This new study explores how British youth was made, and how it made itself, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Urbanisation and industrialisation brought challenges that altered how young people were both perceived and understood. As adults found it difficult to comprehend the rapidity of societal change, focus on the young intensified, and they became a symbol of uncertainty about the future. Highlighting both change and striking continuity, Melanie Tebbutt traces the origins and development of key themes and debates in the history of modern British youth. Current issues such as the ageing of western societies, high levels of youth unemployment and the potential for social and political unrest make this a timely study.
This is a lively account of post-war British youth, combining history, theory and debate. It examines the emergence of youth as a social category which came to embody the hopes and fears of British society in the decades after 1945.
This book examines the emergence of modern working-class youth culture through the perspective of an urban history of post-war Britain, with a particular focus on the influence of young people and their culture on Britain’s self-image as a country emerging from the constraints of its post-Victorian, imperial past. Each section of the book – Society, City, Pop, and Space – considers in detail the ways in which working-class youth culture corresponded with a fast-changing metropolitan and urban society in the years following the decline of the British Empire. Was teenage culture rooted in the urban experience and the transformation of working-class neighbourhoods? Did youth subcultures emerge simply as a reaction to Britain's changing racial demographic? To what extent did leisure venues and institutions function as laboratories for a developing British pop culture, which ultimately helped Britain re-establish its prominence on the world stage? These questions and more are answered in this book.
This book explores the significance and meaning of the countryside within mid-twentieth century youth movements. It examines the ways in which the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, Woodcraft Folk and Young Farmers’ Club organisations employed the countryside as a space within which ‘good citizenship’ – in leisure, work, the home and the community – could be developed. Mid-century youth movements identified the ‘problem’ of modern youth as a predominantly urban and working class issue. They held that the countryside offered an effective antidote to these problems: being a ‘good citizen’ within this context necessitated a respectful and mutually beneficial relationship with the rural sphere. Avenues to good citizenship could be found through an enthusiasm for outdoor recreation, the stewardship of the countryside and work on the land. However, models of good citizenship were intrinsically gendered.
This book traces the history of youth culture from its origins among the student communities of inter-war Britain to the more familiar world of youth communities and pop culture. Grounded in extensive original research, it explores the individuals, institutions and ideas that have shaped youth culture over much of the twentieth century.
Let’s spend the night together explores how sex and sexuality provided essential elements of British youth culture in the 1950s through to the 1980s. It shows how the underlying sexual charge of rock ‘n’roll – and pop music more generally – was integral to the broader challenge embodied in the youth cultures that developed after World War Two. As teenage hormones rushed to move to the music and take advantage of the spaces opening up through consumption, education and employment, so the boundaries of British morality and cultural propriety were tested and often transgressed. Be it the assertive masculinity of the teds or the lustful longings of the teeny-bopper, the gender-bending of glam or the subterranean allure of an underground club/disco, the free love of the 1960s or the punk provocations in the 1970s, sex was forever to the fore and, more often than not, underpinned the moral panics that fitfully followed any cultural shift in youthful style and behaviour. Drawing from scholarship across a range of disciplines, the Subcultures Network explore how sex and sexuality were experienced, presented, conferred, responded to and understood within the context of youth culture, popular music and social change in the period between World War Two and the advent of AIDS. The essays locate sex, music and youth culture in the context of post-war Britain: with a widening and ever-more prevalent media; amidst the loosening bonds of censorship; in a society shaped by changing patterns of consumption and the emergence of the ‘teenager’; existing, as Jeff Nuttall famously argued, under the shadow of the (nuclear) bomb.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. The period between the 1960s and the 1990s has traditionally been associated with sexual liberation and a growing sense of permissiveness in Britain, during which cultural and social norms of young people's sexuality went through a dramatic shift. Using the Brook Advisory Centre (Brook) as a case study, Responsible Pleasure examines how and why this occurred, providing a socio-cultural history of youth sexuality in Britain over these three decades. It focuses on Brook as a pioneering sexual health charity operating on the cusp of voluntary and state-financed sectors. From the opening of its first centre in London, followed by other centres including Birmingham (1966), Cambridge (1966), Bristol (1968), and Edinburgh (1968), to the present day, Brook has been a major provider of contraceptive advice and sexual counselling to unmarried people and teenagers. It pioneered an initiative that would form the primary model for the provision of advice on contraception for teenagers in Britain and remains a key player in sexual health services today. Although Brook has provoked fierce opposition and triggered recurrent public debates on teenage sexuality, little is known of its history. As a non-governmental organisation with deep connections to the Family Planning Association (FPA) and the National Health Service (NHS), Brook offers a fascinating case study for exploring the relationship between changing sexual cultures, sexual politics, and young people's sexual experiences, intimacy, and subjectivities. Drawing on a wide range of archived and published materials, as well as oral history interviews conducted by the author, this book provides a substantial and original contribution to scholarship on the forging of the modern sexual subject.
In The Making of Modern Britain, Andrew Marr paints a fascinating portrait of life in Britain during the first half of the twentieth century as the country recovered from the grand wreckage of the British Empire. Between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of the Second World War, the nation was shaken by war and peace. The two wars were the worst we had ever known and the episodes of peace among the most turbulent and surprising. As the political forum moved from Edwardian smoking rooms to an increasingly democratic Westminster, the people of Britain experimented with extreme ideas as they struggled to answer the question ‘How should we live?’ Socialism? Fascism? Feminism? Meanwhile, fads such as eugenics, vegetarianism and nudism were gripping the nation, while the popularity of the music hall soared. It was also a time that witnessed the birth of the media as we know it today and the beginnings of the welfare state. Beyond trenches, flappers and Spitfires, this is a story of strange cults and economic madness, of revolutionaries and heroic inventors, sexual experiments and raucous stage heroines. From organic food to drugs, nightclubs and celebrities to package holidays, crooked bankers to sleazy politicians, the echoes of today's Britain ring from almost every page.
Empire's daughters traces the interconnected histories of girlhood, whiteness, and British colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the study of the Girls’ Friendly Society. The society functioned as both a youth organisation and emigration society, making it especially valuable in examining girls’ multifaceted participation with the empire. The book charts the emergence of the organisation during the late Victorian era through its height in the first decade of the twentieth century to its decline in the interwar years. Employing a multi-sited approach and using a range of sources—including correspondences, newsletters, and scrapbooks—the book uncovers the ways in which girls participated in the empire as migrants, settlers, laborers, and creators of colonial knowledge and also how they resisted these prescribed roles and challenged systems of colonial power.
