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    Reflections On Age As A Category of Historical Analysis

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    Reflections On Age As A Category of Historical Analysis

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    Graciela Severini
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    mintz2007

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    Reflections On Age As A Category of Historical Analysis

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    Graciela Severini

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    The key takeaways are that age functions both to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. Age is also a subjective experience that weighs on people's minds as they grow up and grow older. Additionally, age became identified with developmental milestones and clearly defined norms and expectations in the 20th century.

    The text lays out that age functions to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. It also serves as a subjective experience and became identified with certain cognitive, emotional, and physiological stages of development as well as forms of behavior appropriate for certain ages in the 20th century.

    The author likens age to gender as a way to organize power but notes age has less definitional power than gender and has undergone more change over time as a prescriptive system. Both are cultural systems imbued with assumptions and values that are attributed to particular categories.

    Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis

    Steven Mintz

    The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 1, Number 1,


    Winter 2008, pp. 91-94 (Article)

    Published by Johns Hopkins University Press


    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2008.0003

    For additional information about this article


    https://muse.jhu.edu/article/233321

    Access provided by Fordham University Library (29 Jun 2018 23:50 GMT)
    STEVEN MINTZ

    REFLECTIONS ON AGE AS A CATEGORY


    OF HIS TORICAL ANALYSIS

    Steven Mintz lays out some of the complex ways age functions, both to describe expected
    processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. Like other
    scholars, he likens the category of age to that of gender as a way to organize power, but points
    out that age has less definitional power than gender and has undergone more change over time
    as a prescriptive system. He sees age, paradoxically, as gaining power as a prescriptive system
    while gender loses it.—M.S.

    R ecent scholarship tells two competing and contradictory stories about


    the evolution of age categories in American society.1 One story holds that age
    categories have grown progressively more rigid, precise, uniform, and prescrip-
    tive as Americans move with greater regularity from pre-school, to primary
    and secondary school, and on to college. An opposing story contends that age
    categories are breaking down as children embrace adolescent and even adult
    behavior and attitudes at ever younger ages, and as adults, in increasing num-
    bers, mimic the styles and fashions of the young. These two conflicting stories
    might be summed up in two quips that pervade popular commentary on chil-
    dren and reflect the dominant “declension” model of childhood: That kids are
    growing up faster than ever, and yet young people never seem to grow up at
    all, at least not before their thirties.2
    Age is a concept with multiple meanings. It is a chronological marker, a
    set of sign posts that societies and individuals use to measure their progress
    through the life course. Age is also a subjective experience, one that weighs on
    people’s minds as they grow up and grow older. During the twentieth century,
    age became identified with developmental milestones and clearly defined norms
    and expectations. American society linked age with certain cognitive, emotional,
    and physiological stages of development and also with certain forms of behavior
    appropriate or inappropriate to people of certain ages. Equally important, age
    provided modern bureaucratic societies with a seemingly impartial organiz-
    ing category that can be used to structure institutions, most notably, school

    Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v.1.1) © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
    92 REFLECTIONS ON AGE AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

