HENA0392IU English - Free topic 18: Youth, Gender and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Britain (Exam form B)

Volume 2014/2015
Content

This course will introduce students to changing understandings of youth and gender roles and relations in twentieth-century British society.  The concept of youth only emerged in Britain in the late nineteenth-century.  Thereafter youth and the presence of young people in society began to assume growing significance, reflecting wider social, economic, political and cultural changes over time.  On this course students will examine some of the key ways in which changing ideas about and attitudes towards young people intersected with gender and social class.

 

Key themes to be addressed will include citizenship, delinquency, labour, and war, as well leisure, the home, family and sexuality.  We will consider how concerns about young people as future citizens, workers, and mothers and fathers shaped social policy towards them.  Within these areas of national life we will also think about the particular experiences of young men and women, and the subjectivities they developed in response to prevailing social norms on gender and social class.

 

Students will be asked to assess the developing historiography on youth, gender and twentieth-century British society.  They will be encouraged to consider the role state institutions, social scientists, medical experts and the media played in shaping the roles of young men and women in public and private life.  The module will give students the opportunity to study a range of British sources including secondary literature, social scientific surveys, journalism, oral and pictorial sources, film, government reports, and political writings and ephemera.

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Class Instruction
  • 28
  • Preparation
  • 176,75
  • Total
  • 204,75