The Liverpool Boys' Association and the Liverpool Union of Youth Clubs: Youth Organizations and Gender, 1940–70

Abstract

Employing the hitherto little used archive of the Merseyside Youth Association (MYA), an association which was created in 1969 out of the amalgamation of the Liverpool Boys' Association (LBA) and the Liverpool Union of Youth Clubs (LUYC), this article explores the role played by youth organizations in the dissemination of ideologies of gender and highlights its persistence into the post-1945 era. Using the respective positions adopted by the two organizations regarding the issue of paid work outside the home as evidence, it argues that the LBA and LUYC both aimed to train the city's young people to conform to conservative definitions of femininity and masculinity. Contrasting conceptions of appropriate work for young people of both sexes illustrates that the LBA and the LUYC defined femininity and masculinity according to middle-class precepts and that, thus, gender identity is inextricably linked with class identity. Hostility from the National Association of Boys' Clubs' (NABC) to the proposal to amalgamate the LBA and the LUYC provides further evidence of the persistence of the dissemination of conservative gender ideologies by youth organizations well into the latter half of the twentieth century.Due to the limitations of the documentary sources contained within the MYA's archive, this article focuses on the intentions of the youth organizations; research into young people's responses to these conservative prescriptions of femininity and masculinity remains to be done.