United Kingdom

In turn, that movement gave rise to a whole range of feminisms, some more radical than others but all aiming at the ingrained assumptions of male superiority in employment practices, in education, and in the understanding of family life itself. Intellectual life became increasingly characterized by an explicitly feminist analysis, which led to some fundamental rethinking in a whole range of academic disciplines, though resistance to this was strong. Changes in patterns of employment challenged stereotyped distinctions between the breadwinner and the housewife, as well as stereotypical notions of life as a married couple being based upon a well-understood division of labour within the household. The phenomena of the “new man” developed, though his progeny of the 1990s, the “new lad,” was not quite what his father had expected. Coined to describe what was in fact a reinvented, consumer-led version of a long-held and ingrained masculine worldview, “laddism” turned out to be a snazzier, more fashion-driven, and above all more unashamed version of the old devotion to “birds” (women), beer, and football (soccer).

Mass culture

In terms of popular leisure, music hall declined in popularity in the second quarter of the 20th century, but it left its mark on much of British culture, not least on the motion picture, which hastened its demise, and on television, which followed its end. By 1914 there were 4,000 cinemas in Britain and about 400,000,000 admissions per year. By 1934 this had more than doubled, and admissions continued to rise steadily to reach a peak of 1.6 billion in 1946. This was a particularly popular form of entertainment, especially among the working class: the lower down the social scale one was, the more likely one was to visit the cinema. The suburban middle-class motion picture audience of the 1930s was important but remained a minority. It is difficult to exaggerate the dominance of the cinema as a form of entertainment. In 1950, out of over 1,500,000 admissions to forms of taxable entertainment (and this included horse racing and football matches), cinema made up more than 80 percent. Hollywood films dominated, though until World War II there was a thriving British film industry. This domination continued after the war, although British cinema asserted itself powerfully from time to time; for instance, in the Social Realism of the 1960s, notably in the work of director Lindsay Anderson, and later in the films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. Parallel to these artful dissections of British life were the less high-minded but extremely successful “Carry On” comedies, which drew on the music hall tradition.

Reading matter continued to be produced within Britain, above all in the form of the newspaper. The British are inveterate newspaper readers, and there was mass consumption of a nationally based daily and Sunday newspaper press as early as the 1920s. This did much to create cultural uniformity, although, as with motion pictures, there were considerable differences of taste and preference regarding newspapers. However, after 1950 the emphasis on uniformity became more marked and was reinforced by the progressive concentration of ownership in the hands of a few proprietors. This circle of ownership became even smaller as time went on, so that at the beginning of the 21st century the empire of the most powerful of these media moguls, Rupert Murdoch, not only dominated much of the popular press and made considerable inroads into the so-called quality press in Britain but was also international in scope. Newspapers, however, were but one component of Murdoch’s and similar empires. The revolution wrought by new information technologies put control of a wide variety of communication forms, most importantly television, in the hands of these powerful individuals. Their political influence swelled as politicians of all persuasions were compelled to accommodate their power and, in a form of spin, play their version of the political game.

The development of a national mass culture seen in the previous period, in which the distinction between “popular” and “high” culture, if still important, was to some extent bridged, was to continue into the 20th and 21st centuries. (Cultural homogeneity was also intensified by increasing social and lifestyle uniformity.) To a considerable extent, from the 1960s, all culture became popular culture, so that differences of gender, class, and ethnicity became if not merged then renegotiated in terms of a mass, “shared” culture. In this process, the older class differences were eroded, in line with other changes in class structure, particularly in the manual working class. At the same time, new differences and solidarities also emerged, particularly around age and levels of consumption.