We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
CULTIVATING CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS IN A NEW GENERATION: THE LABOR GUILD OF YOUTH IN MELBOURNE 1926-28.
- Authors
Smart, Judith
- Abstract
Examines the inspiration and origins of the Labor Guild of Youth, formed as a section of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria in 1926, and the subsequent development of the organization, analyzing its membership, leadership, aims and objectives, educational and social activities, and the reasons for its failure to develop a large following. The main purpose of the article, however, is to investigate the significance of the establishment of a youth organization that had the specific objective of encouraging class consciousness and identity rather than the conservative patriotic citizenship that predominated in most of the other youth movements that proliferated in early-20th-century Melbourne. While there were forerunners such as the Socialist Sunday School, the Labor Guild of Youth was indicative of the transition from middle-class paternalist organizations established for adolescents to ones that acknowledged and supported greater independence and a larger degree of self-governance. The difficulties and contradictions involved in this process, as well as the tensions arising from attempts to combine leisure with political ambition, and the different objectives of "hand" and "brain" workers are themes integral to the analysis of the guild's historical significance and fate. So, too, are the male-gendered but unspoken assumptions built into the labor movement and its associated organizations, despite the mixed membership of the guild. The principal sources used are Labor Call and the minutes of the Labor Guild of Youth, but the study is also placed within the context of research on the organization of youth by others in the 1920's, including conservative political parties and pioneers in the field such as the YWCA and YMCA.
- Publication
Labour History, 2002, Issue 82, p49
- ISSN
0023-6942
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/27516841