Making Adolescence More or Less Modern

Child: Cultural HisPennsylvania Press, 12 and Social Change. MAI(ING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN pment. Chicago, IL: Don Romesburg For at least the last five hundred years, adolescence has been a historically and culturally contingent transition between childhood and adulthood. For the past half-century, historians have explored the social construction of adolescence, how adolescents have adapted to and influenced its changing contours, and the youth cultures produced in the tensions between them. Families, institutions, laws, and developmental stages have saddled adolescents with a compulsory futurity that insists they will always be headed elsewhere. Boys' and girls' success or failure in becoming men and women has been measured through their capacities to grow up in the right ways, on the right schedules. Young people have acted on a continuum between conforming to and transgressing age roles designed to harness them. In the process, they have transformed expectations regarding identity, work, school, family, morality, nationalism, and the market. This essay builds upon what some historians have characterized as the rise and fall of modern adolescence in Western Europe and North America. Let me clarify what I mean by "modern" because so many scholars mean such different things by it. The project of modernity operates through a faith in societal improvement based in a capitalist marketplace and the rational ordering and management of people. To some extent, modernity recognizes the individual's capacity for free will and self-determination, although this has always been highly racialized, gendered, and conditioned on social standing. Modern people are expected to reproduce and expand the productive, moral, and orderly nation-state. With oversight by families, employers, teachers, and institutions, modern adolescents are supposed to self-regulate development toward maturity and social norms. State investment in modern adolescence makes it a key conduit of broader social and civic transformation. A heightened appreciation for adolescence means expanded resources devoted to young people's development. This pressures boys and girls to realize societies' aspirations through their own maturation. When given such importance, adolescents on the whole, through the sheer diversity of lives they lead, can . disappoint. When modernity fails the young, societies tend to blame adolescents. In brief, I argue that adolescence became initially more modern, and subsequently, ｵｾ＠ ｾ＠ .,·,H<; else that I am describing as "more or less modern., Societies first increasinvested in what adolescence could do for civilization and the nation. Then, the promise of modern adolescence lost its allure, societies retained much of its structure but pursued a more cynical management of adolescents. This occurred in . . . •• 229 i i DON ROMESBURG uneven, sedimentary ways rather than in discrete stages. Young people navigated older expectations and practices along with newer systems, institutions, and ideologies. More specifically, I trace this process from the early modern period to the turn of our present century. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, boys and girls with varying social standing and mobility navigated through unevenly applied patriarchal demands. These devalued youths in relation to their elders, but accommodated distinct positions for them. From the mid-eighteenth through early twentieth centuries, the elaboration of modern adolescence had growing value and purpose. Massive state investment in its successful production promised to reproduce national power and advance civilization. Youths who "failed" this project or fell outside of its aspirations, as many invariably did, faced distinct burdens, but also pushed its boundaries. In the mid-twentieth century, the intensity of this project began to lessen. Still, domesticating adolescents was one way to address post-war uncertainties and anxieties amidst the growing complexity of consumer culture, youth cultures, and social justice movements. "Teenagers" embodied a normalization of young sexualities and consumption. · Teens often complied with but sometimes strained against their domestication. Since then, wariness toward adolescents has largely overtaken the modern vision of adolescence as producing order and hope, even as young people have advocated for a right to determine their own developments within an increasingly interconnected global context. Both adolescents and adolescence face an uncertain future. Early modern youth: navigating patriarchy (15 00s-1700s) From the 1500s through the 1700s in Western Europe and colonial North America, young people navigated strong patriarchal systems under brutal conditions. It was an accomplishment simply to reach adolescence. Childhood mortality rates were high throughout the era. In England, for example, approximately 140 infants out of every 1,000 died in their first year, with another 30 percent of children dying of diseases before they reached fifteen. Many others were killed in accidents or orphaned by their parents' death. 1 Ostensibly, fathers and masters, naturally and legally, headed households. Wives, children, and servants were subordinated. This mirrored the Great Chain of Being, a medieval and early modern Christian conceptual hierarchy that placed God at the top followed in succession by kings, aristocrats, and peasants. Adolescence was already thought of as a semi-dependent transition between childhood and maturity. Gender and status influenced deeply the ways in which young people lived and worked. Some boys and girls found opportunities that, over time, loosened patriarchal order. For girls and boys from aristocratic and wealthy backgrounds, adolescence was often a time of preparation for their most valuable task of maturation - marriage. Older traditions of dowry were, by the sixteenth century, joined by widespread Western European adoption of primogeniture, which privileged a family's oldest son in the transfer of name and property.· Dowry and primogeniture delayed marriage, extending youth and promoting considerable parental power over young people's choice of spouse. Rising marriage ages in Western Europe required the social management of an extended sexual delay after the onset of puberty. For those who would not marry, it imposed deep sexual frustrations, for women who were sometimes sent to convents as well as for younger sons who could not reproduce legitimate offspring. 230 MAKil\ Families carefully desirable for marri: twenties, only leavin cumstances, some w education occurred, By the 1700s, early sion. Through dress, how to adorn ｴｨ･ｭｾ＠ eye toward displayil the marriage market seldom wholly a rest Boys from familie: primogeniture, but h trades, or the priest] tion expanded, espe< schooling, most ｷ｡ｾ＠ of self and society b schools, for example bonds with classma1 opportunity through ations and distance l bonds between youn outside of the £amilweakened as land sc primogeniture and a continued well into t (rather than just the Among peasants a In rural France and men gathered to corr codes regarding gen because, as Natalie larger systems of pa1 reputations. Girls, ｨｾ＠ territorial "honor" l and struggled to co America, Chesapeak1 socializing was mor< patriarchs' tight cont Youths from poor were able. Boys anc entered their teens. inhibited entry into t or as unskilled serva for their children. 1 ist responsibility for MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN le navigated older :1d ideologies. ad to the turn of )ys and girls with Jplied patriarchal commodated dis·entieth centuries, )Se. Massive state tiona! power and of its aspirations, >oundaries. In the Still, domesticat1anxieties amidst dal justice movemd consumption. nestication. Since 1 vision of adolesocated for a right :connected global 700s) tl North America, :auditions. It was ty rates were high .fants out of every dying of diseases orphaned by their ouseholds. Wives, Chain of Being, a :ed God at the top :ence was already maturity. Gender md worked. Some :chal order. , adolescence was ration - marriage. widespread West's oldest son in the marriage, extendpeople's choice of al management of would not marry, es sent to convents spring. Families carefully oversaw girls' sexualities and reputations to make them as desirable for marriage as possible. Many continued to live at home into their twenties, only leaving when a husband was secured. While constrained by these circumstances, some wealthy girls had extra-familial ｳｾ｣ｩ｡