The Blonde Bombsite: Towards a Cultural History of Working-Class Femininity in Britain

This paper will present an introductory reading of the image of the “blonde bombsite” in British popular culture, art, and writing. In doing so, it will aim to properly contextualise the blonde bombsite as a particularly important “figure,” defined by sociologist Imogen Tyler as an “over-determined body” in the public imagination, representative of underlying anxieties or shifts. Emblematised by Paul O’Grady’s Lily Savage, I will argue for the ongoing significance of the blonde bombsite as one such figure, crucial to popular understandings of class and gender in Britain, and seek to understand her both in relation to the quantifiable social changes that preceded her, and the shifting attitudes to classed femininity that have since shaped her legacy. This paper will read Savage and others as the unruly Anglophone daughters of Hollywood’s blonde bombshell, both set apart by and constitutive of class markers, and best understood within the context of expanded material production, increased contraceptive access, and post-war housing demolition, amongst many other social and economic changes. Yet it will also seek to account for Savage – and the figure she represents – as just one instance of the creative, conscious and active responses to circumstance enacted by working-class women throughout the twentieth century – and too often neglected. If the English working-class was indeed “present at its own making,” too little has been said about the continued involvement of working-class women in their own. Most broadly, this paper will contextualise the blonde bombsite within a work-in progress cultural history of working-class femininity.

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The Marxism in Culture seminar series was conceived in 2002 to provide a forum for those committed to the continuing relevance of Marxism for cultural analysis. Both "Marxism" and "culture" are conceived here in a broad sense.  We understand Marxism as an ongoing self-critical tradition, and correspondingly the critique of Marxism's own history and premises is part of the agenda. "Culture" is intended to comprehend not only the traditional fine arts, but also aspects of popular culture such as film, popular music, and fashion.  From this perspective, conventional distinctions between the avant-garde and the popular, the elite and the mass, the critical and the commercial are very much open for scrutiny.  All historical inquiry is theoretically grounded, self-consciously or not, and theoretical work in the Marxist tradition demands empirical verification.