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.” 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 Observer 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.) For reasons of hygiene and safety, personal grooming products, cosmetics or items of intimate clothing cannot be returned. The head girl who has come closest to grasping the reins of power is Joanna Gardner, who went to Pimlico School (now Pimlico Academy). This mixed comprehensive in London offered her refuge from a previous convent school, as Joanna, the daughter of Tory peer Baroness Gardner of Parkes, explained at 18: “I hated it. I had a lot of bullying. Here I’m a different person. They take you for what you are.”

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Jealousy masqueraded as moral outrage, because people envied the food and entertainment these women had received as a result of their conduct. When Arletty, the great actor and star of the film Les Enfants du Paradis, died in 1992, she received admiring obituaries that did not mention the rumour that she had her head shaved at the liberation. These obituaries even passed over her controversial love affair with a Luftwaffe officer. But letters to some newspapers revealed a lingering bitterness nearly 50 years later. It was not the fact that Arletty had slept with the enemy which angered them, but the way she had eaten well in the Hôtel Ritz while the rest of France was hungry. 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.” Many victims were young mothers, whose husbands were in German prisoner-of-war camps. During the war, they often had no means of support, and their only hope of obtaining food for themselves and their children was to accept a liaison with a German soldier. As the German writer Ernst Jünger observed from the luxury of the Tour d'Argent restaurant in Paris, "food is power". Unfair 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.

Joanna is now a Conservative councillor in the London Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and stood against David Miliband in South Shields in the 2001 general election. A qualified solicitor, she has worked on large public projects, frequently dealing with government. In the late 80s she “cringed” when the magazine article came out and she feels much the same seeing it now. “But 30 years on,” she says, “some of the issues remain – for example, the need for more women MPs.”Elsewhere some men who had volunteered to work in German factories had their heads shaved, but that was an exception. Women almost always were the first targets, because they offered the easiest and most vulnerable scapegoats, particularly for those men who had joined the resistance at the last moment. Altogether, at least 20,000 women are known to have had their heads shaved. But the true figure may well be higher, considering that some estimates put the number of French children fathered by members of the Wehrmacht as high as 80,000.