ｬ＠ possibilities. When formal in sex-segregated, cloistered religious orders. education occurred, it was ｰｲｩｮ｣ｾｬｹ＠ By the 1700s, early consumer society provided another degree of personal expression. Through dress, some wealthier girls could fashion feminine selves. In deciding how to adorn themselves, however, they most often consulted with parents with an eye toward displaying the taste and cultivation that would enhance their status in the marriage market. Marriage remained a basic expectation. Its circumstances were · seldom wholly a result of girls' choice. Boys from families of stature and wealth also faced the burdens of patriarchy and primogeniture, but had routes to maturity beyond marriage. They joined professions, trades, or the priesthood. From the 1600s through the mid-1700s, civic-run education expanded, especially in Protestant countries. As with more widespread Catholic schooling, most was directed toward boys. By the 1700s, this encouraged a sense of self and society beyond older models of patriarchy. In French boarding and day schools, for example, boys trained to become mature social participants and forged bonds with classmates and teachers. Some, particularly sons not first-born, sought opportunity through the military and New World exploits. Over time, such associations and distance from fathers loosened paternal authority, promoting homosocial bonds between young men. They also created intergenerational masculine allegiances outside of the family that reaffirmed patriarchy more generally. English patriarchy weakened as land scarcity and the early Industrial Revolution resulted in declines in primogeniture and apprenticeships. In colonial New England, a stronger patriarchy continued well into the 1700s, due in part to wealthy fathers' ability to grant all sons (rather than just the eldest) land inheritances. Among peasants across many parts of Europe, nascent youth cultures flourished. In rural France and elsewhere, youth-abbeys and other groups of unmarried young men gathered to compete, brawl, and revel during festivals. They also enforced moral codes regarding gender, age, and association. Communities granted gangs license, . because, as Natalie Zeman Davis argues, their censuring activities often fitted into larger systems of patriarchal order. 2 In particular, they policed sexual behaviors and reputations. Girls, having no such authority, faced harassment and were trafficked in territorial "honor" brawls. In France and Germany, civic leaders alternately armed and struggled to contain formal and informal associations of misrule. In North America, Chesapeake colonists tolerated youthful carousing as male prerogatives, but socializing was more loosely structured than in Western Europe. In New England, · patriarchs' tight control dampened young men's camaraderie. Youths from poor families had to contribute to household labor as soon as they were able. Boys and girls from modest or middling backgrounds worked as they entered their teens. Most stayed close to home. Age limits and gender restrictions inhibited entry into trade apprenticeships, and so many labored within their families or as unskilled servants for nearby masters. Families sought fair work arrangements for their children. Through collective oversight and appeals to masters' paternalist responsibility for servants, communities attempted to mitigate abuse, neglect, or 231 DON ROMESBURG exploitation. Servants could not marry and could be severely punished for out of wedlock sexual practices or pregnancies. In times of overpopulation and famine, boys' and girls' migration increased. This put pressure on hierarchical order and youths exercised some agency. In English towns, few stayed more than a year on one job as they looked for better pay or more favorable conditions. Yet servant girls, in particular, faced greater sexual exploitation as the labor force became mobile. England set the first modern age of consent law in 1576, for girls, at ten; similar Italian and German statutes set the age at twelve. American colonies also chose ten or twelve. Even at this low age, trial juries often took the girls' morality into account when deciding whom to blame. Lower-status boys and girls also entered expanding empires. In 1635, over half of the English who headed to the Americas were between sixteen and twenty-three. Some were as young as ten. Spain, Portugal, England, and Holland funneled destitute boys into seafaring and promised dowries to girls who relocated overseas. English orphans, runaways, and vagrants transported to the Chesapeake faced skewed sex ratios, indenture, and high rates of mortality. Seventeenth-century English colonial girls there capitalized on their scarcity, marrying younger than in Western Europe or New England. In their mid-to-late teens they chose to wed older suitors of greater means and status. Across the colonies, African-Americans who survived enslavement into their teens faced the greatest likelihood among all slaves of sale, forced transportation from birth families, sexual abuse, and unwanted pregnancies. Throughout the eighteenth century, lower-status girls and boys took advantage of weakening patriarchal structures created by economic and cultural shifts. In Western Europe, nascent industrialization drew on unmarried girls, as the traditionally female activity of spinning was transformed into capitalist labor. By the latter part of the century, officials at state-sponsored German, French, and English industrial schools for girls sought to frame them as factories of feminine virtue. These places also provided young women collectivity through which to begin to conceive of themselves as members of a distinct age cohort and culture. In British North America, the Great Awakening (1730s-1740s) attracted young people, especially among the rural poor. Through its promises of immediatism in conversion and spiritual revival, peer cultures challenged patriarchal deference. The American Revolution further eroded intergenerational hierarchy and provided youthful colonists with a sense of shared identity through participation. After the war, the poor boys that had done much of the soldiering sought pensions and/or release from indenture. By the second half of the eighteenth century, early modern patriarchy gave way to more liberal emphases on the market, selfhood, and individual rights. European and American adolescent practices and prerogatives matched up unevenly with the developing concept of modern adolescence. Some young people, particularly of higher status, were able to approximate some of the expectations of a gradual adolescence filled with education and cultivation leading toward autonomy, citizenship, and moral family life. Many others, however, found new opportunities for work, culture, and consumption that exceeded this design. 232 MAK Within liberal hun supposedly broug mental transforma ductive, civilized, espoused adolesce tarity that subordi sexuality, if delaye Joel Schwartz exr into male friendst "advantage of rea: Drang movement ity, destructivenes1 toward rational m of passionate, imp adolescence. By the late eigh1 class boys, apport upon, rather than intergenerational c mate male peer fr a personal balanc parentally arrange intimacy and ｲｯｭｾ＠ Such boys grew and American sta1 these young men t and American cou Joseph Kett's won urban and peer li£ muscular Christiar rial service to broa, courageous caman nizations such as tl Europe), it reassert School growth northeastern and 1 end of the centur) educational, with criticized the Arne {lyde and college) co-educational late Adults managec Western Europe a1 and affections as ual propriety, and MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN Making adolescence modern (1750s-1904) Within liberal humanism childhood was refigured as an innocent blank slate. Puberty supposedly brought a radical second birth of fundamental moral, biological, and mental transformations through which a child grew from neediness into rational, productive, civilized, and gendered citizenship. In Emile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau espoused adolescence as the development of girls and boys into mature complementarity that subordinated women to men. He believed that desire induced by pubescent sexuality, if delayed and nurtured, cultivated virtuous gendered interdependence. As Joel Schwartz explains; Rousseau claimed that boys were first to sublimate desire into male friendship, then balance yearnings for girls with a developing masculine "advantage of reason." 3 In the following decades, German writers in the Sturm and Drang movement emphasized that torment spurred young people toward irrationality, destructiveness, and eroticism. Taken together, Rousseau's call for development toward rational maturity and Sturm and Drang's characterization of youth as a period of passionate, impulsive desire to be weathered and overcome would typify modern adolescence. By the late eighteenth an.d early nineteenth centuries, among wealthy and middleclass boys, opportunities abounded to achieve a liberal maturity. These boys built upon, rather than overturned, their fathers' manhood ideals. Even as they embraced intergenerational obligations required by older patriarchal structures, they sought intimate male peer friendships. When courting girls, boys were expected to strive for a personal balance of reason and sentiment. This perspective rejected the idea of parentally arranged marriage and drew upon cosmopolitan emphases on emotional intimacy and romance. Such boys grew into active public lives of letters, commerce, and politics. European and American states relied upon religious or quasi-religious organizations to steer these young men toward virtuous manhood. In the early nineteenth century, English and American counselors encouraged urban middle-class boys to wall themselves, in Joseph Kett's words, "within the fortress of character" to avoid the temptations of urban and peer life far from parental oversight. 4 In the second half of the century, muscular Christianity spread from Anglican efforts to prepare young men for imperial service to broader attempts to cultivate moral restraint, masculine athleticism, and courageous camaraderie in the bodies, hearts, and souls of young men. Through organizations such as the YMCA (spreading from London in 1844 to the United States and Europe), it reasserted a vigorous role for Protestant masculinity; School growth expanded and recentered modern adolescence. By the 1850s, northeastern and midwestern US towns commonly had public high schools. By the end of the century, American public secondary education was overwhelmingly coeducational, with girls dominating enrolment and graduation numbers. Europeans criticized the American system and sex-segregated day schO"ols increased in France (lycee and college) and Germany (gymnasium). While Scandinavian countries went co-educational late in the century, sex segregation continued to dominate in Europe. Adults managed school structures, but youths asserted their own cultures. In Western Europe and the United States, peer hazing and crushes addressed anxieties and affections as students policed one another for transgressions of gender, sexual propriety, and hierarchy. Young people forged intense homosocial peer bonds 233 DON ROMESBURG and worked out ideas and identities within dormitories as well as secret societies, fraternities, and other associations. Organized sport was one adult attempt to manage this semi-autonomy. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century middle-class girlhood, too, took on liberal forms. In Protestant Germany, England, and the United States, parents, pedagogues, and physicians believed education should develop girls' taste, modesty, cheerfulness, and household management along with basic literacy and mathematics. The German figure of the giggling, diary-writing backfishe emerged, a mid-teen girl who internalized the social order in her transition from carefree innocence into maturity. Protestant girls generally learned to balance what Martha Vicinus calls "distance and desire" through the cultivation of independence and duty. 5 They were encouraged to enact sexual restraint and social norms as they engaged in broadening mixedsex social activities. By contrast, French Catholic convent schools were transformed after the revolution into sex-segregated state and private boarding institutions. French girls faced, as they had before, strict surveillance and were kept in ignorance about sexuality prior to marriage. They cultivated relational identities, collaborating to negotiate institutions, evade authoritative control, and fan cross-sex flames through subtle flirtations. Both Protestant expectations of self-regulation and Catholic tension between surveillance, sexuality, and innocence would become central to modern female adolescence. As modern adolescence coalesced, it bifurcated youth into those who, to some degree, approximated its ideals and inhabited its aspirational institutions, and those seen as needing other forms of management and discipline. In the 1810s, New York founded the House of Refuge to shelter and sequester homeless, destitute, and vagrant children and youths. By the mid-century, major Western European and American cities had state-run reform schools. These promoted gendered discourses of domesticity, regimentation, and industry, but were often like prisons. French, British, German, and American administrators imitated each other's institutions. Reform schools became laboratories through which a scientific approach to adolescence emerged through the study of crime, poverty, and age. This led to psychological and sociological approaches to delinquency, institutionalized first in Chicago's juvenile court (1899). Juvenile justice underpinnings also came from the middle-class reform movements' approaches to youth racialized as nonwhite. Mid-nineteenth-century US evangelical women carried scientific racism and expectations of gradual post-pubertal development into missionary work, as did Englishwomen with London's "ragged children" and African "mission children." Through late-nineteenth-century US orphan trains, Native American boarding schools, and similar programs in the British Empire, the mass redistribution and "uplift" of indigenous, poor, and immigrant populations served imperial needs. Older forms of apprenticeship disappeared across Europe and North America, but after the US Civil War (1861-1865), the Freedman's Bureau and southern state authorities forced tens of thousands of newly emancipated AfricanAmerican teenaged boys and girls into agricultural "apprenticeship" to former slave holders. Free black adolescence meant navigating the humiliation and vulnerabilities of structural and interpersonal indifference, segregation, and violence. The growing black middle class provided some avenues for youth possibility, including schooling, reform, and club activities. 234 MAK Working-class · worried over ｮ･ｾ＠ embraced, such as to legislate bans < French archetype had her counterp for riotous assem recreations and d attention was als< At the turn of "treating." This · tion. Girls gainec homosocial prote eronage declined, gatherings domin: were vulnerable t agency through n also had a new, if also made their o· Governments 1 sexual delay. Ag, (France 1863) an< American mandat lecherous men. Ju ual knowledge ar of girls as well as New laws often e By the century'1 theory to divide 1 oped to manage ; into his Adolesce; Sociology, Sex, 0 vidual's life cours This marked ado: uniquely rich wit lag between one' national advanta strengths of the p gender differentia ern ｡､ｯｬ･ｳ｣ｮｾ＠ peoples" rushed i Moreover, as Dav privilege." 6 Boys "periodicity" anc while pursuing ec Hall charted a I boy suicides, Briti MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN Working-class young people at play stimulated many observers' fears. Reformers worried over new "low" forms of mass consumption that working-class youths embraced, such as British "penny dreadfuls" and American "dime novels," and sought to legislate bans or replace them with prescriptive ｾｬｩｴ･ｲ｡ｵＮ＠ The nineteenth-century French archetype of the simultaneously sweet and debauched garment factory girl had her counterpart in the apprentice, now conceptualized as a mobile boy ready for riotous assembly. Across Europe and North America, links between poor boys' recreations and delinquency raised the greatest concern, although late in the century attention was also paid to girls' sexual delinquency. At the turn of the twentieth century, working-class youths pioneered heterosocial "treating." This blended commercialized leisure, informal sexual barter and affection. Girls gained some freedom from parental oversight but lost intergenerational homosocial protection. Boys assumed greater economic burdens but also, as chap1 eronage declined, enjoyed more interpersonal power. Collectively, boys' gangs and gatherings dominated urban youth cultures. As with early modern youth-abbeys, girls were vulnerable to boys' advances and censure. Still, girls were able to assert some agency through making boys accountable to peers and families. Wage-earning girls also had a new, if still limited, voice within their families. If finances permitted, they also made their own consumer choices. Governments legislated modern adolescence as an extended pubertal period of sexual delay. Age of consent laws rose from as low as ten to between thirteen (France 1863) and sixteen (England and Wales 1885). Sweeping European and North American mandates encouraged the view of teenage women as little girls victimized by lecherous men. Jurors continued to adjudicate based on their perceptions of girls' sexual knowledge and experience. Gender, class, and race biases led to uneven policing of girls as well as prosecution of men of color, working-class men, and immigrants. New laws often extended age of consent and sexual crime coverage to boys. By the century's end, doctors and other experts were turning to social evolutionary theory to divide youths along tracks of care that intersected with institutions developed to manage them. American psychologist G. Stanley Hall wove all this together into his Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, · Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904). Hall suggested that each individual's life course recapitulated humanity's evolution from savagery to civilization. This marked adolescence as a universal life stage of storm and stress, vulnerable yet uniquely rich with potential. It imagined that advanced societies could harness the lag between one's pubertal, moral, and mental maturities to personal, social, and national advantage. During a prolonged adolescence, youths could carry forward strengths of the primitive past, sublimated into ever-advancing progress through clear gender differentiation and a gradual sexual path to marital procreation. While modern adolescence was supposedly available to all, Hall believed that so-called "primitive peoples" rushed into an early reproduction that short-circuited proper socialization. Moreover, as David Macleod writes, "Staying on Hall's schedule was distinctly a class privilege." 6 Boys were at the center of Hall's vision. He viewed girls as beholden to "periodicity" and criticized those who. lost what he perceived as proper femininity while pursuing educational ambitions. Hall charted a path to the future for Germans alarmed by a perceived rash of schoolboy suicides, Britians concerned with the industrial and imperial impact of boys' poor 235 DON ROMESBURG health, and Americans grappling with a diversifying, mobile population. Adolescence. drew on European and US scholarship and its first printing sold over 25,000 copies worldwide. It inspired major works in France (G. Compayre's I:Adolescence [1909]), England (J. W. Slaughter's The Adolescent [1911]), and Germany (C. Buhler's Das Seelenleben des Jugendlichen [1922]) and attracted an international following of reformers, youth organization leaders and educators. Adolescence had become modern: a nationalist and humanist accomplishment of individual will and feeling, peer affinity, family nurturance, institutional administration, legislation, and expert guidance. Modern adolescence and the great state (1900s-1940s) Throughout the first half of the twentieth, century, adolescence held the state's interest as a core nationalist project. It promised to strengthen empires, fosrer social stability, and build robust societies. Many across Western Europe and North America were optimistic about the capacity of social engineering to solve dilemmas of girls' expanding prospects, ｷｯｭ･ｮｾｳ＠ political rights, declining middle-class birthrates, sexual and social pathology, and growing immigrant, imperial, and nonwhite populations. Social scientists responded to the complexity of urban, industrial, and consumer societies. They. gradually transitioned away from a clear-cut celebration of middleclass adolescence that pathologized others as inherently inferior. Instead, they sought to incorporate diverse youth into universalized adolescent developmental processes, social activities, and gender/sexual adjustments. From the 1910s through the 1930s, experts standardized stages of physical and psychosexual development. Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytically influenced psychologists such as Albert Moll, Phyllis Blanchard, and Wilhelm Stekel argued that pubertal sex forces tested childhood "tendencies" that by adulthood were resolved or resulted in a fixation. Sociologists and anthropologists from the 1910s through the 1940s added environmental explanations, delimiting adolescence as culturally specific within a global range of pubertal youth experiences. This encouraged toleration of a wide array of adolescent expressions. Still, experts criticized those who transgressed norms too much or too persistently for a supposed incapacity to adjust to their society. Heterosexuality became defined as a fusion of cross-sex desire with an idealized model of middle-class, monogamous, gender normative, companionate marriage. Experts claimed heterosexuality was psychologically mature, socially normal, .and biologically natural. At the same time, it was understood to be not inevitable but a developmentally vital accomplishment. In this context, adolescents had to · walk a "tightrope of normalcy" between self-expression and maladjustment. They were expected to be heterosexual (but not too sexual), gender normative (but not overcompensating), and well-adjusted heterosocially (but not promiscuous). 7 Across Europe and North America, proponents of social hygiene, which combined scientific research and public education in an attempt to manage the sexuality of the masses, translated this ideology into practice. In England during and after World War I, they mounted campaigns to provide working girls with programs in nutrition and social purity. These linked future motherhood to other programs to produce healthy, orderly citizens. French and German leftists and feminists hoped social hygiene would dismantle the sexual double standard and help girls avoid unwanted ,I: 236 sexual advan' gave educatm and bees" nat in linking stu< Most explicit: ism, eugenic 1 adolescents ir tures adolesce approach tha1 Expert disc ization of ado courts and g wayward you models, Genr the 1920s, it i and North Ar tus offenses. l sexual offens1 received the s. Homosexual < and eugenic s of Europe, or most extreme concentration with Jewish g labor, sexual' The Ameri1 first girls, an< fied massive g discipline div< trasted with I after World \X Adolescents orderly develc to manage th tracks, opting careers. Some social hierard tivity versus e another in re! dating, rating, In Europe a lives and temp and American letics, nature ' teamwork. M gled to hold · MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN sexual advances, venereal disease, and pregnancy. American mass secondary school gave educators a captive audience for sex education. Its trajectory arched from "birds and bees" nature study through the advancing history of civilization. This culminated in linking students' personal fulfillment to their adjustment to modern heterosexuality. Most explicitly in Nazi Germany, the school curriculum wedded patriotic triumphalism, eugenic science, and pronatalism. This became part of the state's effort to press adolescents into national service. Social hygiene sought to replace the sexual cultures adolescents interacted with at home, with peers, or on the street with a modern approach that standardized development of love, family, and society for the state. Expert discourses and social hygiene efforts were part of the broader institutionalization of adolescence. American cities and the British government established juvenile courts and guidance clinics that assessed the causes of delinquency and directed wayward youths through education and varied services. Unlike the Anglo-American models, German juvenile justice continued to emphasize penal sentencing even as, by the 1920s, it incorporated some welfare-oriented approaches. Across Western Europe and North America, authorities largely brought in boys for property crimes and status offenses. Experts characterized them as immature. Girls, most often targeted for sexual offenses, were seen as dangerously precocious. Boys' sexual offenses rarely received the same attention as either boys' property crimes or girls' sexual activities. Homosexual offenses, however, could lead to institutionalization, indefinite treatment, and eugenic sterilization. Sterilization was either voluntary, as implemented in much of Europe, or compulsory, as in the United States and Germany. Eugenics found its most extreme outcomes under the Nazi regime. The Nazis killed, abused, and sent to concentration camps youths diagnosed with mental and physical disabilities together with Jewish girls and boys. Those who survived faced generational ruptures, hard labor, sexual violence, malnutrition, and trauma. The American democratization of co-educational secondary schooling attracted first girls, and then boys, from across class and ethnic backgrounds. It also justified massive governmental, philanthropic, and social scientific investment seeking to discipline diverse populations into a cohesive industrialized nation-state. This contrasted with Europe, where most working-class adolescents continued to labor until after World War II. By 1930, the majority of US youths attended high school. Adolescents in school expressed themselves within and beyond state aspirations for orderly development. The massive influx of diverse youths overtook adult capacities to manage them: Academically, many rejected gendered and class-based curricular tracks, opting instead for courses they hoped would propel them into white-collar careers. Some left school to work. Within youth cultures, students became litera.te in social hierarchies of leaders versus followers, heroes versus fans, and national collectivity versus ethnic subcultural identity. As with past generations, peers policed one another in regard to civic, social, and sexual norms. They also created systems of dating, rating, and belonging. In Europe and the United States, youth programming sought to fill adolescent social lives and temper urban and industrial unrest. In the 1900s and 1910s, adult-led British and American organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts emphasized athletics, nature worship, intergenerational mentoring, clear gender roles, courage, and teamwork. Mostly popular among pre-adolescents, such organizations often struggled to hold the interest of the young as they reached their teens. The youth-led 237 DON ROMESBURG \ i. i i i German Wandervogel shared values of athleticism and training with Anglo-American organizations. Unlike those groups, it could be sympathetic to socialism, emphasized more free expression of ideas, and encouraged direct political engagement. It also had far more appeal to older adolescents than the scouts. Ethnic and religious groups also created organizations to cultivate character alongside community solidarity. Following World War I, interwar political parties and governments sought to channel youths as symbols of an eternally regenerative nation and as loyal male and female counterparts. The UK Labour Party's League for Youth (1926) and French Catholic, fascist, and leftist student organizations sought to channel young men's street life into political engagement. In the New Deal, the US Civilian Conservation Corps harnessed unemployed young men during the 1930s to develop natural resources and personal character, while the National Youth Administration employed young men and women to build infrastructure. As the Nazis centralized power, they made participation in their youth organizations compulsory. Hitler Youth were to strive toward military excellence and physical perfection while the League of German Girls was famed as heroines on the "birth front" of the National Socialist struggle. By the early 1940s, the numbers brought in through compulsory participation overwhelmed Nazi state infrastructure. Many adolescents became disenchanted with the promises that participation would produce greatness. As even the extreme example of Nazi programming suggests, social control was, at best, incomplete. Despite the array of discourses and institutions developed to manage adolescence, adolescents exercised new prerogatives in the marketplace. Workingclass American and English girls composed a heterosocial mix of low-wage workers engaged in retail, waitressing, and factory work. Adolescent working-class and poor boys frequently took unskilled, poorly paid, and sporadic employment. British boys underutilized job placement services and day continuation schools, in part because they were resistant to their mandates. Urban work and play provided many social and sexual opportunities. In 1920s Chicago, for example, the Juvenile Protective Association worried over the complex urban economy of desires in which newsboys, in addition to selling papers, sometimes ran johns to prostitutes or sold their own bodies to men to earn money to take gals out on the