15. Danny Told Me a Thing or Two

Chapter 15: Danny Told Me a Thing or Two, opens with Norah’s diary accounts of Danny’s visits in January and April 1943 and explores her evident sexual ignorance and conflicts of respectability and desire. I discuss attitudes to sexuality with which she will have grown up, which emphasise women as sexless and men as having uncontrollable desires. I use other women’s diaries – the published Mass Observation writers, Jean Lucey Pratt, Olivia Crockett and Doreen Bates -- to explore the struggle to cast off modesty and shame. I examine the argument that attitudes to sex were liberalising in the 1940s, and the ways in which this was countered in the women’s magazines that Norah read. Norah’s friend Connie clearly had a sense of Norah’s ignorance and vulnerability when she gave Norah a book on birth control.