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of declining working hours and increasing wage packets. 9 This working-class Modern Girl availed herself of leisure activities such as cinemas and dance halls; she spent her pay packet on the latest affordable fashions and cosmetics. 10 Perhaps this is why social critic J. B. Priestley (1894–1984), in his journeys throughout England in 1933, insisted that England’s factory girls looked like actresses. 11 Lest we think this Modern Girl was a piece of frivolous fluff, Alexander touts the aspirations of modern working girls: some were active in trade unions and
discussed in this period suggests the enticement of recreational culture. The 1950s anxiety about ‘the problem of leisure’ came about as more statutory holidays and shorter working hours led to increasing consumption of activities such as television, cinema, sport and holidays. Historian Brian Harrison has written that ‘technological change, improved transport, growing affluence, and (for many) reduced working hours, were opening up hitherto unimaginable cultural and recreational opportunity’. 12 And yet, despite this bevy of career options, many women ended their waged
, going to the cinema or whatever. … And what was more interesting was often they would talk about their own faith, which usually was, I mean very often appalling negative experiences of schools or nuns or priests, not necessarily sexual, but of repression, of feeling not understood or they were often difficult children so they’d not felt accepted. But so often they wanted to talk, not necessarily about faith specifically, not about God, but about values, about what they were doing. 54 She experienced a relationship of exchange: of giving and receiving. Her response
of newsworthy events. Active congregations faced similar proscriptions. Yet, attitudes differed amongst congregation leaders. The prioress of the Augustinian Canonesses surprised her sisters in June 1953 with a rented television set so that the community could watch Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation day together. 53 By the late 1950s, young women entering religious life after the war were accustomed to access to news and entertainment via newspapers, radio, cinema and cine newsreels. Television was fast becoming Britain’s most important leisure activity and as a