Ben Jones. The Working Class in Mid-Twentieth-Century England

This bold and provocative book investigates the working class in southern England in the middle years of the twentieth century. Using Brighton as his case study, Ben Jones sets out to reclaim class, and particularly the class experience, in shaping shared identities and memories. He rightly argues that studies of the mid-twentieth-century working class have largely been left to contemporary sociologists, while fewer historians still have strayed from the traditional working-class communities of northern England. This study is thematically structured and investigates how Brighton's working class experienced the transformation of postwar Britain in relation to employment, welfare, neighborhood networks, and the emergence of council house estates. Chapter one deals with working-class identity and convincingly urges us to rethink the salience of class as a social identifier, challenging the postmodern academics of the early 1990s. In surveying both qualitative and quantitative data, he concludes that despite changing employment patterns and declining support from the traditional Labour Party, “working class self-description has remained robust in the face of industrialisation” (p. 66). The clue to the continuation of working-class self-identification was, according to Jones, a combination of familial, neighborhood, and work cultures. Jones also investigates the slum clearances from the 1920s and finds that the stigma associated with bulldozed poorer areas became established in the newer estates of the postwar period. Furthermore, Jones also turns the spotlight on the so-called privatized worker of the 1950s and beyond. It has been traditionally argued that the working-class nuclear family became more home-centered and suburban, developing leisure interests and lifestyles similar to their middle-class counterparts. However, while Jones acknowledges that working-class families did indeed become more home-centered, their experience of home was “classed” in every respect, from pooling their resources to leading a lifestyle that was consistently criticized by the middle class.

Aesthetics · Class analysis · Identity (music) · Political science · Politics · Postmodernism · Social class · Sociology · Working class · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies