Here are a few short anecdotes that hark back to another age culled recently from the web.

Mary P. London says:

After I left school I went to work for a firm of solicitors. This was during the early 1960s and I felt all the way grown up. Then disaster struck and after two years I was made redundant.

Luckily my father had an insurance brokerage and he had me come and work for him.

Bearing in mind that I hadn’t lived at home for two years, I was 20, so there was no way I thought I would have to curtail my freedom.

Right from the start he told me I couldn’t smoke anymore. I was furious, but I hid my habit after that. Then he started asking about my going out habits on a work night.

I think I resented it so much that I started going out to spite him. This is what led me to coming to work one day at almost 10 in the morning.

I realise now that anyone else would have been sacked and at the time I would have settled for that.

Dad was furious. I can hear him now saying, “If you don’t buck your idea up girl I am going to tan your backside for you.”

I swore at him and told him no way.

“You are not too old to across my knee,” he said. This in front of two co-workers.

I don’t remember what I said. I probably swore at him again. I might even have said “you wouldn’t dare.” In any case, a moment later I was over his knee with my short skirt up getting the spanking of my life on the seat of my pants.

That wasn’t the end of it. At the end of the day before the others had gone home he had me stand in the corner of the office until he was ready to “deal with me.” I was pretty meek by then, but I had never been so embarrassed.

Later that day, he took my knickers down as I bent over his desk and got another good hiding from his belt.

It wasn’t the last time that it happened and I pretty much gave up smoking and partying on a weeknight after that. The worst part was that he always made me stand in the corner to wait for it, this right where the others could see me.

Shortly after that first time, another young girl started at his office and he treated her the same. She thought he was wonderful. I guess I did too, since I went on working for him for another five years.

Getting a spanking got less and less as I entered my 20s, but even up to the week I left I am not sure I was ever entirely too old.

On FemFirst Kay wrote:

Back in the so-called permissive 1970s I came home to find my daughter in bed with a boy. She was stark naked, as was he, and I was outraged.

Then she had the temerity to say it was “No biggie” while lighting up a cigarette in my house.

I hauled her from the bed and spanked her bare behind for all I was worth while the boy in question scrambled for his clothes to flee.

“Not in front of Steve,” she wailed and “I’m too old for this.”

I could barely hide my amusement when ‘Steve’ said, “See you around babe, I can see you and your mother have a lot to discuss.”

I sure did. I think I spanked her into a wreck and then grounded her. I think being grounded at 19 was far worse than the spanking as I made sure she didn’t hide it from her friends. Although I had to threaten to spank her again to keep her to it.

Pat writes:

I was spanked until I was over 19; an embarrassing event that usually took place over my mother’s knee. She always raised my skirt and bared my bottom.

This was back in the 1950s, I turned 20 in 1959, and back then there was no regard for my dignity.

Mother always spanked me with a big old hairbrush which purpled and bruised my bare bottom until I was howling like a kid. Although she usually took me to my room or hers, there was always someone around and everyone knew I was getting it.

Sometimes she didn’t bother to see that the doors were closed, so even if they didn’t see it (and I know that on at least one occasion a boy cousin peeked) they certainly couldn’t miss hearing it.

Once when I was at my Aunts, she scolded me for answering her back and told me if I didn’t mind my manners that she would spank me. I told her that at 19 I was too old. Big mistake.

She spanked me in her back garden in full view of whoever could see, skirt and slip around my waist, with my pants around my knees, there for all to see.

I’ve never forgotten the humiliation of the hoots of the boys next door watching me over the fence.

Oddly enough I sort of enjoyed it, despite breaking down into floods of tears so that my mascara ran and stained my aunt’s skirt.