1. Valentine, 23 June 1962, p. 11.
2. Stephen Brooke, ‘”Slumming” in Swinging London? Class, Gender and the Post-war City in Nell Dunn'sUp the Junction(1963)’,Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), p. 439; Hera Cook, ‘The English Sexual Revolution: Technology and Social Change’,History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), p. 122; Callum Brown, ‘Sex, Religion, and the Single Woman c.1950–75: The Importance of a “Short” Sexual Revolution to the English Religious Crisis of the Sixties',Twentieth Century British History, 22 (2011), p. 195.
3. See Bill Osbergy,Youth in Britain(Oxford, 1998), pp. 50–63; Stephanie Spencer,Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the1950s (Basingstoke, 2005); Adrian Horn,Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (Manchester, 2009); Selina Todd and Hilary Young, ‘Baby-Boomers to “Beanstalkers”: Making the Modern Teenager in Post-war Britain’,Cultural and Social History, 9 (2012), pp. 451–67; Carol Dyhouse,Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women(London, 2013); Lynn Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the “Good Woman” in 1950s and 1960s Britain’, in Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (eds),The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianisation in North America and Western Europe1945–2000 (Toronto, 2013), pp. 60–83.
4. I focus on ‘preferred readings'. Any text can be read in different ways, but there is usually a dominant or ‘preferred reading’ in the specific historical context within which it was produced and intended to be read. See Stuart Hall, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, in Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (eds),Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies(London, 1980), p. 134. Most readers probably recognized ‘preferred readings' but also produced additional, including oppositional, readings depending on their experiences, cultural resources, needs, interests and the various ways they navigated each magazine. A detailed discussion of how teenagers used and read magazines is, however, beyond the scope of this article.
5. The sample consisted of three months' issues for each sample year at three-year intervals; emergent themes were explored through additional issues.