Being Boys: Youth, leisure and identity in the Inter-war years. Conclusion

What is it about?

Being boys opened with the regenerative significance that youth assumed after the First World War, and focused on how ex-soldiers sought new meanings in reformulating ideas of manliness and masculinity for the post-war boys’ club movement. Valorising the manly potential of working-class boys at a time when women’s growing visibility in society seemed to be making masculinity more vulnerable and uncertain represented the desire of an older generation to maintain the values of ‘traditional’ manliness. These preoccupations with moulding working-class boys and young men into ‘appropriate’ forms of masculinity were in tension with the relaxed models of masculinity which were assuming increasing prominence in commercial popular culture. All had implications for how working-class boys defined and were expected to define themselves, and this book has attempted to explore the complex connections between representations and experience, moving between adult perceptions and the perspective of an individual boy such as Les, whose mundane chronicling of the everyday not only contrasts with the rhetorical constructions of earlier chapters but also illustrates how the contingent, varied nature of youthful masculinities defies easy generalisations. The challenge of this study has been to examine the leisure lives of working-class boys and young men from new perspectives and to explore less familiar areas of youthful masculinity, which is why some significant aspects of male leisure, such as sport, have received less attention. This era was one in which working-class young people’s engagement with commercial leisure was limited by their broader financial responsibilities in the household economy. Yet,...

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