Tomboys and Bachelor Girls provides the first detailed academic study of lesbian identity and culture in post-war Britain. As such it is essential reading for scholars and students working in the history of sexuality. Tomboys and Bachelor Girls offers a new perspective on post-war Britain, challenging the dominant representation of the 1940s and 50s as a period of conservative femininity and cultural austerity. The research suggests that many women were challenging the cultural emphasis on domesticity as women's defining concern and presenting radically alternative modes of femininity, decades before the organised women's movement. This monograph challenges the conventional account of post-war sexuality as either an account of triumphant gays overcoming prejudice or a dismissal of the radical potential of pre-1970s sexual cultures. Instead it demonstrates that issues of sexual deviance were hotly debated by lesbians in the post-war decades, not simply as the beginning of a movement toward sexual liberation, culminating in the Gay Liberation Movement, but offering significant alternative perspectives which engaged with contemporary social and cultural concerns. The lively, readable style of the book, and its use of personal accounts and oral histories, mean that it will also be enjoyed by the general reader and particularly anyone interested in lesbian and gay issues, in the UK, US and elsewhere.