How to be popular? Take a trip back to the 1950s

“Pretty hair can always overcome the handicap of a not-so-pretty face. Your hair can make or break you”: this is a taster of what author Betty Cornell advises in her Teenage Popularity Guide – a detailed manual of tips and advice published in 1953.

As well as brushing your hair with 100 strokes each night, the former teen model tells her readers: “In order to be a success in this world you have to be pretty as well as look pretty.”

It may hark back to an era of post-war repression and female aspirations tied to the kitchen sink. But when Maya van Wagenen, a shy 13-year-old, decided to give the manual a go, she emerged like a butterfly: newly confident, empowered and able to hold her own among the cool cliques at school.

Maya documented her experiences in a book, Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek, and the film rights have already been snapped up by Stephen Spielberg, making her the youngest non-actor to secure a film deal with Dreamworks. On the strength of her memoir, she has also secured a two-book deal with Penguin and was named one of TIME’s most influential teens last year.

It is all a big departure for a girl who a few years ago, put herself at the bottom of the social hierarchy at her school in Brownsville, Texas. While the volleyball girls were at the top of ladder, Maya says she was more on a level with the lowest of the low: substitute teachers.

‘I had people ask if I’d changed religions’

The book details the transformation, and how Maya worked her way through some of the topics in the 1950s manual, from dieting and hair, to posture and attitude. The Texan teen went from keeping her head down and trying not to be noticed, to wearing white gloves and a hat. She tried out a girdle, dug out some pearls and spent time putting her hair in rollers.

“So much of middle school had been very hard for me. 6th and 7th grade were very difficult, I found it hard to make friends,” she told Channel 4 News.

This is also a school where fights break out and which the FBI puts on “lockdown” during drugs raids just across the border in Mexico. It took a lot of guts to break away from the herd.

I think Betty’s advice was really hardcore, but still better than magazines Sabine Kasem, 14

“It was definitely difficult,” she told Channel 4 News. “Whenever someone stood out, it was fodder for bullying basically, and so that was really difficult for me. But the more I pushed myself out of my comfort zone, the less difficult it was.”

“By the time I hit the clothing month, people knew that something was up, and that got me the most attention because I came to school in skirts and pantyhose and big shoes with a buckle on the front and a cardigan. I went to church in a hat and gloves.

“I had people ask if I’d changed religions. There was a lot of speculation about what was going on, and I always said it was for fun.”

As well as the outdated advice about not being too “loud” while on a date with boys, Betty Cornell’s book is also full of positive-speak about keeping an upbeat attitude in the face of teenage strife. It ended up being a self-help book of sorts for Maya, and she says that the “attitude” advice had the most impact:

“Kindness is the best way to make friends and reaching out to people is very rewarding,” said Maya. “And it also leads to a level of confidence.”

‘Betty says it’s ok to be curvy’

The rather quaint advice is all a far cry from 2014, where teenagers’ social lives are all about Facebook and social media, and where magazines are full of skinny models and sex-tips. But when Channel 4 News took Maya to meet pupils from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (EGA) School, they had mixed feelings about whether they would want to “do a Maya”.

“In those days, I guess teenage girls might have just been preparing to be a mum, or a wife to someone else, but now teenage girls are planning their own futures, like the boys have done,” said 13-year-old Kristin Benson.

At the same time, looks and appearance are now as important as ever to these teens – and to many other like them across the UK and beyond – and some of the 1950s advice, distilled by Maya, seemed quite appealing in contrast:

It struck me how little the pressure to be this kind of woman has not changed at all Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

“I think Betty’s advice was really hardcore, but still better than magazines, because magazines portray different views on women (of) different sizes,” said Sabine Kasem, 14. “But Betty says it’s ok to be curvy…. Magazines go to the extremes.”

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, author of The Vagenda, agrees. She said she anticipated being slightly horrified by a teen harking back to the 1950s for advice, but was pleasantly surprised by how Maya navigated the complexities of high school, armed with Betty Cornell’s advice.

“A lot of what being cool is about (now), is being sexually available, being attractive to boys,” she told Channel 4 News. “Modern magazine advice is less achievable: you’re expected to conform to a body ideal, that is not only lacking in diversity, but also largely manipulated by computers.

“It struck me how little the pressure to be this kind of woman has not changed at all. It’s still about being attractive, being slim – it’s the same pressures that teenage girls had 60 years ago.”

The EGA pupils and Maya were agreed that the girdle can stay put in decades gone-by, where it belongs.

But they were all sold on the social advice. The chapter which resonated the most, and that Maya found the most difficult, was sitting with a different clique every day in the school cafeteria – a potential social suicide, as any teenager will tell you.

“I’m not very social,” said Alicia Avdyli, 14, “but thinking about it, this would be great. It wouldn’t be that hard to meet new people if they’re the ones that also feel that way.”

Betty Cornell would be proud.