Flappers and Factory Lads: Youth and Youth Culture in Interwar Britain

Abstract

The interwar years witnessed a transition in the experience, representation, and treatment of youth. While David Fowler identifies an interwar explosion of a commercialised youth culture, other historians suggest that young people’s lifestyles were fractured by class. More affluent young people were in full‐time education, but the majority of children entered the labour market at the age of fourteen. Young wage‐earners shouldered economic responsibility but increasingly experienced personal affluence as employment opportunities expanded. This influenced the proliferation of dance halls and cinemas and shaped political interest in young people. Gender as well as class affected lifestyles: parents allowed sons more freedom, but young women’s employment opportunities expanded significantly, enabling them to become important leisure consumers. Poverty prevented the emergence of a uniform, commercialised youth culture before the Second World War, but socially, and sometimes politically, young people expressed collective interests and concerns, albeit shaped by social class.

9 Fathers, sons, and ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ family life, 1945–1974

“…Democratic structures of household organisation might also include children, once old enough; although, as had been the case before the war, the younger generation's weight of responsibility was often similarly unequally gendered. 39 For example, it was Andrew Coverley's sisters who would help their mother with the cooking, washing, and cleaning, while Andrew would join his father, Peter, to do the shopping every Saturday morning. 40 Peter's job was also to carry out repairs and undertake the 'heavy manual' work in the garden, while his wife was 'on flowers and general supervision'.…”