Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years
Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years
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作为男孩:两次世界大战期间的青春、休闲和身份
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发表时间:
2013
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通讯作者:
Sarah Mills
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文献类型:
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作者:
Sarah Mills
widespread social, economic and moral reform as legislators hoped, these changes in policy and practice relating to commercial sex seem to have left London prostitutes significantly more at risk of a variety of dangers including arrest, imprisonment, eviction, extortion, rape and murder than they had been in the past. As one prostitute interviewed in the 1950s by the sociologist Rosalind Wilkinson pointed out, ‘It’s no use making reforms if you do not understand the people you are making them for’ (p. 189). Laite is careful not to assume that London provides a representative case study, given its atypical character, and emphasises its regional specificities throughout the book. She observes that there is a pressing need for further investigations into the history of sex work in other regions of the UK during the twentieth century and that the related subjects of male prostitution and the commonplace and often taken-for-granted assumptions about links between sex work and drug addiction (not just historically but in the present day) both deserve book-length studies in their own right. Scholars interested in writing these much-needed histories would do well to use Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens as a model. This is a well-written, informative and engaging book that will be of great interest and relevance to all historians working on sexuality and gender in twentieth-century Britain. It will make an invaluable addition to both undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists. It is to be hoped that a paperback version will appear shortly, helping it gain the audience it deserves.