When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls' Leisure between the Wars by Katherine Milcoy (review)

In the late 1920s, middle-class reformers understood that teenage girls were exhausted from long days of factory work, and they aimed to provide "constructive" evening activities that corrected perceived deficits in working-class labor and family life. To club leaders' frustration, however, girls in urban working-class communities had different ideas about leisure. They devoted their scarce resources to commercial amusements and marshaled their creativity and skills to create, borrow, or save for the dresses and accessories that marked their claim to interwar consumer culture.

In When Girls Come Out to Play, Katharine Milcoy shows how scholars' misconceptions about gender and class in the early to mid-twentieth century have obscured the historical significance of working-class teen girlhoods. According to Milcoy, historians have wrongly assumed that engagement in commercial leisure required substantial disposable income, which became available to adolescents only in the postwar years and, even then, only to boys. By centering girls, the book makes clear that there was, in fact, an adolescent working-class consumer culture in the decades prior to World War II and that girls both engaged in and helped to create it even when disposable income was limited by family obligations and low wages.

Milcoy makes this broad argument through a local case study of Bermondsey, England, known in the interwar years as the larder of London, where the air smelled of biscuits, jam, pickles, jellies, and chocolates. Milcoy's sources include local newspapers, records, and journals of the girls' club movement, municipal records, and fifteen oral testimonies. Her sources reveal that changing labor, educational, and municipal practices opened up new possibilities for girls to pursue leisure activities. Between the time when girls typically left school around age fourteen and entered into marriage and motherhood in their early twenties, they became full-time workers in new "light" industries of textile manufacturing and food processing. The work was low paying and unskilled, but new labor protections (such as hour restrictions) and local government improvements (such as electrification and municipal laundries) meant that young workers had more time for leisure in the evening hours than they had previously.

At the same time, consumer culture was emerging, and working-class girls drew on class-specific practices to avoid missing out. Although they turned most of their income over to their parents, they used the remainder to gain access to the venues and fashions that enabled pleasurable forms of social interaction and collective fantasy life. To stretch their meager resources, they participated in neighborhood savings clubs, loan clubs, and dress exchanges. Those who had learned from work or home how to make dresses circulated the latest patterns or designed their own, adopting the shortened skirts and straight lines that characterized modern, middle-class fashions. Club workers noted girls' uncharacteristically heavy participation in dressmaking classes, as girls strategically devoted their time to learning skills that they could apply immediately.

Interviews and club leaders' publications reveal that more than anything else, what motivated working-class girls' use of leisure was their desire for fantasy and escape. In "The Modern Girl: Spoilt for Choice," arguably the most compelling and original chapter of the book, Milcoy paints a picture of the luxurious and thematically stylized cinemas of the 1920s, which "created a physical landscape in total contrast to the girls' everyday reality." When they entered the theater or adjoining café or orchestra area, they entered "a dream world" and "were living the fantasy" (62—63). Evidence for this interpretation comes in part from an essay-writing competition by the Girls' Friendly Society on the theme of the cinema, which complements the memories of oral history narrators. In the 1930s, large commercial dance halls spread across London, adding to the possibilities for an evening of entertainment and escape from the everyday routines of work and home.

Milcoy suggests, furthermore, that...