Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain. Chapter 3: Organised and unorganised Youth

What is it about?

Organised youth movements Political youth organisations Containing youth in a changing world Youth-led anti-racist activism The evolution of a state-funded youth service This chapter charts some of the ways in which adults attempted to organize young people once they left school, starting with the activities of urban gangs, whose violent activities and reputation in the late-Victorian and Edwardian were part of a broader international trend, as elite groups worried about the social and political tensions of urban expansion and the growth of poor working-class communities. There are omissions, not least young people’s involvement in trade unions, suffrage campaigns, the feminist movement of the 1960s and youth groups in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The politically active were always a minority, often a very small one, and most young people never joined a youth movement or political group of any sort, yet these movements were often influential beyond their numbers, culturally and politically, and the chapter suggests both the complex ways in which adults imagined young people as they wanted them to be and the pragmatism and idealism of young people themselves.

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