‘Are You Really Living?’ If Not, ‘Get With It!’

Abstract

Young women were harbingers of social change in postwar Britain; this article addresses discourses that informed their sense of self and expectations. It focuses on magazines produced for, and read by, young women in their mid-to-late teens and early twenties as a prism through which to explore ideas about the teenage self and lifestyle between 1957 and 1970. It argues that a distinctive feature of these magazines was a new ideal of young womanhood that resonated with late-modern discourses of self-discovery and self-fulfilment and which necessitated a lifestyle characterized by independence, experience and opportunity. Though an attractive ideal, it was also problematic for young women and potentially frustrating.

Introducing ‘resonance’: Revisioning the relationship between youth and later life in women born 1939–52

“…They are normative assessments of youth in the life lived, shaped by institutional experiences and popular discourse, and revealed when people reflect on whether their younger days fulfilled historically-specific expectations of what youth should entail for a person such as themselves (however they see this), and how it should prepare them for life. Significantly for our cohort, their teens and early twenties occurred when expectations of youth as a particular quality of experience expanded and became more defined (Tinkler, 2014; Todd, 2019, pp. 46–47), but the freedoms, lifestyle and opportunities for self-realisation that were increasingly associated with youth were sometimes elusive for women and typically short-lived.…”