Being Boys: Youth, Leisure and Identity in the Inter-War Years, by Melanie Tebbutt

Abstract

British social history is in a transitional phase at present. No longer, as in the 1970s and 1980s, a radical discipline brimming with innovative and wide-ranging scholarship on, for example, the role of music hall in late nineteenth century British imperialism; the historical significance of apprentices’ strikes of the 1930s, or spending and saving in the context of working-class life and culture, 1870–1939, it is now a hybrid form; less concerned with social questions and far more preoccupied with ‘cultural’ and sociological agendas—with ‘gender’, ‘masculinity’ and, to take the key buzzword of this study, ‘identity’. In effect, much British social history has been turned into women’s and gender studies. Melanie Tebbutt’s new book is a case in point. Belonging to a Manchester University Press series on ‘Gender in History’ which claims to have ‘changed the face of history’ since the 1970s, it sits oddly in a series dedicated to revealing ‘the lived experience of women in the past and the present’. The book deserves to be unshackled from this feminist agenda and to be marketed as a monograph in its own right. It is one of the most stimulating books to appear on British youth history in recent years—though it is not an easy read and is marred by modish sociologising at several points.