Drunk with the Glitter: Space, Consumption and Sexual Instability in Modern Urban Culture (review)

Gillian Swanson’s Drunk with the Glitter searches amid what she calls the “fleeting and fractured moments of change” (12) that characterize the postwar period to trace the relationship between urban modernity, sexual instability, and consumerism. She explores in particular how understandings of this relationship inflected medical and legal discourse, government policy, and wider understandings of sexuality in postwar Britain. Swanson’s study is bookended at one end by the Second World War and at the other by the Profumo Affair, the sex scandal that very nearly toppled Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government. But in order to understand the 1960s, we need look, according to Swanson, at least as far back as the management of morale in World War II, its consequences for femininity and the family in the 1940s, and postwar consumerism and sexual behavior in the 1950s, all moments when the sexual was significantly implicated in understanding modern life.

The first three chapters of the book explore the danger posed by and to women as gender categories were reordered and stabilized after World War II. War work, rationing, and the managing of consumption all placed women squarely at the center of the wartime cause but also highlighted women’s role in the modernizing thrust of reconstruction, throwing into relief modern femininity’s effect on sexuality and the family: “Femininity—specifically youthful femininity—became a key site for the redefinition of a modern British national identity” (26). Much of this concern fell on young working-class women and their sexual and consumer choices. Official policies to promote motherhood as a desirable choice among young working-class women were not only supposed to sustain the nation’s birthrate but also expected to combat the sexual and consumer disruptions that the war had wreaked.

The book turns to the products of the family in chapters 2 and 3. Children, and particularly girls, drew the attention of both policy makers and psychologists in the 1950s and 1960s. Defective families, it was feared, created defective children. Among the most worrisome was the “problem girl,” characterized by pathological apathy, petty crime, and sexual experimentation. The problem girl’s lack of “purposiveness” left her susceptible to the gratifications of commodities and thus potentially to a life of prostitution. The field of psychopathology became particularly interested in such girls, whose “distractibility” left them disposed toward the sensory thrills and excitements of “inauthentic” entertainments and cheap mass consumerism, illustrating further the danger of emerging cultural forms.

Prostitution and homosexuality are the focus of the fourth and fifth chapters of the book and illuminate links between earlier concern with the breakdown of the family and threats to sexuality with the more threatening sexual identities that preoccupied the state in the 1950s and 1960s. The prostitute, linked to “fractures” in the family that affected her early development, was another product of postwar anxiety with modernity. But it was precisely her modern form that most concerned commentators. Increasingly diversified, normalized, and unanchored from particular areas of the city, the prostitute herself was modernity. Adapting to new transportation structures, suburban movement, and commercial travel, the prostitute’s “locatedness” unraveled and along with it the certainty of observers’ understandings of her identity. Representative of the intersection of spatiality, technology, modernity, sexuality, and observers’ anxiety over this confluence was the car prostitute. She might hire a car from which to attract customers and then remove herself and her client to another more suitable location. Her engagement with changing technology and a transformed urban environment disrupted understandings of prostitution and its regulation. Nonetheless, the Wolfenden Committee, called in 1954 to investigate the state of the law regarding prostitution and homosexuality, nonetheless concerned itself with the higher visibility of the streetwalker, overlooking more transparent emerging types.

Swanson next turns to homosexuality. Looking to shifting understandings of homosexuality since the 1920s, Swanson examines changing interest in the life of T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia...