Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-g7rbq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-26T19:17:35.571Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Bodies, Sexuality and the “Modernization” of the British Working Classes, 1920s to 1960s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2006

Stephen Brooke
Affiliation:
York University

Abstract

A neglected aspect of the perceived “embourgeoisement” of the British working-classes in the 1950s was the representation of a blurring of class difference around questions of sexuality. In different ways, female bodies and sexuality in the postwar period became a means of talking about changing class identity and the modernization of society. In the 1920s and 1930s, the working-class body and working-class sexuality served as counterpoints to largely middle-class ideas of modern femininity and sexuality. Working-class women's inability to control their reproduction was portrayed as one cause of the deprivation experienced by the working classes. In the fifties, by contrast, working-class bodies and sexuality had become signifiers of the modernization of British class society. Working-class women were perceived as being able to control the size of their families. Such control was, with full employment and better housing, a mark of a modern, affluent working class. At the same time, working-class marriage was represented as increasingly incorporating notions of companionability and sexual pleasure previously only seen in middle-class life. “Embourgeoisement” in postwar Britain was thus represented as having a sexual aspect.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)