‘Teenagers’ came into their own as a sub-group in post-war Britain, driven by rising affluence and new mass media forms. Attention from varied social-scientific traditions alighted upon them: from radical concern with the impact of teenage economic consumption on young people’s revolutionary potential, to exploration of the ways in which teenage culture resisted adult norms, and all alongside a new discipline of market research. How did all of these help to ‘create’ teenage culture as much as analyse it?

For seminar preparation, I would recommend at least one primary reading, one secondary reading, and attempting to dip into another primary or secondary as appropriate.

Seminar questions

• What sorts of young people attracted the eye of social researchers during the twentieth century and why?
• How successful was social science in accessing 'youth culture' during this time period?
• How far was the 'teenager' created by market researchers or other social scientists?
• What can we learn from these studies as historians?

Sample reading

Chris Brickell, 'The teenager and the social scientist', New Zealand Sociology, 28:1 (2013), pp. 36-61 [Link]

Laura Carter, 'The haidresser blues: British women and the secondary modern school, 1946-72', Twentieth Century British History, advanced access 2023 [Link]

Daniel O'Neill, '"People love Player's": cigarette advertising and the teenage consumer in post-war Britain', Twentieth Century British History, 28:3 (2017), pp. 414-439 [Link]

Laura Tisdall, '"The school that I'd like": children and teenagers write about education in England and Wales, 1945-1979', in Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor (eds), Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain (London: University of London Press, 2021), pp. 197-219 [Link]

Selina Todd and Hilary Young, 'Baby-boomers to "beanstalkers": making the modern teenager in post-war Britain', Cultural and Social History, 9:3 (2012), pp. 451-467 [Link]

Primary material

Further reading

Lise Butler, Michael Young, Social Science and the British Left, 1945-1970 (Oxford: OUP, 2021), chapter 4, 'The Institute of Community Studies, 1953-1958', pp. 101-157

Frank Mort, 'Boys own? Masculinity, style and popular culture', in Rowena Chapman and Jonathan Rutherford (eds), Male Order: unwrapping masculinity (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1988), pp. 193-224

Melanie Tebbutt, 'Listening to youth? BBC youth broadcasts during the 1930s and the Second World War', History Workshop, 84 (2017), pp. 214-233

Laura Tisdall, '"What a difference it was to be a woman and not a teenager": adolescent girls' conceptions of adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain', Gender and History, 34:2 (2022), pp. 495-513

Further primary sources

Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: the creation of the Mods and Rockers (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1972) [available in a later edition as a Library e-book]

J. Douglas, All Our Future: A Longitudinal Study of Secondary Education (London: Peter Davies, 1968)

Andrew Hill, ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: noise, the mob, and the English countryside’, British Journal of Sociology, 53: 1 (2002), pp. 89-105

Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958)

Michael Schofield, The Sexual Behaviour of Young People (London: Longmans, 1965)

Young people at a 'Melody Bar'. Image from Mark Abrams, The Teenage Consumer, p. 2.