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This article reflects on the ways researchers are affected by their engagement with the stories they encounter in research. It proposes the notion of 'research resonance' to capture the experience of living with research participants' stories, and by extension, their lives. The article draws on data collected for the 'Girlhood and Later Life' project, which investigated youth experiences and transitions to adulthood of women born between 1939 and 1952 in Britain. Reflecting on examples from a music elicitation exercise and life history narratives, the researchers on this project explore and conceptualise their experience of living with 'sociological memories'. Their accounts address how life history researchers may be challenged or affected on a personal level through their professional practice. The article concludes by outlining the key implications of 'research resonance' for the craft of analysing life-course interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes 'resonance' as a fruitful way of conceptualising the relationship between youth and later life and reflecting on its significance: resonance is how a person's 'youth' is lived with in the present of their later life. Resonance revisions youth, engaging with the complexity of its presence in the lifecourse. Relinquishing a preoccupation with continuity and linearity, youth seen from the vantage point of later life contributes fresh insights into what matters for people and how. This conceptualisation emerged from a qualitative study of women born 1939–52 which revealed that experiences attributed to the teens and early twenties have a presence in a person's later life in ways unrecognised in established approaches, namely longitudinal life-course studies and socio-cultural approaches. These resonances are often historically inflected such that some cohorts may live with their youth in later life in ways that distinguish them from their predecessors and successors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cultural understandings of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault have shifted considerably since the 1960s in the United Kingdom and more widely. This article investigates how changing discourses around sexual abuse, harassment and assault are navigated by British women in later life when they narrate experiences that occurred in their youth in the 1960s and early 1970s. It identifies six sites of youth that are relevant to understanding how women narrate experiences of sexual violence: home; school; local outdoor places; workplaces; heterosexual intimacies; independent travel. These sites are associated with different points on a 'girl to woman' register, tracing a pathway from the immaturity of girlhood, through the liminal state of young womanhood, into maturity. How interviewees positioned themselves on this register reflects how they understood their youthful selves in different sites, and their past experiences of unwanted sexual attentions. While gender inequality is understood to have limited women's education and employment opportunities in youth, it is surprisingly absent from narratives of sexual violence. In attending to this absence, we argue that what is at stake for the women in how they navigate shifting cultural discourses is narrating a version of themselves that is agentic and morally responsible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives To investigate whether the timing and nature of women's transitions out of full-time (FT) education are related to later-life subjective well-being and the life-course experiences that might explain any associations seen. Methods Data are from women in Wave 3 of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing who have participated in the life history interview and were aged 50+ at the interview (n = 3,889). Using multichannel sequence analysis, we identified 6 types of transition out of FT education (ages 14–26). Regression models were used to examine associations between transition types and life satisfaction, quality of life, and depressive symptoms at age 50+. Results Women who made early transitions to married parenthood and FT domestic labor had lower levels of well-being on all 3 later-life well-being outcomes (p <.01), compared to women who made later transitions to family life and remained employed. Women who remained single up to age 26 also had lower life satisfaction (p <.05) and quality of life (p <.01) in later life than their counterparts who married and had children. These associations were explained by the life-course socioeconomic and relationship pathways. Advantaged childhood socioeconomic circumstances and higher educational qualifications set "Later Marriage and Later employment" women apart onto advantaged trajectories and a better quality of life later (p <.01). Discussion The timing and nature of exits from FT education played a pivotal role in setting people onto life-course trajectories that influence well-being in later life for this older generation of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on a photo-elicitation project linked to a major exhibition of Shirley Baker's photos of Manchester and Salford in the 1960s and 1970s, this paper explores relationships between people and the photos that purportedly represent the communities of their childhoods. It addresses neglected questions about how documentary photos contribute to the construction of memory and about how personal memories might animate found photos. The article proposes that it is useful to describe relationships between people and photos using terminology that characterises connections between people. 'Intimate' relationships are the focus of this discussion; these occur when people have a personal connection, and feel close, to a photo. Intimate relationships were forged with Baker's photos in part because of their mnemonic power. Their utility as memory materials was not simply that they prompted remembering, including re-enactment of belonging in place, but that they did important work for participants by facilitating the composition of narratives about the self, past and present. Baker's photography collection is one of several, typically underused photographic sources in local archives, representing everyday life in post#-war Britain. Understanding how people relate to documentary photos that purportedly represent their lives, enables more effective use of found photos as sources in academic and community history contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Birth cohort studies can be used not only to generate population-level quantitative data, but also to recompose persons. The crux is how we understand data and persons. Recomposition entails scavenging for various (including unrecognised) data. It foregrounds the perspective and subjectivity of survey participants, but without forgetting the partiality and incompleteness of the accounts that it may generate. Although interested in the singularity of individuals, it attends to the historical and relational embeddedness of personhood. It examines the multiple and complex temporalities that suffuse people's lives, hence departing from linear notions of the life course. It implies involvement, as well as reflexivity, on the part of researchers. It embraces the heterogeneity and transformations over time of scientific archives and the interpretive possibilities, as well as incompleteness, of birth cohort studies data. Interested in the unfolding of lives over time, it also shines light on meaningful biographical moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial mobilities are a neglected dimension of the historiography of post-war youth and yet, as this article argues, in the late 1950s and 1960s, mobilities became integral to a redefinition of young femininity. Examining media targeting girls and young women, as well as national newspapers and women's magazines, this article explores the popularization of the idea that girls in their teens and early twenties were on the move and that particular kinds of mobility were a feature of modern girlhood. Whether out and about, travelling or migrating to cities, mobilities were often portrayed as empowering girls and facilitating transitions to adulthood; for these reasons, girls were encouraged to embrace opportunities to be going places, even if this meant challenging personal boundaries. This empowering new ideal came at a cost: youth, and the passage to adulthood, became riskier for girls. Only a thin line separated going places from out of place, as the most transformative mobilities took girls away from the parental home and other forms of adult supervision. There were long-established dangers posed by predatory men, but also new ones posed by going it alone—sexual and domestic exploitation, loneliness; risky mobilities were often less about travel than arriving someplace else. Financial resources helped safeguard girls, but survival increasingly depended on personal resources. Mobilities became a new axis of social differentiation, dividing the girls who were going places, literally and in terms of social status and cultural capital, from those who were out of place or stuck in place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how British social problem films in the late 1950s and early 1960s represented social anxieties around the sexuality of girls in their mid to late teens. Its analytic focus is upon the risks posed by modern social life to the teenage girl's sexual innocence and it argues that attending to this hitherto often-neglected sexual state brings new insights to cultural histories of young female sexualities. Discussion draws upon Beat Girl (1959), Rag Doll (1960), Girl on Approval (1961) and Don't Talk to Strange Men (1962), highlighting how these films situated the figure of the teenage girl in the liminal space of child-adult and girl-woman and how this informed concerns about her sexual vulnerability. By unpicking the films' different approaches to viewing and representing this liminal space—through the lenses of adolescence and young womanhood—the authors demonstrate how at this historical juncture the intersections of gender and age are differently emphasised and given meaning in cinematic portrayals of sexual innocence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various papers published in this issue including one by Fink and Tinkler on sexual vulnerability of teenage girls on film, oneby Edwards on rural femininity and one by McCarthy on women employees.

An introduction is presented in which the authors discuss the issue's taking stock of gender and education theme which involves the process by which a person thinks about a situation or event and then forms an opinion about it, and it mentions research regarding gender and women's education.

A small number of attempts have been made to take stock of the field of gender and education, though very few have taken methodology as their explicit focus. We seek to stimulate such discussion in this article by taking stock of the use of visual methods in gender and education research (particularly participatory and image-based methods). We undertake this exercise by looking at the claims researchers have made about the ways in which visual methods have advanced gender and education research, and by examining how these methods have been employed in research. We argue that the visual has become somewhat invisible in accounts of gender and education research. We conclude by considering different ways in which we might develop image-based research in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

History is often embedded, explicitly or implicitly, in discourses on contemporary aspects of gender and education, but relatively few scholars engage critically with history as they grapple with current issues. This article posits ‘historical sensibility’ as a means of engaging constructively with the past when scrutinising and working on current issues in gender and education. Four features of historical sensibility are mapped out and compared with established ways of approaching the relationship between the present and past. The utility of historical sensibility is demonstrated with reference to ongoing debates about the feminisation of schooling, the sexualisation of children and the leisure pursuits of young women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on children and youth increasingly features young people's photographs and/or young people as photographers. While this suggests that quite a lot is known about young people's relationships to photographs and camera technologies, this is not the case. Following an overview of studies that engage with young photographers, this article demonstrates why still very little is known about young people's photographic practices - that is, the range of ways and media through which young people take, feature in, and use photographs. The author argues that this gap in knowledge needs to be addressed. Important aspects of childhood, youth and growing up, including identity, belonging and memory, are often experienced and/or expressed in part through photographs and photography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cars, corsets, and cigarettes occupied a prominent place in British and U.S. editions of Vogue in the interwar years. All three products were presented as quintessentially modern and possessing the capacity to modernize the women who used them. This article addresses the relationship between consumption and feminine modernity, showing how affluent British and North American women were encouraged to remake themselves as modern feminine subjects through the purchase of cars, corsets, and cigarettes. By scrutinizing representations of women's relationship to modern and modernizing goods, key constituents of interwar affluent feminine modernity are identified. While Britain, Canada, and the United States took distinctive routes through twentieth-century modernity, Vogue encouraged wealthy women to imagine and create forms of feminine modernity that transcended the specificities of place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Ladettes’ are argued to be a sign, and product, of contemporary development and change; their fortunes are presented as inextricably related to the conditions of late modernity. Using the past to shed light on the present, this paper considers whether fears and claims about the behaviour of some contemporary young women in Britain are exclusive to the present. Two data sets inform the discussion: first, representations of ladettes in national and local newspapers from 1995 to 2005; second, materials relating to the ‘modern girl’ published in the popular print media between 1918 and 1928. Although there have been important changes in the conditions of girlhood since the 1920s, this historical comparison highlights continuities in the representation of ‘troublesome’ youthful femininities. We explore similarities and differences in the characteristics attributed to the modern girls of the twenties and the ladettes of recent years, and the dominant discourses that underpin popular constructions of troublesome young women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines British women's magazines and the insights that they can provide into the relationships between social class, gender and respectable feminine consumption. The discussion focuses on magazine representations of women who smoked cigarettes in the years between 1918 and 1970 with particular attention to the period up to 1950. Magazine images reveal the visual parameters of respectable smoking for women between 1918 and 1970 and the centrality of refinement to respectable consumption. However, while respectable smoking was always visibly associated with refinement, the absence of working-class smokers 1918–1970 suggests that smoking was visibly inconsistent with refined and respectable working-class femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explains how the leisure of young women became perceived as a cause of concern in England during the late 1930s and 1940s. Information on how the Second World War served as a catalyst in bringing the problem to the fore; Discussion of the way in which leisure came to be constructed as an important area of social life during the inter-war period; Ways the discursive construction of female adolescence and of leisure shaped discussion about young women's leisure and suggestions regarding their leisure needs during the late 1930s and 1940s.

