ABSTRACT
Introduction Two visual images of the working class vie for attention in the popular memory of the inter-war years: the cloth cap and spare frame of the unemployed man whose wasted face and staring eyes still wrench pity from the onlooker; and the young working girl - lipsticked, silk-stockinged, and dressed, in the phrase of novelist, playwright, and broadcaster J. B. Priestley, ‘like an actress’. The juxtaposition pierced contemporary consciousness. The two figures represented, on the one hand, the means test, hunger marches, and Orwell’s ‘twenty million inadequately fed’; and, on the other,
the England of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations, factories that look like exhibition buildings, of giant cinema and dance-halls and cafes, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor-coaches, wireless, hiking . . . grey hound racing and dirt tracks, swimming pools and everything given away for cigarette coupons.1 This was the north/south divide. It was also a sexual division.
