Working Class Masculinities in the Interwar Years: Youth, Leisure and Identity

对青春和青春期的生动叙述主导了人们对年轻人生活的普遍理解。他们塑造了政府的青年政策，影响了青年研究人员的学术项目，满足了媒体和公众的胃口，往往以理解“平凡和单调的经历”为代价，而这正是大多数年轻人的命运。历史学家在青少年的无纪律、街头帮派和犯罪行为中发现了“好的模仿”，尽管这些只涉及少数男孩。大众对年轻人（尤其是年轻人）生活的审视仍然集中在更离谱的事情上，因为戏剧性的刻板印象继续掩盖了大多数人的基本一致性。这个项目代表了对不同的青年历史需求的回应，它将工人阶级年轻男性的历史经历置于更广泛的性别变化背景下，并挑战了男性青少年的主流刻板印象，即“有麻烦的青年”或“有麻烦的青年”；其中一个探讨了被忽视的青少年“顺从”和顺从问题，并展示了青少年男子气概的意义和表现是如何以经常被忽视或低估的方式微妙地存在的。该项目认为，历史学术需要超越一维的分析，这种分析基于有组织的青年运动的档案优势，对特殊的青年行为或特定类型的青年一致性给予特权。它有助于更细致入微地了解年轻的男子气概，特别是主流青年，通过评估通常在男性青年文化考试中缺失的安静、墨守成规的态度和行为。在两次世界大战之间的年代里，教育学家和青年工作者最关心的是如何最好地向新一代工人阶级年轻男性灌输男子气概。这项研究将这种修辞上的男子气概与男孩们自己参与他们鼓励的日常活动的务实性进行了对比。它表明，通过大众媒体和商业娱乐，接触到更轻松的社会和情感规范如何微妙地影响了青少年时期的年轻人的自我意识，并探讨了个人行为和社会互动的新模式如何影响工人阶级男孩和年轻人的自我形象和焦虑，特别是在20世纪30年代，“第一个感受到大众媒体对社会的全面影响的十年”。大众媒体的“魅力摄影”标志着女性身体越来越性感化，研究认为，这往往掩盖了它对年轻男性身体和男性体格概念的复杂影响，因为新的视觉形式有助于塑造男性的自我意识和对身体形象和时尚的敏感性。更轻松的社会关系和性感的休闲空间，如舞池，为年轻男性提供了新颖的表演和被关注的机会，但也给男性世界的青春期感觉带来了新的焦虑和不确定性，该研究通过个人和大众媒体的建议专栏探讨了这一点。它还研究了骑自行车和步行等日常活动如何在青春期塑造男性的社会身份，帮助赋予地点和地点特定的男性意义。广泛的定性证据和当代调查被用来探讨这些问题，包括报纸、杂志、自传、口述历史、信件、群众观察和男孩俱乐部运动的记录。这个项目最不寻常的主要来源是我父亲的日记，他在20世纪30年代的北安普顿写了十几岁的日记，这些日记被仔细地与这些更广泛的趋势和发展联系起来。

Vivid narratives of youth and adolescence have dominated popular understanding of young people's lives. They have shaped government youth policy, influenced the academic projects of youth researchers and fed the appetites of the media and general public, often at the expense of understanding 'the mundane and humdrum experiences' which are most young people's lot. Historians have found 'good copy' in youth indiscipline, street gangs and delinquency, although these have only ever involved a minority of boys. Popular scrutiny of young people's lives (particularly young men) still focuses on the more outrageous as dramatic stereotypes continue to obscure the essential conformity of the majority. This project represents a response to the need for a different history of youth, one which places the historical experiences of working-class young males in the context of broader gender changes and which challenges dominant stereotypes of male adolescents as either 'youth in trouble' or 'youth as trouble'; one which explores neglected issues of adolescent 'compliance' and conformity and which demonstrates how meanings and representations of adolescent masculinity were/are nuanced in ways which have often been disregarded or under-estimated. The project argues that historical scholarship needs to move beyond one-dimensional analyses which privilege exceptional youth behaviour or particular types of youth conformity based on the archival dominance of the organized youth movement. It contributes to a more nuanced understanding of youthful masculinities, particularly mainstream youth by assessing the quieter, conformist attitudes and behaviours usually absent in examinations of male youth culture. Educationalists and youth workers were at the forefront of concerns about how best to inculcate manliness in a new generation of working-class young men in the interwar years and the research contrasts this rhetorical masculinity with the pragmatic everydayness of boys' own involvement with the activities they encouraged. It suggests how exposure to more relaxed social and emotional codes through the popular press and commercial entertainment subtly influenced young men's sense of self during adolescence and explores how new models of personal behaviour and social interaction influenced the self-image and anxieties of working-class boys and young men, particularly in relation to images of the body during the 1930s, the 'first decade to feel the full impact of mass media on society'. The 'glamour photography' of the popular press signified the growing sexualisation of the female body and the research argues that this has tended to over-shadow its complex implications for young men's bodies and notions of the male physique, as new visual forms helped shape male self-consciousness and sensitivity to body image and fashion. More relaxed social relationships and sexualized leisure spaces such as the dance floor offered young men novel opportunities to perform and be seen yet also introduced new anxieties and uncertainties to the male world of adolescent feeling, which the research explores in relation to individuals and through the advice columns of the popular press. It also examines how everyday activities such as cycling and walking shaped male social identity during adolescence, helping to invest place and locality with particular masculine meanings. An extensive range of qualitative evidence and contemporary surveys are used to explore these issues, including newspapers, magazines, autobiographies, oral histories, letters, Mass-Observation and the records of the boys' club movement. The project's most unusual primary source is my father's diaries, written in his mid teens in 1930s' Northampton, which are carefully contextualised in relation to these broader trends and developments.