This paper examines the roles and significance of the viva in the doctoral examination process. More specifically, it addresses the following question-what purposes does the viva serve in the PhD assessment process? Discussion focuses upon (1) the roles of the viva as delineated within university policy; and (2) the purposes of the viva from the perspectives of examiners, supervisors and doctoral candidates. The findings suggest that, whether viewed in terms of institutional statements, or in terms of the perspectives of academics or candidates, there is no consensus regarding the roles of the viva in the PhD examination process. Moreover, our research reveals that there are inconsistencies and contradictions concerning the purposes of the viva, both at the levels of policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship has traditionally been equated with borders and boundaries and, in particular, membership of a nation-state. Motivated by recent interest in the crossing of boundaries and processes of inclusion which operate across a common basis such as the nation-state, this article explores the ways in which international relations were implicitly and explicitly embedded in constructions of British citizenship in the 1940s. Focusing on representations of English girls in literature relating to the education and leisure of girls, this article identifies and explores four international aspects of citizenship. First, it addresses the ways in which British citizenship was defined through an implicit or explicit juxtaposition with the citizenship associated with other nation-states. This international dimension worked to delineate boundaries. Second, the article examines how British citizens were defined as members of a community which transcended the nation. Following this, it explores the expectation that girls required international knowledge in order to effectively fulfil their duties as British citizens. Finally, the article investigates some of the ways in which British citizenship involved international responsibilities. Although some aspects of girls' citizenship challenged national parochialism, the duties and characteristics of apprentice female citizens were articulated in ways that restated hierarchies which assumed the distinctiveness and authority of Britain and the British. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the scope of the 1994 Education Act. Proposals for part-time continuation education; Establishment of County Colleges; Guidelines for County College provision.

The girl or woman smoker is a 20th-century phenomenon. In 1900, smoking was invariably associated with sexually deviant womanhood. Today, smoking is firmly, if contentiously, established as a feminine practice in British society. This article examines one aspect of the 20th-century feminization of smoking in Britain, namely, the ways in which smoking practices have been presented as appropriate for young women in the period 1920-70. Advertisements featured in magazines for young women aged 15-29 years have been chosen as a particularly apt medium through which to explore some of the ways in which cigarettes and smoking practices have been delineated and infused with meaning. These advertisements constituted a discourse for the circulation of messages about the relationship of women to cigarettes. Findings reveal a number of shifts in cigarette advertisements featured in women's magazines from 1920 to 1970. First, during the 1930's and early 1940's, advertisements were, in contrast to later counterparts, preoccupied with establishing smoking as a feminine practice. Key to processes by which smoking was feminized were various mechanisms whereby the cigarette was depicted as part of the presentation of a heterosexual identity and where smoking practices were embedded in heterosexual relations and rituals. Second, there was a discernible shift in the way women were addressed by advertisements, from potential women smokers in the 1930's to more general consumers in the 1960's. Third and relatedly, the significance attached to women smoking changed between 1920 and 1970. In the 1930's, smoking was utilized to signify that women were "modern"; in the period 1960-70, smoking served to indicate that women were recognized, and accorded status, as consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article the authors attempt to shed some light on the PhD examination process, a process that is arguably far less transparent than those at other levels of British higher education. More specifically, the authors focus upon institutional policy from a sample of 20 British universities and attempt to document policy and interrogate the principles underpinning guidelines governing examination practices. They examine definitions of what constitutes a doctorate and policies governing a range of practices that are integral to the examination process. The research reveals that although there is a large degree of inter-institutional consistency regarding key criteria for the award of a PhD, close inspection of institutional policy suggests that the PhD examination is in fact conceptualised and operationalised in diverse ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the development in Great Britain of leisure training for girls from 1939-1950. Comparisons between male and female leisure training history; Post-war changes in attitudes concerning women; The Board of Education's Youth Scheme in 1939; Main types of leisure training for girls in 1941; Contrasts between Service of Youth and the Hitler Youth movement.

Service ideals were fundamental to the constructions of femininity and girlhood throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Amid the disruptions of the Second World War, service remained key to expectations of English girlhood, although, in this historical context, it was public as opposed to private forms of service that were most vociferously promoted. On the one hand, this was a resource issue. On the other, discourses on service served an explicitly cultural purpose in that they were central to the project of defining "the nation" and the "nation's" girlhood. Key to this process was the continued and implicit differentiation of British youth initiatives from the mobilization of young people in Germany and Italy. It is for this reason that attempts to understand the service expectations of English girlhood conveyed in youth policy and media representation need to be located in an international context and, more specifically, the ideological construction on the domestic front of "other," and especially "enemy," nations. Wartime discourses on girls' service were mobilized in the construction of "the nation," as well as in the constitution and differentiation of the genders.