Negotiating Controls, Perils, and Pleasures in the Urban Night: Working-Class Youth in Early-Twentieth-Century Antwerp

This article is concerned with the night-time activities of youth as they developed in the city of Antwerp in the first half of the twentieth century. In this period, explosive growth of the city’s consumption and entertainment functions altered patterns of urban nightlife, while at the same time, drastic changes in the social positions of working-class youths provided them with new forms of social and financial independence and freedoms. This provoked serious official and public anxieties about ‘loose’ and ‘unsupervised’ activities of young wage-earners, especially about those of girls, as well as attempts to watch their nightlife more closely. The urban night and its associated ‘dark’ amusements such as the dance-halls and movies were considered as primary sources of juvenile misconduct since they offered possibilities to escape from parental and other ‘protective’ supervision.
This article examines how this new problem-definition of youth and night affected the deployment of control mechanisms oriented towards youngsters in Antwerp, looking in particular at the strategies of two central actors in the regulation of youngsters’ access to the night – the police and parents. On the other hand, the article investigates the ways in which the evening and night spaces of the city functioned as an outlet for experimentation among working-class youth with new attitudes of social autonomy and new sexual codes.