ABSTRACT
Earlier in this issue it was pointed out that sub-cultures ‘provided for a section of working class youth, mainly boys, one kind of strategy for negotiating their concrete collective existence’ (our emphasis). The absence of girls from the whole of the literature in this area is quite striking, and demands explanation. Very little seems to have been written about the role of girls in youth cultural groupings in general. They are absent from the classic subcultural ethnographic studies, the ‘pop’ histories (like Nuttall, 1970), personal accounts (like Daniel and McGuire, eds., 1972), or journalistic surveys (like Fyvel, 1963). When they do appear, it is either in ways which uncritically reinforce the stereotypical image of women with which we are now so familiar – for example, Fyvel’s reference, in his study of Teddy Boys, to ‘dumb, passive teenage girls, crudely painted’ (1963): or they are fleetingly and marginally presented:
It is as if everything that relates only to us comes out in footnotes to the main text, as worthy of the odd reference. We come on the agenda somewhere between ‘Youth’ and ‘Any Other Business’. We encounter ourselves in men’s cultures as ‘by the way’ and peripheral. According to all the reflections we are not really there.