town. In the United States, laboring sons and daughters of European immigrants continued to participate in expanding cultures of commercialized amusements and peer-driven heterosocial mixing. They frequently clashed with families over autonomy and expressivity. By the interwar period, working-class European girls and boys f.ollowed suit. By the 1920s and 1930s, American middle-class girls and boys embraced "dating" as a rite of adolescence. Over time, parents, reformers, and social scientists gradually accepted limited heterosexual expression ("petting") as useful to normal development. Across class lines, girls found ways to express themselves through consumerism. This was often accompanied by modern femininity's disciplinary expectations. These included what Joan Brumberg calls the "body projects" of mass personal hygiene and beauty cultures. Some contemporary commentators saw flappers and other "modern girls around the world" as excessive consumers, dupes of popular culture, or promiscuously expressive. Others, however, saw them as emblems of healthy nationalism and reflecting a robust youth. Girls themselves used consumer culture to express themselves beyond the dictates of families, ethnic communities, or institutions. Vicki Ruiz 238 describes he identities by fashions, an according tc to adolescer Jon Sava. disorganize< erosocial m girls took u right to ｰｵｾ＠ ers and sex and nonwh helped builC vers to reprc develop men By the rr modern adc viable. Mar state design. families, co1 and educati< In the mid-t norms, inch the modern but led tow1 roles in lear they remadt cultural mm During th teenager as ' on schedule lion and ger North Ame1 era, quantifi Bios and Eri solutions to sonality dev the attainmt Key to thi: ideals of seJ and success thered "hete European p1 healthy, wei MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN describes how some Mexican-American girls, for example, crafted hybrid adolescent identities by painting their faces with widely available cosmetics, donning affordable fashions, and taking cues from the movies. Middle-class and African-American girls, according to Kelly Schrum, also appropriated adult cosmetics and Hollywood models to adolescent norms and practices. 8 Jon Savage viewed early twentieth-century adolescent dancing as an informal, disorganized resistance from below to state control. Bringing together peer-based heterosocial mixing, commercialized amusements, and youth-driven cultures, boys and girls took up transnational rhythms in collective activities in which they presumed a right to pursue their own pleasures. During World War II, middle-class bobby soxers and sexually active "victory girls" on both sides of the Atlantic, working-class and nonwhite American zoot suiters, French zazous, and German swing kids all helped build visible expressive youth cultures. 9 Their moves complicated state maneuvers to reproduce patriotic, orderly, and participatory nationalism through adolescent development. By the mid-1940s, the vision that massive investment in and management of modern adolescence could lead to an eternally youthful, powerful state seemed less viable. Marketplaces and youth cultures facilitated adolescent expressivity beyond state design. Post-war efforts shifted to cultivating adolescent dependence that served families, communities, and nations through well-adjusted sexualities, consumption, and education. Teenagers as more or less adolescent (1945-1970s) In the mid-twentieth century across North America and Western Europe, American norms, including heterosexuality, consumerism, and mass education, helped redefine the modern adolescent as the teenager. This played out differently in various contexts but led toward greater transnational youth affinities. Young people assumed teenage roles in learning, leisure, and love, and many embraced their domestication even as they remade it on their own terms. Other teens actively engaged with political and cultural movements toward social transformation. During the late 1940s through the 1960s, social scientists viewed the successful teenager as one who experimented with self-expression yet internalized social norms on schedule as they adjusted to adult identity. Experts domesticated teenage rebellion and generational conflict as typical. Longitudinal developmental studies, first in North America in the 1930s and then proliferating across Europe in the po'st-war era, quantified normative adolescence. British-based Anna Freud and US-based Peter Blos and Erik Erikson gained transatlantic audiences through their assertion that the solutions to teen problems rested in individual and familial adjustments. Healthy personality development, the central psycho-social task of adolescence, was achieved by the attainment of mature, normative identity. Key to this process was heteronormativity, the internalization of white, middle-class ideals of sexually fulfilling nuclear family domesticity as aligned with the security and success of the post-war democratic capitalist state. "Family life education" furthered "heterosexual consciousness," as Susan K. Freeman writes. 10 Sweden led the European push for rational adolescent sex education that emphasized the virtues of healthy, well-adjusted heterosexuality for the individual and society. American sex 239 DON ROMESBURG education, building on curricula developed since the 1920s, emphasized successful preparation for heterosexual marriage and extolled narrow gender roles. Together, these promoted dominant sexual norms while encouraging awareness of bodies and psychological perspectives. Compulsory heteronormativity also produced pathologizing and punitive measures for those who failed to comply. Schools participated in a transnational Lavender Scare that encouraged the persecution of gay people as "sexual psychopaths." In the United States, school districts screened teachers for homosexual "tendencies" and fired those arrested on moral charges. Counselors monitored students for gender transgression or sexual perversion. Related persecutions occurred in Canada and Great Britain. West Germany and France retained explicitly anti-gay World War II laws on the grounds that they protected youths. Juvenile justice blamed working-class girls' sex delinquencies and out-of-wedlock pregnancies on family psychodynamics, such as confusion or anger over neglectful fathers. By the 1960s in the United States, during a time of expanding civil rights demands, familiar attacks on black urban culture and the black family got rewritten through psychoanalytic narratives. As exemplified by the US Department of Labor's 1965 Moynihan Report, these expressed alarm over masculinized, smothering-yetneglectful mothers and absent, emasculated fathers that supposedly resulted in overly precocious "children" having children. During the 1950s and 1960s, American teenagers shifted from social dating toward the more monogamous dedication of "going steady." This initially alarmed parents, but carne to be understood as appropriate rehearsal for married life. In the postwar era, Americans married younger and in higher percentages than ever before; by 1959, nearly half of US girls were married by age nineteen. Soaring US teenage pregnancy rates peaked for the century in 1957. This did not cause great alarm, in part because many teenage girls married prior to becoming pregnant, while many other girls, after becoming pregnant, left school or work to opt for early marriage. In West Germany, alternately, premarital coitus faced greater stigma in the 1950s than it had under the Nazis, but still occurred at higher levels than in most of Europe. Throughout Western Europe, patterns similar to those in the United States took hold after the mid-1950s economic recovery and lasted into the late 1960s. As marriage became nearly universal, couples had children when they were younger. Hopes and concerns about teenagers were also bound into consumerism. In the United States, Grace Palladino argues, teenagers had by 1957 become "the nation's most exciting new consumer market," albeit decades in the development.U Girls, for example, were initiated into mass-produced menstruation products and "junior figure" clothing sizes and styles. These put bodily functions and diverse shapes at odds with the streamlined, attractive, sexually aware but innocent teenage body. Advertisers and experts exhorted boys and girls to protect their emotional and social health by investing in clear skin. State efforts to domesticate teenage consumerism met limited success, as with the 1953-1955 US and British attempts to censor comic books by linking them to delinquency and sexual deviancy. While European and Canadian media and politicians regularly lamented the "Americanization" of their teens, they also saw healthy consumption as developing individual expression and commitment to the capitalist state. British media portrayed its teenagers as classless while opposing more visibly 240 M. working-class ; Herbert Marcu pellating the ir capitalism. Mo counter cultura but through ad adaptation. 12 Teenagers WI ing them. Roc! of rebellion, cc track also undeJ musical "Britisl the Atlantic. Tl consumer mark too, growing c expanding midc led to youth t< hagen, New Yo transnational yc States hoped 1950s and early teenage consum ment. In the th: German, Dutch! around 80 perc America, state While European into secondary a not as intense a Brown v. Board the next two dec Many youths, and heteronorm States, African-J the "Emmett Till to schools, publi1 white students t< 1968 "Blow Out schools to prote Chicano student of the sixties in l ety and confron· liberties, sexual 1 ingly, though, ｭｾ＠ pessimism. MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN working-class youth cultures. This led New Left critics such as Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse to attack youth consumerism as working against liberation by interpellating the individual into a depoliticized relationship with corporate consumer capitalism. More recently, Axel Shildt and Detlef Siegfried argue that even 1960s counter cultural European youths navigated this tension not through anti-materialism but through a differentiation of consumption through subcultural expression and local adaptation. 