Being Boys: Youth, leisure and identity in the inter-war years. Chapter 1: Looking at youth

What is it about?

Chapter 1 focuses on publications by several well-known youth workers who were also ex-combatants, to suggest the complex commemorative dimension to their work in boys' clubs, where ideas of citizenship, manhood and the rational use of leisure were distinctively fashioned not only by war memories and experiences but also by heightened post-war awareness of female ‘otherness’ as young women's social and economic visibility increased. The motivations of such writers offer an implicit commentary on older masculinities in the sense that their involvement with these boys suggests the deep emotional legacies of their war experiences and how these were ‘contained’ not only in writing but in social action.

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