Almost thirty years ago, equality of the sexes had a different flavor than it does today. Somehow this doesn’t seem like the sort of think my mother’s Ms. magazines would have gotten, er, behind. From the January 7, 1976 Newcastle/Tyne Evening Chronical:

School Girls Get Equal Chance To Be Caned

The schoolgirls really felt liberated when the headmaster asked the boys to leave the assembly hall. The teenagers listened proudly as the he told them that from now on they would be treated exactly the same as the boys. But the girls of Heaton School, Newcastle, were stunned when he added: “And that means you will also get the cane!”

The girls have never been caned before and today there was growing apprehension behind the scenes. A 16-year-old girl said: “We nearly died when the headmaster said that we will now get the cane. I know it’s women’s lib year but we think this is taking it too far.”

…

Headmaster Mr. Henry Askew was adamant that what’s good for the boys is good for the girls. He said at the school today: “We simply told the girls that from now on they will be punished the same as the boys.” He said that the decision had been taken as the result of pressure from the school’s women teaching staff who had had enough of the behaviour of some girls.

…

It is understood that girls will be caned if they are put in detention twice in a week.

Thanks to reader Randi for passing along the Caned Girls porn site link where she found this, and to Google for confirming, at least, that Caned Girls didn’t fabricate the newspaper story from whole cloth as a work of salacious fiction.