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Elected to the post of vice chairman of the sixth form committee at her new school, she approved of the way such democracy prevented “the usual biased preferential treatment”. A university degree would be a way to bide time. “That should tide me over till I’m 21, which is when I can legitimately stand for parliament. As a Tory. But I realise it’s very hard for ladies to get into parliament. Look at the figures – out of 635 only 23 are women.”

For reasons of hygiene and safety, personal grooming products, cosmetics or items of intimate clothing cannot be returned. I went on to fail pretty miserably in the things I thought I was going to do’: Anna Wright, in her old place at school. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the Observer I was embarrassed by being head girl’: Frances Stonor Saunders. Photograph: Sophia Spring for the ObserverUnfair popular bias suggests head girls are bossy and self-satisfied – and probably swots. It is no surprise to learn that Margaret Thatcher once had the title at her Grantham grammar. Nor perhaps that the wholesome Kate Winslet was head girl at her drama school. And I certainly understood, in the wake of punk, that my success at the ballot box was pretty uncool. It was a victory likely to make me more enemies than friends. This realisation was possibly the most valuable lesson that being head girl ever offered. Each of these former head girls sees the blueprint of the person they became in their younger selves. And now, all around 50 years old, they feel the story is not over. As Joanna puts it: “My husband and daughter mean the world to me. I don’t, however, feel I have quite finished in my life’s challenges.” The young Joanna believed that a husband would have to fit in: “It would have to be somebody who supports me in politics. I wonder what would have happened to Margaret Thatcher if Denis hadn’t supported her. I’m not an out-and-out feminist. I don’t like people who get riled and wear men’s clothes or scream merely to justify their point. We depend on men and men depend on us.” Also during the Spanish civil war, Falangists had shaved the heads of women from republican families, treating them as if they were prostitutes. Those on the extreme right had convinced themselves that the left believed in free love. (The most famous victim in fiction is Maria, the lover of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.) Churchill heard these stories of women snipers during his visit to Normandy on 12 June and wrote about them to Anthony Eden on his return. British officers, however, later became increasingly sceptical of these "latrine rumours".

Frances can recognise herself in the article, although her sentiments about children – she didn’t go on to have any – do not ring as true for her as the fear of being a housewife (“I’d hate to think of myself just being at home with children while my husband was out earning the money”). She noted grimly then it was “still tough for a woman in a man’s world”, asking: “How many successful women are there in the City?” But literary ambition was already in place. “I’d like to write, but how realistic that is I don’t know.” We all thought the world had changed to fit us in as career women, and then we found that it hadn’t

Confronted by the expectations of her teenage self, Anna, who now works in health and social care in Camden, detects she felt pushed in the wrong direction. “I spent quite a bit of time swimming against my natural tide in terms of career choices. I can now see from what I said then that human rights and international development, as well as the social justice stuff, was the way I was actually inclined.” The post of head girl was “a huge boost”, she thinks, because she did not feel like a “star type”. It buoyed her in tough times. “I went on to fail pretty miserably in the things I thought I was going to do – like be a radical documentary filmmaker. But I ended up taking a path that suited me much better.”