Being Boys

Melanie Tebbutt is Professor of History at Manchester Metropolitan University

• Introduction1. Looking at youth2. Ordinary boys and masculine men3. Bodies and appearance4. Sex and sentiment5. Seeking advice6. Dancing and gender7. Movement, motion and street space8. Being a boy and becoming a manConclusionsBibliographyIndex

This well-researched book is a corrective to depictions of working-class young men as rigidly masculine.'Jad Adams, The TLS, 25/05/2012'A welcome addition to the literature on inter-war youth; contributing to our understanding of American influences across this 20-year period and offering insights into aspects of experiences that affected all young men, not just a minority.'John Griffiths, Reviews in History, 24/05/2012'The ultimate success of this marvellous book lies in the way that Tebbutt allows the private voices behind the public swagger of the ‘monkey parade’ to articulate the longing in 1930’s Britain for a better world while also showing how, in their own small way, boys like Les helped that world come into being.'Richard Weight, History Today, December 2012'A valuable contextual source for historians of post-war youth'Sarah Mills, Contemporary British History, May 2013'A fresh and welcome contribution to our understanding of youth in twentieth-century Britain'Kate Bradley, Twentieth Century British History, 2012'Being Boys makes an important contribution to the nexus of the history of interwar society and culture, of the history of gender and of childhood and youth, and of the history of leisure and consumerism.'Stephanie Olsen, Journal of British Studies, 52 (3) July 2013'The historian Melanie Tebbutt, Les Tebbutt's daughter, has drawn on her father's teenage diary entries, as well as contemporary memories and interviews, to try to reconstruct the inner lives of working class boys in the interwar years.'Alan Allport, London Review of Books, 21/11/2013'It is one of the most stimulating books to appear on British youth history in recent years.'David Fowler, University of Cambridge, English Historical Review, 04/09/2013'In its exploration of the subjective and affective dimensions of growing up male, Being Boys is both important and consistently moving. The boys who lie at the core of this study are complex characters who interact with dominant models of masculinity in diverse and surprising ways. Tebbutt consistently places boys’ experiences alongside those of girls and in so doing generates a richly relational sense of gender.'Claire Langhamer, University of Sussex, Sport in History, 33:4, 605-607, 2013