12 Teenagers were assertive, active interpreters of the products and media targeting them. Rock'n'roll gave middle-class audiences diverse working-class messages of rebellion, consumer yearning, generational conflict, sex, and love. This soundtrack also underscored "girl-crazy" boyhood and boy-obsessed girlhood. By the 1964 musical "British Invasion," influence increasingly flowed in both directions across the Atlantic. That year, twenty-two million American teens made up a $12 billion consumer market, spending another $13 billion of their parents money. In Europe, too, growing disposable teenage income, a more prosperous working class and expanding middle class, and advanced communication and transportation connection led to youth tourism to hot spots such as London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, New York, and California. Consumerism and, later, social protest generated transnational youth-driven cultures and countercultures. States hoped to manage teenage adjustments though various institutions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, youth commissions addressed juvenile delinquency, channeled teenage consumerism, and fostered adolescent social adjustment and civic involvement. In the three decades after World War II, a near majority of British, French, German, Dutch, and Nordic teenagers stayed in school. US graduation rates peaked around 80 percent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Across Europe and North America, state investment made post-secondary education increasingly accessible. While European and Canadian efforts to integrate working-class and nonwhite youth into secondary and post-secondary schooling were not without controversy, they were not as intense as US struggles with racial desegregation. After the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling (1954), implementation battles were fought over the next two decades. Many youths, far from being domesticated by institutionalization, consumerism, and heteronormativity, became political and countercultural activists. In the United States, African-American teenagers occupied the front lines of what Wilma King calls the "Emmett Till generation," mobilizing as "tender warriors" who pushed for access some to schools, public accommodations, and broader justice. 13 Their actions ｩｮｳｰｲｾ､＠ white students to stand with them and provoked others to oppose their cause. In the 1968 "Blow Outs," Mexican-American students walked out of East Los Angeles high schools to protest overcrowding, teacher and administrative discrimination against Chicano students, a high dropout rate, and a lack of inclusive curricula. By the end of the sixties in Europe and North America, young people sought to transform society and confronted the state over militarism and empire, students' rights and civil liberties, sexual and gender liberation, environmentalism, and social justice. Increasingly, though, many members of Western societies viewed adolescents with alarm and pessimism. 241 DON ROMESBURG Youth less adolescence? (1970s-2000s) Adolescents, it turns out, are neither mere vessels of modern state intention nor domesticated teenagers. Contemporary girls and boys still navigate the structures of earlier times, but often without the romance once attached to them. In the late twentieth century, policymakers across the political spectrum fought over what to do with adolescents. Young people's diverse lives continued to challenge narrow concepts of what adolescence should be. Even Western European and North American teens best equipped to follow normative developmental trajectories have struggled with transitions toward adulthood. Extended dependency and high expectations of educational achievement have become central to adolescence even as secondary and post-secondary schooling have lost their value as guarantors of career opportunity. These have intensified adolescents' personal burdens to realize economic, psychological, and social success. Since the 1970s, many young people have created lives beyond the orderly futurities desired by the state and corporate marketplace. In the United Kingdom and to a smaller extent elsewhere, punk aesthetics have reflected a working-class, sometimes xenophobic disenchantment with society. Other antisocial groups have included Sweden's raggare and more recent neo-Nazi youth in Germany, France, the United States and elsewhere in the West. In the 1990s and early 2000s, American school shootings by white, middle-class boys led to renewed discussions about media violence, gun access, bullying, and alienation. Societies have pathologized low-income, nonwhite, and immigrant girls and boys for academic under performance, unemployment, criminality, drug abuse, sexual irresponsibility, and, more recently, terrorism. Nordic countries have attempted to address alienation related to social diversity through broad educational access, high gender equality, and universal social assistance. In the United States, official school racial desegregation was largely dismantled by the 1990s. Since then, poor youths of color have assumed a disproportionate burden of what some call a "school-to-prison pipeline." 14 . Extensions of young people's rights were followed by restrictions. In 1970 the United Kingdom lowered the voting age to eighteen, and Canada, West Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Ireland, and France followed suit. In the United States, years of youth activism led to greater educational access for poor, minority, and female students. But since the 1980s, the Supreme Court has restricted student expression and privacy. American juvenile justice reform established due process rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Court cases began to underwrite the notion of other rights for the young. But in the 1980s and 1990s, prosecution of minors as adults increased. The United Kingdom has paralleled the American approach, but Germany's Juvenile Justice Act of 1990 implemented a more generous welfare model. Youths have also been viewed as victims and perpetrators of transgressive sexualities. In the mid-1970s, two decades after the peak in US teen pregnancy, policymakers broadcast a "crisis" about out-of-wedlock teen births that focused on African-American girls. Religious conservatives urged abstinence-based education, blaming feminism, welfare, contraceptive and abortion access, and comprehensive sex education. A 1996 federal law withdrew support from teenage mothers while expanding abstinence-until-marriage education. In 2009, the United States shifted 242 MA course, funding · the federal abst the lowest in se' Western Europe mation and acce personal decisioi ity between ado: of marriage hav' marriage and pa The emergenc especially under: ern adolescence. group of homel( to social service: gay liberationist mative institutio legal discourses intervention. Sin, confronting state ity, and participa as yet another rr course developm Anxieties ·a bot as particularly su has been the ris( United States anc States, young pee rise in eating disc Related, many y< to their body pre across the weste1 epidemic. Many 1 ification of femin transformation. New media ha sought to preven A year later, US on music albums games industry in pornography and coverage of onlin tional and imme< adapt global med. MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN course, funding evidence-based teen pregnancy prevention, which effectively ended the federal abstinence-only subsidy. In 2010, US rates of teen pregnancy and birth, the lowest in seventy years, continued to be far higher than in Western Europe. While Western European programs vary, all give teenagers consistent, evidence-based information and access to contraception and condoms. Public education there encourages personal decision making, respect for young people's choices, and a shared responsibility between adolescents and society. Across North America and Europe, median ages of marriage have substantially risen and more young people cohabit. This diminishes marriage and parenthood as markers of maturity. The emergence of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth activism especially underscores adolescent sexual agency that exceeds the constraints of modern adolescence. As early as 1966, for example, Vanguard, a San Francisco activist group of homeless LGBT youth, demanded an end to police harassment and access to social services. In the 1970s, American, Canadian, French, British, and German gay liberationist and lesbian feminist youth groups mounted critiques of heteronormative institutions, experts, and state power. By the late 1970s, social service and legal discourses characterized LGBT youth as vulnerable subpopulations in need of intervention. Since the 1990s, though, LGBT youth have engaged in renewed activism confronting state and social limitations on their right to safety, identity, sexual activity, and participatory citizenship. It has sparked controversy with those who see them as yet another manifestation of an indulgent world spinning away from proper life course development. Anxieties about adolescent sexuality resonate with broader concerns about youths as particularly susceptible to "disorders of consumption." 