



1. What are the traditional expectations of marriage in Britain? (Pp19, 22, 23)
2. How do you visualise the typical family in modern Britain? (Pp 19)
3. What changes in the family and marriage have occured since the Second World War?
Which are the most significant? How do you explain them? (Pp 19, 20, 24, 25, 26)
4. What do you understand of the term "youth culture"? Can you give some specific examples of youth subcultures or cults? Do all youth subcultures have certain common features? (P21)

 Diverse families
 Nuclear family
 Lone-parent family
 Cohabiting couple
 Common-law/de facto marriage
 Civil partnership

 Marriage: half —fail; rate—lowest since records in 1840
 Divorce: rate —highest in Europe;
1+child/4 before age 16 —divorce of their parents
 Lone parenting: increased three-fold in the last 20 years, 1/10 families
 4/10 people: born outside marriage
 1/10: cohabiting

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1865

 Complete family size of 2 kids: 1/3 women
 Childlessness: 1/5 women
 Causes:
 Falling infant death rates fell
 The expense of having children
 Career vs. children

Darren Hayes
Savage Garden

 "I can honestly say it was the happiest day of my life," writes Hayes of the civil partnership ceremony, which took place in London.
"I feel lucky to live in an era where my relationship can be considered legally legitimate, and I commend the U.K. government for embracing this very basic civil liberty."

 Britain legalized civil partnerships in
December 2005.
 Civil Partnership Act 2004
 Same-sex couples
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Partners hip_Act_2004

 the most popular region within the UK in which to register a partnership in
2007
 The London Borough of Westminster
 Brighton and Hove Unitary Authority http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.as
p?id=1685

Living in Britain General Household Survey 2002

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1685

Living in Britain General Household Survey 2002

A 2 Youth
 Youth: an age group?
 A social organization
 The 1950s: about ten years after the end of WWII
 A rise in the birth rate
 Music, films, fashion

‘Youth subculture’—teenagers

A 5 50 Years of Change
 The 1950s – a time of great changes in fields of economy, culture, politics.
 The 1960s – a decade of rebellious young generation of great expectation

A 5 50 Years of Change
 The 1970s – a decade of strikes and recession
 The 1980s – a decade of
Thatcherism
 The 1990s – a decade of great expectation

A2 Youth (1970s)
Youth Subcultures




Subculture : a ‘cultural group within a larger culture often having beliefs or interests at variance with those of the larger culture
(COD)
A distinct individual style – certain ways of dressing, speaking, listening to music and gathering in similar places
The way of life
Inevitable products of affluent society
 To leave: usu. at the point of marriage

A2 Youth —Teddy Boys
 Rock 'n' Roll: black origin , white musicians like Elvis
 Teenage cults
 Music of the Teddy Boys or 'Teds'
 Slickedback ‘quiffs’ or ‘DA’ (ducktail) haircuts

Narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers

‘Drape’ jackets, fancy shirts

‘Bootlace’ ties

A 2 Youth
Teddy Boys: Characteristics
 Group-mindedness – a reaffirmation of traditional working class values and the strong sense of territory


Extreme touchiness (over-sensitivity) to insults
Conditions for its formation – extensive welfare provision (social security, health, housing),
European economic boom with Marshall plan, abolishing of draft, introduction of hire purchase
 Drastical and fundamental alteration of the concept of the adolescent

A 2 Youth cont.
Teddy Boys in the 1950s

A 2 Youth cont.
The Beatniks

The “beat” movement in the US in the 1950s
 Rejection of traditional middle-class American values, customs

The “Beat generation”—beatitude
 Sputnik I
 Their visual symbols - jazz, poetry, marijuanna, the Beatles
 Counter-cultural, anti-materialistic, bettering the inner self

A 2 Youth
Beatniks: Characteristics
 Extremely pessimistic about future & possibilities of progress
 Aspired for freedom and the anguish of being alone, undecided and separate
 No popularity in Britain until mid-1960s; the
Hippies
 The Simpsons episode

A 2 Youth
The Beatles

A 2 Youth
The Rolling Stones

A 2 Youth (The 1960s)
Mods and Rockers
 A new mood of optimism and change
 Rockers: rock 'n' roll & big motorbikes; 'dressed down' (in leather jackets and denim); working class, masculinity driven
 Mods: American rhythm and blues music & scooters ; 'dressed up ' (in sharp suits and ties —
Italian style); working-class, non-traditional clerical or service jobs

A 2 Youth
Rockers and their motor-bikes

A 2 Youth
Mods and their scootors

A2 Youth
The Hippies








‘Hippie’: bohemian, student and radical subcultures
Being critical of growing dominance of technology & bureaucracy of capitalist societies
Distrust of establishment
Criticism of inequality and affluence of society
Search of social change through peaceful means
Contradictions:
Anti-materialistic, yet lived to share the fruits of affluence
Pro-egalitarian, but reactionary

A 2 Youth
Skinheads cont.






The unskilled working-class community
Working-class activities: pubs, football and streets, associated with football hooliganism
The end of the 1960s, relative worsening of situation of working-class
Dress – big industrial boots & jeans rolled up high to reveal them
Appearance –hair cut to the skull
Emphasis on collectivity, physical toughness, and local rivalry; targets for the aggression — hippies

A2 Youth cont.
Hippies (left) Skin heads (right)

A2 Youth (1970s)
Punks
 The 1970s: Punk, Heavy Metal
 Punk: youth culture in the extreme
 Spiked hair, ripped and outlandishly customized clothing
 Obscene language (much-publicized)
 To both cut themselves off from society and to shock it into action
 Heavy Metal music: grew in the 1970s; bikers

A 2 Youth cont.
The punks

 Travis Bickle
 Jodie Foster
 John Hinckley
 President Reagan

A2 Youth (1970s)
Rastafarianism-Rastas
 Rastafarianism : a philosophy and a religion originating in
Jamaica ; black
Britain; the reggae music of
Bob Marley.

