‘Something for the Girls? Constructions of Class and Girlhood in Girl, Princess and Bunty’

This article focuses on three comics which emerged in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s targeting girls and young women as readers: Girl, first published by Hulton Press in 1951, which continued publication until 1964, Princess, published by Fleetway from 1960-1967 and Bunty, published by DC Thomson from 1958-2001. It will explore how the publishers envisaged their readers in relation to social class, showing how each title incorporated stories and activities they considered appropriate and class-specific; analysing, in effect, their social construction of girlhood. Like the earlier publications for girls that Penny Tinkler (2000) analyses, they are implicated ‘in the construction of the “girl”’ (p. 99). This article can be seen as rooted in the work of Allison James & Alan Prout (1990) whose new paradigm of the social construction of childhood argued that childhood can never be divorced from variables such as class, gender and ethnicity.