15 One manifestation of this has been the rise in recreational drug use, which peaked in the early 1980s in the United States and in the 1990s in Western Europe. In the United Kingdom and United States, young people have faced heightened drug prosecutions. Another marker is the rise in eating disorders since the 1970s, which first hit girls and, more recently, boys. Related, many youths, particularly girls, have added pressures of fitness and dieting to their body projects, while at the same time in the United States (and increasingly across the western world) childhood and adolescent obesity is often framed as an epidemic. Many cultural critics have lamented the late 1990s "girl power" commodification of feminism that emphasized personal sexual empowerment over structural transformation. New media has also inspired new fears. The UK Video Recordings Act of 19?4 sought to prevent teens from viewing violent, sexually demeaning films at home. A year later, US Senate hearings on rock music led to parental advisory warnings on music albums. Gangsta rap faced mid-1990s calls for censorship and the video games industry instituted ratings. Primed by late 1970s and 1980s transnational child pornography and abduction panics, the Internet's rise brought sensationalist media coverage of online youth predators. New media makes youth cultures more transnational and immediate in ways that exceed easy oversight. Adolescents continue to adapt global media to local contexts. 243 DON ROMESBURG ·Conclusion: contempt or collaboration? In a recent essay, historian Michael Zuckerman argues that despite the changing meanings of American adolescence, a "regime of rejection" from the colonial era to the present has established a continuity, of sorts, in adult animosity toward the young. 16 Yet the modern project of adolescence was distinct from the eras preceding and following its ascendance. Today, modern adolescence has been largely abandoned as a project possibility. The homogenizing lenses through which we have attempted to see young people keep failing. Contemporary sociopolitical regimes have distaste for the long-term investment that believing in a more expansive and generous vision of adolescence requires. Better, we assume, to blame the young for their failure to get with whatever program still has funding. Perhaps we need to grieve not the loss of adolescence, but maturity. As increasing numbers of adolescents and adults opt out of marriage and face unstable employment, we chastise our collective failure to grow up. Perhaps young people could teach us all a thing or two about thriving outside "maturity." When more adults are finding it less desirable or possible to attain markers of adulthood, why expect adolescents to strive for it? · To recapitulate: early modern youths negotiated multiple forms of local patriarchal control and expanded the possibilities for adolescence in the process. Modern adolescence as a life stage was consolidated through expert discourses and structural, ideological, and institutional forces. As centralized state management failed to reproduce patriotic, orderly, and eugenic nationalism, the teenager emerged, promising well-adjusted normativity and consumption. This, too, failed to capture youth. Adolescents now face both structures of modern adolescence and a generalized disillusionment with its promises. A hundred years after G. Stanley Hall defined adolescence, psychologist Jeffrey Arnett has gained international recognition for his concept of "emerging adulthood" as the new century's next universalizing developmental life stage, squeezed in between adolescence and maturity. 17 But in a neoliberal world of tough love and austerity measures, aren't most of us ceaselessly emerging? As we chart a course through our precarious present, our challenge is to find new ways to appreciate young people, not as victims, projects, or threats, but as collaborators. of Notes 1 Lynda Payne, "Health in England (16th-18th c.)," in Children and Youth in History, Item · #166, http://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/teaching-modules/166 (accessed October 12, 2011). 2 Natalie Zeman Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modem France (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). 3 Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 81. 4 Joseph Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to Present (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977), 108. 5 Martha Vicinus, "Distance and Desire: English Boarding School Friendships, 1870-1920," in Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York, NY: Meridian, 1989), 212-229. 6 David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York, NY: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 25. 244 7 DonRon andAme. 8 Joan J. B NY: Ran, ern Girl. Duke Un Mexican Women's Routledg, Teenage ( 9 JonSavag Books, 2( 10 Susan K.: IL: UniveJ 11 Grace Pal 175. 12 Axel Shih Age of R ing Eurot Berghahn 13 Wilma Ki Rights (N1 Could Ch, (Chapel H 14 Catherine NY: New 15 Christine 1 Feminist R 16 Michael Z Childhooc. 17 Jeffrey Ar Through tl Austin, Joe, at tory in Twe excellent hi1 race; class, ｾ＠ Levi, GiovannJ Cambridge, through the art. Martin, James, sity Press, 2• that undersc democratic i Maynes, Mary Mills: Placin MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN 7 Don Romesburg, "The Tightrope of Normalcy: Homosexuality, Developmental Citizenship, and American Adolescence," Historical Sociology 21(4) (2008), 417-442. 8 Joan J. Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York, NY: Random, House, 1997); Modern Girl Around the World Working Group, The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Vicki Ruiz, "'Star Struck': Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920-1950," in Unequal Sisters: An Inclusive Reader in U.S. Women's History, 4th edn., ed. Vicki Ruiz and Ellen Carol Dubois (New York, NY: Routledge, 2008), 346-361; Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1945 (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 9 Jon Savage, Teenage: The Prehistory of Youth Culture, 1875-1945 (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007). 10 Susan K. Freeman, Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education before the 1960s (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008), i. 11 Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1996), 175. 12 Axel Shildt and Detlef Siegfried, "Introduction: Youth, Consumption, and Politics in the Age of Radical Change," in Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980, ed. Axel Shildt and Detlef Siegfried (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2006), 1-35. 13 Wilma King, African American Childhoods: Historical Perspectives from Slavery to Civil Rights (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 155-168; Rebecca de Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 14 Catherine Kim, Daniel Losen, Damon Hewitt, The School-to-Prison Pipeline (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2010). 15 Christine Griffin, "Troubled Teens: Managing Disorders of Transition and Consumption," Feminist Review 55 (1997), 4-21. 16 Michael Zuckerman, "The Paradox of American Adolescence," Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 4(1) (2011), 13-25. 17 Jeffrey Arnett, "Emerging Adulthood: A Theory of Development from the Late Teens Through the Twenties," American Psychologist 55(5) (2000), 469-480. Suggestions for further reading Anthologies Austin, Joe, and Michael Nevin Willard, eds. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998. :An excellent historiographic introduction sets up a strong essay collection attentive to gender, race, class, and sexuality. Levi, Giovanni, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds. A History of Young People in the West, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1997. Essays address European youth from Ancient Greece through the mid-twentieth century, touching on family, religion, politics, culture, society, and art. Martin, James, ed. Children and Youth in a New Nation. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2009. This collection presents rich primary sources for interpretation and essays that underscore how changes in childhood and adolescence brought on by republican and democratic ideals and practices shaped young people. Maynes, Mary Jo, Birgitte S0land, and Christina Benninghaus, eds. Secret Gardens, Satanic Mills: Placing Girls in European History, 1750-1960. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University 245 DON ROMESBURG Press, 2005. An outstanding introduction leads into eighteen. essays focusing on Northern and Western Europe that detail the social construction of girlhood and girls' roles in labor, consumerism, education, sexuality, society, and culture. Sauerteig, Lutz D. H., and Robert Davidson, eds. Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth-Century Europe. London, UK: Routledge, 2009. Explores links between sex education, citizenship projects, medicine, religion, family, the state, and shifting representations of gendered and sexualized youth. Schildt, Axel, and Detlef Siegfried, eds. Between Marx and Coca-Cola: Youth Cultures in Changing European Societies, 1960-1980. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2006. A collection that seeks to understand the recent past through links between consumerism, leisure, activism, sexuality, and subculture. Surveys Gillis, John. Youth and History: Tradition and Change in European Age Relations, 1770Present. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1981[1974]. This trailblazing social history draws on demographic and economic indicators to assert that modern adolescence involved youths -principally male - as active agents influenced by and transforming their circumstances. Kett, Joseph. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to Present. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1977. Marking four epochs of transition, this social and cultural history asserts that major structural shifts for youths during the nineteenth century led to the elaboration of the "age of adolescence" throughout the twentieth. Mintz, Steven. Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004. Broken into pre-modern, modern, and post-modern eras, this survey covers diverse male and female childhoods and youths through ideologies, institutions, cultures, and experiences from early colonial encounters through the recent past. Mitterauer, Michael. A History of Youth. Translated by Graeme Dunphy. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992. This cultural and social European history spans five hundred years and is arranged thematically, addressing puberty and adolescence, transitional milestones, positions of youth within social institutions, youth cultures, and contemporary adolescence. Monographs Adams, Mary Louise. The Trouble with Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making of Heterosexuality. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Through a reading of Canadian discourses about youth in sex-education materials, court and school records, and media, this work asserts that modern adolescence was transformed by the elaboration of heterosexuality and companionate marriage as oppositional to homosexuality. Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modem England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994. Describes how experiences of growing up from 1500-1700 varied widely by gender and social group, and concludes that early modern adolescence was a prolonged, dynamic life phase involving separation from parents, entry/exit from service, establishing of marriage, and other rites. of passage. Bailey, Beth. From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Describes the demise of the nineteenth-century model of "courtship" and subsequent evolution of "dating," linking this to the democratization of education, urbanization, and developments in mass communication, transportation, popular culture, and economy. Cornacchia, Cynthia. The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modem Canada. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006. Comparing boys and girls across ethnic and class backgrounds from World War I through the mid-century, 246 · this book aq peer-based id. Deluzio, _Crista. MD: Johns r chological, ar discourse rew Dyhouse, Carol. Routledge & adolescence, t the socializati< Fass, Paula S. ' New York, N' tury, schooling youths into a r pluralistic edu< Jobs, Richard I. ; and World Wi gender as anal· nized, ａｲｮ･ｩ｣ｾ＠ promising, if tr• Lombard, Anne. 1 MA: Harvard ( rather than peeJ loss of paternal for boys in whi< Moran, Jeffrey. 'j Cambridge, MA lescent sexual se to prevent adult even as pedagog Neubauer, John. T Press, 1992. Th; modern adolescf was taken up in literature, and th Odern, Mary. Delit. United States, 1, Focusing on refo how moral camp. lation in which e autonomy. Pollack, Linda A. F UK: Cambridge · parental regard o parental empathy left horne, Redding, Kimberly A Westport, CT: Pra covers the radical eternally youthful problem"; youths, MAKING ADOLESCENCE MORE OR LESS MODERN · this book argues that modern adolescence became a market force, cultural phenomenon, peer-based identity, nationalist project, pedagogical directive, and social scientific concern. Deluzio, Crista. Female Adolescence in American Scientific Thought, 1830-1930. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. This book analyses biological, medical, psychological, and anthropological writing about girlhood to show how a century of expert discourse reworked the meaning of femininity and adolescence. Dyhouse, Carol. Girls Growilfg Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. During this crucial era for the development of modern adolescence, the family and broader social contexts played a larger role than the school in the socialization of girls into modern femininity. Fass, Paula S. Outside In: Minorities and the Transformation of American Education. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989. Asserts that throughout the twentieth century, schooling's promise to bring racially, ethnically, socioeconomically, and gender-diverse youths into a national experience transformed adolescence and drove the push for universal, pluralistic education; youth also made institutions from within. Jobs, Richard I. Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France after the Second World War. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Foregrounding age and gender as analytical categories, this cultural history asserts that as France became decolonized, Americanized, and industrialized, youth consumerism and dynamism symbolized a promising, if troubling, national future and transformed young people. Lompard, Anne. Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. In early New England, young men viewed patrilineal, rather than peer or heterosocial relationships as principal, but over the eighteenth century a loss of paternal power and a greater recognition of emotional experience led to new ideals for boys in which women and peers assumed central roles. Moran, Jeffrey. Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. American emphases on cultivating adolescent sexual self-control as a form of social control and intervening into youth malleability to prevent adult sexual "disorder" reverberated throughout twentieth-century sex education, even as pedagogical models changed. Neubauer, John. The Filt-de-Siecle Culture of Adolescence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. This book draws expansively from European and US sources to assert that modern adolescence was discursively consolidated in the decades around 1900 because it was taken up in intertwined ways by psychology, criminal justice, pedagogy, sociology, and literature, and that these shaped young people's lives and identities. Odem, Mary. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in United States, 1885-1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Focusing on reformers' and officials' discipline of working-class girls, this work highlights how moral campaigns fueled by race, class, and gender tensions led to uneven sexual regulation in which e_ven parents utilized laws and courts to reassert authority over daughters' autonomy. Pollack, Linda A. Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500-1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Countering a prevailing thesis about a lack of parental regard of early modern children, this work underscores historical continuity in parental empathy for adolescent sons and daughters, including advocacy for them once they left home. Redding, Kimberly A. Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow: Remembering Youth in Postwar Berlin. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004. Drawing from oral histories and archival sources, this work covers the radical shift from Nazis' enforced inclusion of adolescents in the vision of an eternally youthful state to a post-war state mistrust of boys and, especially, girls, as a "youth problem"; youths, however, were remarkably resilient. 247 DON ROMESBURG I I ｾ＠ I i Schlossman, Steven. Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of "Progressive" Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977. An early important juvenile justice history that asserts that an evolving vision of benevolence led to greater intervention into young people's lives resulting in fewer rights, more diagnosis and prevention of "delinquency," and heightened distrust of adolescents and their families. Springhall, John. Coming of Age: Adolescence in Britain, 1860-1960. Dublin, Ireland: Gill and Macmillan, 1986. This work traces modern adolescence in expert discourses, play, work, and juvenile justice that. converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to address shifting class conditions; in mid-twentieth century consumer society, these led to tensions drawn between the disruptive teddy boy and the redemptive teenager. Todd, Selina. Young Women, Work and Family, 1918-1950. New York, NY: Oxford, 2005. This social and economic history shows how, despite poverty and struggle, working-class girls created new possibilities within the work practices and cultures central to their lives through which they became more mobile, gained new stature within families, assertively demanded better laboring conditions, and created new ways to play and relate. 248 THEI Physical space the ways in w ety without th modern perioc ing imperial e shops, and otl work. They cc a house with a public high sd fully madtdor , of modernity i1 hospitals, ref01 mer camps, ch material cultur means by whic_ and their child] Materiality I physical spaces graphers, and < actors, use, ap1 is due to the e1 also offers a un: as an arena sha space is where < ical evidence of Physical spaces, grasp "the histc rial world are < adult actions, f< use space to exe In this essay, that physical sp childhood, are IJ a child to be the teacher fills up¥. THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD IN THE WESTERN WORLD some of the most )y an international :h all future books Edited by Paula S. Pass :SINCE 1700 ｾｕｓｔ＠ BODY :UROPE ｾＱ＠ mｾ＠ Routledge Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK