MovieChat Forums > The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) Discussion > The school dance.

The school dance.

posted 10 years ago by rogerneon
9 replies | jump to latest

I guess it's really not so strange for a school like Marcia Blaine to hold a dance where most of the girls had to dance with each other for the most part, though a few of them danced with male staff members.

My question is this: would it be possible for a school like Marcia Blane to invite boys from a nearby school to a dance? I'm presupposing that only the girls from the "senior school" would have been present.

I can imagine from my own history that if an invitation was issued, the boys would probably be in a huddle at one end of the room, and the girls would be in a similar huddle at the other end. Eventually, a couple teachers might dance and be completely alone on the dance floor. This would have broken the ice, and a few very brave boys and girls would move onto the dance floor, finally followed by others.

[–] ronfirv 10 years ago

This was set in 1936 when Britain was, largely, still quite puritanical, and the sexes were indeed segregated.
I was a teen in the mid-60's,(in Scotland) and we had some segregation of the sexes even then ; separate corridors for boys and girls, separate school entrances; in the junior forms, girls to one side of class and boys on other, and not until Vth Form were we allowed to mix. Some classes (eg. English Lit., Art, we had boys only classes). Any infringements of these rules led to 100 lines from Prefects or staff, and persistent offenders faced minor corporal punishment! I remember one of our boyhood 'dares' was running down the deserted girls corridors, unspotted by staff!
Great fun!

[–] rogerneon 10 years ago

Well, I did say that only the senior school girls would be allowed, to attend and I assume the same would hold for the boys who might have been invited. I'm sure the whole thing would have been chaperoned in a very Gestapo-like manner... it probably was anyway without any boys present.

I guess the thing is that some of the senior girls were 17 or 18, when they could potentially be invited to other functions where there was dancing. Things in the USA were still pretty conservative at the time as well, but I know that both my parents who grew up in different small towns in Idaho attended mixed-gender school dances where it was even possible to bring a DATE. And those dances were WELL chaperoned.

Even when I was in high school in the early 1970's, dances required a certain number of chaperones. A couple of times they got very daring and held dances with a live band where students from other towns were invited, and in those, the local small town police department was very much in evidence, not only inside, but in the parking lot...

[–] Qanqor 9 years ago

Well, I could believe that such a school in that time and place could have such a stick-up-the-ass that they'd insist on segregated dances. What I find somewhat less believable and a bit hard to understand is the *enthusiasm* that the girls show in that scene towards dancing with each other. It almost looks like a lesbian dance. Maybe girls are just different than boys, but I am *quite* certain that if a boys school had put on such a dance, the boys would be grimacing and very reluctant about dancing with other boys.

[–] rogerneon 9 years ago

I agree about the boys. I'd guess the younger boys probably would have had to dance the girls' parts, and they'd have HATED it.

[–] roreyking (558) 6 months ago

@ronfir - it’s funny that the 2 genders were only allowed to mix when they reached the age when they would want to have sex with each other.

[–] singjohn 9 years ago

The song that was playing was godawful!

[–] ronfirv 9 years ago

Yes it was, but wouldn't be to middle class ears in 30's Edinburgh.(I am Edinburgh born as was my mother and she grew up in the city in the times of this story. I know all of the film locations intimately, and indeed the school on which the Marcia Blane was based. Edinburgh, back then, and right into the 80's had a very high proportion of children attending fee-paying schools, more so than any other area of Scotland and I'd say as high as many English cities too. I believe at one point in the 60's/70's it was around 24%-26% of school-age children, which is a very creditable percentage indeed).

[–] EliotTempleton 8 years ago

Which is what all people living in 1936 would say about the garbage that passes for music in 2016.

[–] EliotTempleton 8 years ago

Given the fact that most people today live in the moment, and are totally ignorant of anything that happened more than two weeks ago, I shouldn't be surprised by the complete lack of knowledge of the school system in Great Britain in the 20th Century exhibited in the posts in this thread.

But I am.