage to find ways to modify it according to fashion: Materialities of Schooling Design: 118.] [72: Head Mistresses Association Records, Reports of Annual Conferences-MSS.188/4/1/16; MSS.188/4/1/17; TBN 50. University of Warwick Modern Records Centre]

Theorizing the Visualized Body

Joyce Goodman and Jane Martin note that ‘the interaction of personal and historical pasts has become a staple of feminist scholarship’.[footnoteRef:73] Informal photographs of girls in their school uniform demonstrate this interaction as those who wore the uniform, part of the public face of the school, can reflect on their private reading of the way that they wore, or their reactions to, that uniform. Adolescence is a turbulent time of selfcreation, of working out who we are and who we want to be. Goodman and Martin consider this self-invention as ‘the struggle and contest over identity; the process of identification and an unstable shifting subject constructed through dominant conceptions and resistance to those conceptions’.[footnoteRef:74] The lived-body and the representation of that body provide a site for the inscription or encoding of this contest within teenage identity. Uniform, presented both as photograph and in detailed description, offers a focal point through which to examine both dominant conceptions of modesty and femininity and young girls’ identification of their resistance to these demands. To a disinterested observer’s eye this resistance to the dominant discourse may be almost unrecognizable but to the authorities who enforced regulations and to the girls themselves, the slightest deviation represented a challenge to the influence of the school on their creation of self. [73: Martin, J., and J. Goodman. Women and Education 1800–1980. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004: 9.] [74: Ibid., 11.]

Homi Bhabha’s work on the location of culture offers some helpful insights into the interface between culture and the creation of identity.[footnoteRef:75] The ‘in between spaces’ which ‘carry the burden of meaning’ also exist between the visual and the spoken interpretation and provide a way towards understanding the way individual identity is constructed in relation to collective identity. Bhabha focuses on cultural differences of ethnicity and nation. In terms of the educational we might think of the borders between school and home and between youth culture or ‘the teenager’ and the expectations of the school. Both photograph and descriptions of the visualized body offer the possibility for ‘the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’.[footnoteRef:76] Bhabha suggests that these spaces offer a ‘terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood, singular or communal, that initiate new signs of identity, and innovate sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining society itself’.[footnoteRef:77] [75: Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 1.] [76: Ibid.] [77: Ibid., 2.]

As noted earlier, documentary research on the history of education can create boundaries between the school and the surrounding community. The opportunity for more children to attend secondary education and the implications of the raising of the school leaving age are rarely mentioned in conjunction with texts that investigate the rise of the teenager. The teddy boy ripping up cinema seats[footnoteRef:78] bears little relation to the aspirational grammar school pupil. It is easy to think that these two individuals could not be one and the same person, yet the comment earlier by the woman who left grammar school because ‘she was more into coffee bars’ and wanted to earn money to spend on clothes demonstrates the difficulty faced by teenagers wanting to conform to peer pressure and the demands of their school. [78: Fyvel, T. R. The Young Offenders: Rebellious Youth in the Welfare State. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.]

The family added yet another dimension as Michael Carter observed in Home, School and Work.[footnoteRef:79] These three components can all be read in Figure 1. The school sets a rigid uniform code that requires its pupils to conform to a uniform identity. The girls, influenced by current fashion and a growing desire for autonomy, react by modifying the uniform (and the ‘tote bag’ symbol of 1960s London replaces the school satchel). The parents occupy the middle ground, expecting their daughters to conform to school rules but turning a blind eye to the shorter skirts and wayward hair. All three of these components may have been shared by the community of ‘the middle class’ but ‘the exchange of values, meanings and priorities may not always be collaborative and dialogical, but maybe profoundly antagonistic, conflictual and even incommensurable’.[footnoteRef:80] The wearing or the imposition of a school uniform that bears little resemblance to the fashions of the day serves to maintain the stereotypical fixed identity of the schoolgirl and boy. As Bhabha notes, it is the fixity of the stereotype that moves ‘anxiously’ between what is already recognisable and in place and the need to repeat the process in order to maintain its dominance’.[footnoteRef:81] Girls in school uniform such as the ones illustrated here might be indistinguishable across generations yet those who wear it, and those who impose it, use this very fixity in order to challenge or confirm the hierarchy within the school. The schoolgirl body acts as a site for this confrontation. One year pupils may be in trouble for having their skirts too short, the next because they are too long. In neither case is the actual length of the skirt relevant to the debate—the almost iconic ‘two inches from the ground when kneeling’ represents control and uniformity, a departure signals challenge and individualism. [79: Carter, Michael, P. Home School and Work: A Study of the Education and Employment of Young People in Britain. Oxford: Pergamon, 1962.] [80: Bhabha, Location of Culture, 2.] [81: Ibid., 66.]

Conclusion

This article has discussed how the use of the concept of the ‘visualized body’ can be incorporated into oral history analysis and practice. It has used the example of school uniform clothing the body of the schoolchild as a case-study. It has explored the way in which school uniform and the restrictions it imposed, as well as the opportunities it presented for challenging the school hierarchy, remain powerful memories when adults are asked to reflect on their experience of formal education. As part of the analysis of the relationship between the body and its role in researching the history of education, the issue of school uniform inevitably needs to be taken into consideration. The article has not dwelt on the purpose or design of school uniforms; rather it has focused on what the representation of the uniformed body means to the individual and how this might be more thoroughly theorized. It has questioned the role of uniform in the construction of teenage identity in the way in which individuals choose to conform to, or rebel against, the regulations set by the school. Avenues open to us to investigate these meanings include photographic representation, autobiographical reflection and oral history accounts. I have suggested that if we combine such disparate sources we need to find a framework that can offer a satisfactory way to generalize from the particular. The greater meaning may be found in the space between the account and the picture—more than the sum of its parts. The photograph is not just an illustration of a spoken description of the remembered schoolgirl body: the account draws added layers of meaning from the interpretation of the photograph to, and by, a third party (the interviewer). The power of the visual is confirmed by the way that even when there are no actual images to interpret, the respondent will give a detailed description of her/himself in order to explain the relationship between her/ himself and her/his schooling. In the case of 1950s and ‘60s schoolgirls the visualized body presents a site for representing the difficult individual negotiation between academic aspiration and overarching models of classed, gendered and teenage identity.

228 S. Spencer

230 S. Spencer

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