Making Youth: A History of Youth in Modern Britain. Chapter 6: New

What is it about?

Youth in the long 1960s Counter-cultures and political radicalism Black youth: creative otherness Youth sub-cultures Punk and girl power Youth culture started to acquire a more self-conscious identity from the end of the 1950s. The word teenager was in common use, although the culture to which it applied was very different to what developed during the 1960s, with the expansion of consumer culture. The values of young men who were conscripted after the war and during the 1950s had much more in common with the 1930s than with the later decade and Richard Vinen has described them as an ‘in-between generation’, culturally and demographically, over-shadowed by those who had fought in the war and those who were younger; no-one born after September 1939 was called up. The outlook of the ‘baby-boomers’ who were born from the late-1940s was very different and contributed to a stronger sense of generational difference, which became more marked in the early 1960s. In 1964, for example, Mark Abrams commented on the ‘sense of alienation’ which characterised relations between the older generation raised before the Second World War and ‘the 16 million young people born and brought up after the defeat of Hitler’. This chapter starts with the 1960s, a decade often seen as dominated by this generation gap and by the so-called ‘youth rebellion’ which unsettled young and old in western Europe and north America.

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