Bloomsbury When the Girls Come Out to Play: Teenage Working-Class Girls' Leisure between the Wars

Filling a long-standing gap both in women's history and in the material history of class culture, this book is a unique and necessary reassessment of the social and cultural scene during the inter-war period in England. By combing over the everyday practices of working-class girls in 1920s and 30s England, including a sharp focus on Bermondsey south-east London and oral testimony from women who grew up in the period, Milcoy demonstrates the persistence and ingenuity with which these teenagers gained access to the commercial leisure culture of the day, from hairstyles and fashionable dress to films, music, and dances. She shows how this access had a startling ripple effect, transforming the way young women rehearsed and contested their identities so that play, rather than work, became the primary mechanism for defining subjectivity and constructing femininity. When the Girls Come Out to Play is a refreshing and nuanced take on the social and cultural history of England between the World Wars. Review Matthew Griffiths offers some lucid and exciting reappraisals of Modernist poets, including some less often discussed (David Jones and Basil Bunting). He traces in these innovative texts the emergent forms of a global environmental ethic. Once fully recognised, the inventiveness of these modernist poets offers a gauge for the possibilities, limitations and strengths of climate change poetry in our own time. --Claire Langhamer, Professor of Modern British History, University of Sussex, UK About the Author Katharine Milcoy is Senior Lecturer in Education and Associate Lecturer in History at the University of Chichester, UK. She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Friends of The Women's Library.