    classrooms. At the same time, age served, sometimes explicitly and sometimes
    implicitly, as a system of power and hierarchy, linked to legal rights (such as the
    right to vote, marry, drink, and smoke) and also to legal consequences (through
    status offenses that can only be committed by those under eighteen).3
    Historians have a great deal to contribute to an understanding of age
    as a category of analysis. Historians’ dynamic, diachronic approach helps
    illustrate how age categories and age consciousness have shifted over time.4
    Contemporary societies’ fascination with age stands in stark contrast to ear-
    lier societies’ rather vague and amorphous age categories. Still, no society is
    unaware of age, and historians need to ask what age meant or entailed in soci-
    eties that lacked the rigid age categories and the intense age consciousness of
    western societies in the mid-twentieth century. Historians also need to provide
    their unique perspective on whether age is losing its salience as a basic organiz-
    ing category as we enter the twenty-first century.
    Age functions in differing ways in distinct social and cultural contexts and
    inevitably intersects with other categories of social organization and social
    difference. Historians’ attentiveness to class, ethnicity, and gender shows how
    multiple definitions of age coexist in particular historical eras, even within a
    single society, and how these definitions can become the source of cultural con-
    flict.5 In our own time, the issue of young peoples’ competency and maturity
    lies at the heart of debates over capital punishment for minors, trying youthful
    offenders in adult courts, adolescents’ access to contraceptives and abortion,
    and debates over children’s right to a say in custody decisions.
    The title of this essay self-consciously echoes an extraordinarily influen-
    tial article by Joan Scott published nearly twenty years ago in the American
    Historical Review.6 Entitled “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,”
    her essay argued that gender is as important a category of historical analysis
    as class, ethnicity, and nationality. Gender, Scott explained, referred not simply
    to biological and anatomical distinctions between men and women, but also
    to the socially constructed meanings, ideas, and assumptions attributed to
    masculinity and femininity. Challenging earlier materialist and psychoanalytic
    approaches to gender, Scott emphasized the historical variability of gender sys-
    tems and the way that such systems function along a number of dimensions,
    including the normative, the symbolic, the institutional, the subjective, and the
    performative. Scott’s emphasis on gender represented a challenge to historians
    who focused on women’s lives in isolation from men’s. Gender analysis, she
    insisted, had certain advantages: it problematized historians’ vocabulary; made
    historians’ more attentive to agency; and encouraged scholars to compare and
    contrast gender to other categories of difference and oppression.7
    Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 93

    In some respects, age resembles gender; yet, in other respects, it is funda-


    mentally different. Like gender, age is a construct that has changed over time.
    Far from being static and unchanging, age categories and age consciousness
    have shifted profoundly in distinct historical eras. Also, like gender, age is a
    cultural system. Age categories are not natural; rather, they are imbued with
    cultural assumptions, meaning, and values. Thus various socially and cultur-
    ally constructed meanings are attributed to particular age categories. Implicit
    in terms like child or adolescent are certain assumptions about immaturity,
    irresponsibility, and incomplete development and maturation.
    Like gender, age is a system of power relationships. Relations between age
    groups are a primary aspect of social organization, and differences in age are
    organized along hierarchical lines. Age categories are embedded in personal
    relationships, institutional structuring, social practices, law, public policy,
    and politics. Yet while both gender and age are rooted in biology, there are
    profound differences in the way gender and age function culturally, socially,
    and psychologically. Unlike gender, age is a more fluid category; variation
    is wider, and age categories and age consciousness have changed more over
    time. Furthermore, gender totally shapes the life course even in a culture that
    emphasizes gender equality; in contrast, age is always modified by class, eth-
    nicity, gender, nationality, and religion. In addition, the biology of aging has
    changed in ways that the biology of gender has not. Age is much less fixed
    than gender; age categories are very malleable compared to gender, and sub-
    jectively, age does not define individual identity in as encompassing a way as
    does gender.
    Yet paradoxically, age today may well be a stronger system of power rela-
    tions than gender, at least for minors. Despite shifts in cultural conceptions
    of age and the seeming acceleration in sexual maturation and the process of
    growing up, the institutional boundaries surrounding the young have remained
    strongly intact. Meanwhile, public policy, under the banner of child protection,
    has sought to restore childhood as a protected state of innocence through such
    measures as mandatory Internet filtering software, graduated drivers licenses,
    abstinence-only sex education courses, random drug tests, zero tolerance disci-
    pline policies, school dress codes, V-Chips, and intensive efforts to reduce the
    number of school drop-outs.

    NOTES
    1. Howard Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture
    (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage:
    Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
    94 REFLECTIONS ON AGE AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

    2. David Elkind, The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (New York: Perseus
    Books, 1988); Kay S. Hymowitz, Ready or Not: What Happens When We Treat Children
    As Small Adults (San Francisco, CA: Encounter Books, 2000).
    3. Steven Mintz, “Life Stages,” in Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliott J. Gorn, and Peter W. Williams,
    eds., Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993),
    3:2011–2022.
    4. Chudacoff; Kett.
    5. Stephen Robertson, Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in
    New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Steven
    Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press,
    2004).
    6. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical
    Review, 91, no. 5 (1986): 1053–1075.
    7. Jennifer Terry, “Notes on Joan Scott’s essay, Gender as a Useful Category of Historical
    Analysis” http://home.earthlink.net/~jenniferterry/courses/WS140w/Scottongender.html.

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