The youth market takes shape: the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

The origins of the modem youth market lie in the industrialisation and urbanisation of North America and Western Europe during the late nineteenth century. Fin de siéde cities were becoming bustling centres of entertainment and consumption, and youth was a significant force in the transformation. In the US, for example, historian Kathy Peiss (1987) shows how young, working women were pivotal to the development of commercial leisure during this period, young women representing a major segment of the audience for dancehalls, amusement parks, and movie houses. Young men were an equally significant consumer market. Indeed, by the end of the century groups of working-class youths - both white and African-American - were making a virtue of conspicuous consumption. Flamboyantly promenading in broad-brimmed hats, embroidered shirts and frock-coats, these ‘b’hoys’ (as they were known in New York) were a distinctive feature of life in urban America (Swiencicki, 1998: 786). Their middle-class peers, too, were an important market, Howard Chudacoff (1999) showing how an extensive ‘bachelor subculture’ developed around the network of eating houses, barber shops, city bars, and theatres that thrived on the patronage of affluent, young ‘men about town’.

Europe saw comparable trends. During the late nineteenth century European cities became hubs for mass entertainment industries geared to an urban working class whose disposable income and leisure time were gradually being extended. Constituent in these developments was the rise of working youngsters as a distinct cultural group and, as Jon Savage (2007) shows, they were increasingly targeted by a wide variety of social movements and commercial businesses. In Britain, for example, young workers’ spending power had, by the turn of the century, laid the basis for an embryonic youth market for particular goods and entertainments. Indeed, writing in 1905, an observer in the industrial city of Manchester described how a 19-year-old, semi-skilled youth earned a pound a week in an iron foundry and, after surrendering 12 shillings to his parents for board, was free to spend the remainder on clothes, gambling, and the music halls (C.E.B. Russell, cited in Springhall, 1980: 89).

The youth market steadily flourished during the 1920s and 1930s. In Britain youth unemployment was a problem in some regions, but generally demand for young workers remained high since their labour was relatively inexpensive (compared to that of adults) at a time when employers were cutting costs. Interwar Britain, therefore, saw a steady increase in working youngsters’ income, historian David Fowler estimating that youth’s money wages rose by between 300 and 500 per cent. Retaining around 50 per cent (or more) of this income, Fowler argues, young wage-earners ‘invariably enjoyed a standard of living higher than that of the rest of the family’ and represented an increasingly attractive market for entrepreneurs and manufacturers (Fowler, 1995: 95; 101). For Fowler, then, a ‘hard-sell youth market’ began to blossom in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s as cinemas, dancehalls, and magazine publishers all courted the spending power of young workers (Fowler, 1995: 170).

In interwar America the youth market also blossomed. Generally, the 1920s saw the US economy boom, gross domestic product rising by nearly 40 per cent between 1922 and 1929. Amid this age of prosperity, a fully formed, commercial youth market came into view. Stanley Hollander and Richard Germain (1993), for example, show how a substantial number of businesses began to direct their efforts towards youth spending during the 1920s. ‘Entrepreneurs, consultants and marketing scholars’, they argue, ‘expounded the significance of the youth market’, while ‘special youth promotion, special youth pricing, and special youth distribution [was] applied to a wide range of products such as automobiles, apparel items, personal hygiene products, typewriters, and cigarettes, and services provided by such establishments as hotels, inns, dancehalls and barber shops’ (Hollander and Germain, 1993: 114; 55).

The rise of this market was, to a large part, predicated on the proliferation of a new ‘campus culture’. This stemmed from the thriving American middleclass, whose affluence brought a huge expansion in higher education during the Jazz Age. Once the preserve of a small elite, colleges and universities saw a threefold increase in enrolments between 1900 and 1930, with nearly 20 per cent of the college-age population attending some kind of educational institution by the end of the 1920s. Young, relatively well-to-do, and free of family responsibilities, these students were an attractive market for businesses, and attempts to court youth spending were invariably focused on the college sector (Hollander and Germain, 1993: 24—5). In turn, the products of the youth market fed into the rise of what historian Paula Fass identifies as ‘the first modern American youth culture’ — a collegiate universe that formed around student fraternities, dancehalls, cinemas, cafeterias and other campus hangouts (1978: 122).

The student culture chronicled by Fass weathered the lean years that followed the Wall Street Grash of 1929. More widely, however, American youth were hit hard by the Depression of the 1930s, and numbers of unemployed youngsters spiralled. During the 1940s, however, the American youth market was revitalised by the labour demands of the wartime economy. The economic pressures of the war drew increasing numbers of young people into the workforce, US Census Bureau statistics showing that in 1944 more than two in five young men aged between 16 and 17 were gainfully employed (Modell, 1989: 165—166). As a consequence, greater disposable income was delivered into young hands, and by 1944 American youth wielded a spending power of around $750 million (Adams, 1994: 127). This growing economic muscle renewed businesses’ interest in the youth market and helped foster a developing belief that young people constituted a consumer group of exceptional independence and influence - trends that became increasingly pronounced amid the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.