The Influence of Reggae on Punk
 Search for authenticity


The romanticization of petty criminality
“white translation of black ethnicity” (Hebdige p.64) —Elvis Presley: “white nigger”
 Reggae music
 Non-mainstream
 Working class credentials
 Political awareness
 Music of the “outsider ”

A 2 Youth (1980s)
The Ravers
 the New Romantics — wearing
flamboyant
clothes often like those of the 18C
'dandies'
 Hip Hop , the black communities of the USA, rap music, graffiti art, sportswear-based dress and other cultural elements
 R ave , grew out of the 'acid house' cult of 1988.
American 'house' music, baggy colourful clothing drugs like LSD and Ecstacy . All night dancing events called raves in remote out-of-the-way places

A 2 Youth (the 1990s)
Ragga & Jungle
 Predominantly
black, ragga music, a dance-oriented form of reggae commonly with the lyric spoken or
'chatted'
 Young Asians born in Britain:
' bhangramuffin ‘, the Asian music,
Bhangra
 Jungle , elements of house music and rave culture; the most innovative, original youth culture of the mid-1990s

60 后 70 后 80 后 90 后
 1 、关于工作
 60 后：他们要么狂工作，要么不工作 ,
狂工作的是为了尽早不工作。
 70 后：工作狂基本上都是 70 后的。
 80 后：拒绝加班！
 90 后 ：拒绝上班！

60 后 70 后 80 后 90 后


2 、 关于穿着
60 后：买衣服要么去购物广场，要么去
批发市场。



70 后：喜欢穿中等价位牌子的衣服 , 价钱
决定购买 .
80 后： 喜欢潮流品牌 , 搭配出 FEEL 的都
不惜购买 .
90 后：个性服饰 , 穿衣基本靠冲动 .

60 后 70 后 80 后 90 后


3 、关于 K 歌
60 后：一般只喝不 K ，即使 K ，也是喝了酒之后，
大体是“一无所有”、“北方的狼”
 70 后：唱 k 的时候只会乱吼 —— 例如 2002 年的
第一场雪，然后就拼命拉着你喝酒，不让你
唱。
 80 后： Mic 霸。
 90 后 ：不止会唱，还会跳！

A 2 Youth
Millennial Tension
 Young males – postmodernity destroyed traditional social role, respect, authority

Erosion of ‘masculine’ forms of work, sources of self-respect

A 2 Youth
Suicide Solution
 Massive increases in suicide amongst young males in UK
(5X higher than young women)

A 2 Youth
Conclusion
 Commercial consumption
 Blurring of upper and lower boundaries
 More escapist than oppositional
 Absorption into mainstream
 Reinforced expectation that youth will generate consumer ideals
 Childhood —modernist optimism, youth— postmodernist freedom and possibility
 The real problems

Samuel Erman
 1 . Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind, it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees, it is a matter of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, it is the freshness of the deep spring of life.

 2. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.
This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows merely by a number of years; we grow old by deserting our ideas.
 3. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear, selfdistrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

 4. Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonders, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station: so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from man and from the Infinite, so long as you are young.

 5. When the aerials are down, and your spirits are covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you’ve grown old even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up to catch waves of optimism, there’s hope you may die young at 80.

 Marriage and cohabitation
 In 2000 :
 54% of men & 52% of women aged 16 and over: married
 10% of men & nine% of women: cohabiting
 27% of men & 18% of women: single
 3% of men & 12% of women: widowed
 6% of men & 9% of women: divorced or separated

 http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=170




The value of marriage
Conflict between spouses
The ease of divorce


Women, paid employment and marital conflict
Income and class


Age
Marital status of parents


Background and role expectations
Occupation

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1866

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1925

 40 years ago,the Beatles asked the world a simple question,they wanted to know where all the lonely people come from.

Grey’s Anatomy
 All the lonely people, where do they all come from? All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
 Eleanor Rigby , Beatles

2.2
2.0
1.8
1.6
1.4
1.2
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.0
3.0
2.8
2.6
2.4
A 1 The Family cont.
One-parent families & their dependent children
Dependent children in one-parent families
One-parent families

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1748

 The traditional family: in decline?
 The Soul of Britain survey:
 80% of Britons: marriage is not out-dated 
 76% of Britons: marriages to last for life 
 46% of Britons: lone parenting as a lifestyle choice 
 Columnist Melanie Phillips: the traditional nuclear family —at the root of democracy
(secure, stable, inner-directed and selfconfident, a sense of duty and responsibility)




Traditional families are better for children
Bob Rowthorne (professor of economics at Cambridge University): step families are very dangerous places for children to be —Higher rate of child murder
Lone-parent families or cohabiting families  — not stable
 Lone-parent families: poverty and social problems related to poverty

A 1 The Family
Home is Where the Heart is
 Stable marriage – a happy home life in
Millennium Britain (a new Alliance &
Leicester public opinion poll by MORI)
 1,938 people: what would be the most important ingredient to family life in 25 years time
 Stable marriage and less divorce: more than one in four people (26 per cent)
 Consistent across all age groups

Towards a More Civilised Society
 European economies: joint taxation
 In Britain: family commitments —largely irrelevant to tax assessment
 Call for approbation and support from the state
 The married family & the nurture of children -- Center for Policy Studies