Reviewed by: When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls' Leisure Between the Wars by Katharine Milcoy Allison Abra When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls' Leisure Between the Wars. By Katharine Milcoy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. x + 166 pp. Cloth $88, paper $26.95. For some time now, historians of modern Britain have been challenging a long-prevailing notion that the birth of the "teenager" and the creation of a leisure economy built around the young was a post-1945 phenomenon. In this book, Katharine Milcoy expands upon these arguments by claiming that not only was a "teenage consumer culture" evident in the interwar years, it was working-class girls who were the "key participants" in its development (3). Readers of this journal will appreciate how attuned Milcoy is to the specificities of age, demonstrating that their stage in the life cycle strongly influenced girls' interest in and experience of leisure. Moreover, she argues that they were active consumers, who, through the choices that they made, defined their identities and significantly reshaped aspects of both commercial leisure and British society more broadly. The study is focused on Bermondsey, in southeast London, and is attentive to its peculiarities while using the borough as a microcosm through which to make national claims. The book also relies on oral histories, and the inclusion of the voices of some of Bermondsey's "modern girls" adds richness to the narrative and analysis. The first chapter provides an overview of Bermondsey between the wars, showing that local and national transformations to industry, politics, and education expanded economic and ultimately leisure opportunities for teenage girls. Chapter 2 then considers why, despite strong historical evidence for the latter, many women later claimed in oral histories that family and work obligations had left them little time for leisure pursuits in their youth. Milcoy accounts for this by claiming that established ways of understanding leisure—specifically how historical actors spent their time when not at work—are gendered male, and do not allow for the distinct experiences of women in the public and domestic spheres. She offers a more nuanced definition of leisure that incorporates differences of gender, age, and region, arguing that for women the [End Page 491] lines between work and play were frequently "blurred" (28). They listened to the radio while performing domestic tasks like ironing or chatted about music while working the production line. Indeed, in chapter 3, Milcoy describes how social commentators sought to encourage activities that would prepare working-class girls for futures as wives and mothers. However, the high demand for unskilled, low-paid labor gave girls a range of employment opportunities, which in turn granted them the financial resources to direct toward the leisure activities of their choice. Chapter 4 continues exploring contemporary ideas and debates about leisure, focusing on those that specifically addressed "modern girls." Milcoy points out that while the behavior of young working-class women had long been a source of social concern, this period was the first to explicitly target their consumption practices. The chapter also examines their favored leisure practices, such as cinema-going, dancing, fan clubs, reading magazines and library books, sports, and holiday-making. Chapter 5, in an especially compelling analysis, explores the creative strategies teenage girls employed in order to participate in the leisure economy to a degree that was seemingly beyond their limited "spends" (their disposable income after contributing to the family purse). They often relied on sneaking into dances and movies, or "treating" by men, or participated in leisure activities from a distance, such as by dancing at home to the radio; they were also "imaginative consumers" when it came to fashion, purchasing new clothes via installment plans and savings clubs, or sharing with friends. Finally, the last chapter considers the question of respectability, arguing that teenage girls' commitment to consumption gradually helped to diminish certain social concerns about leisure, such as that cinemas and dance halls were morally suspect spaces, for the working classes and beyond. The book successfully reconstructs the social world of working-class girls in interwar Britain and evocatively captures the "fantasy" of leisure, as girls moved through sumptuously decorated...
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Oct 30, 2024
Katherine Davey 
Open Access
