New Wave Women
Paying Attention to Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21784993 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hollie Price (0000-0002-6246-2986, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 316-336 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of British Cinema and Television (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1743-4521 • E-ISSN: 1755-1714 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/jbctv.2024.0724 |
| OpenAlex | W4399567685 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Scholarship in British film history has tended to suggest that the female characters in New Wave films are marginalised, dismissively associated with the trappings of consumer culture and responsible for the ultimate containment of their ‘Angry Young Men’ protagonists. In Sex, Class and Realism, which was published in 1986, John Hill situates the New Wave in relation to broader socio-economic and cultural changes in post-war Britain, including women’s shifting relationships with work, motherhood, family life and patterns of consumption. However, he concludes that the cycle failed to register women’s changing lives in the late 1950s and identifies the ‘dramatic and thematic subordination of female characters’ and a ‘streak of misogyny’ running through the cycle. Revisiting the treatment of women in the British New Wave, this article focuses on the characters Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and instead explores how Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field’s performances offer potent expressions of women’s changing lives in this period. Poised between representing individual desires, confidence and autonomy, and feelings of frustration, reserve and uncertainty, their performances vividly convey their characters’ experiences and expectations in ways that chimed with mobilities and new constructions of selfhood that were increasingly being practised by a ‘transition’ generation of young women in post-war Britain. I argue that Roberts’s and Field’s performances evoke the feelings of two different, working-class women, for whom expressions of assertiveness, sexuality and aspiration are shaped by contradictions, anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. In doing so, the article foregrounds and re-contextualises Roberts’s and Field’s contributions to the New Wave, recognising their representation of contemporary femininities in flux; and explores the promotion and critical reception of their roles, highlighting the tensions between social realism and glamour that shaped their New Wave stardom
Morning · Australian History and Society · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Medicine · Internal Medicine
I didn’t feel like my own person’
Going Places or Out of Place? Representations of Mobile Girls and Young Women in Late-1950s and 1960s Britain
Liberating the female self
Post-war girlhoods
Glamour
Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s
Teetering on the Edge
Getting Out and Getting Away
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |