Afterword: Against adulthood

Kristine Alexander

Adulthood, it turns out, is many things: a relationally constructed social category, a context-specific legal status and (for some people more than others) an empty promise. Not necessarily a milestone and not always a crisis, adulthood – as the contributors to this book make clear – has been imposed, aspired to, denied, rejected and contested in multiple ways over the past six centuries. Focusing on the territories currently known as Great Britain and the United States, this volume charts continuity and change while highlighting the complicated ways in which cultural expectations informed individual lives. Like whiteness, adulthood functions in much historical scholarship as an invisible norm.¹ The entwined and often taken-for-granted histories of adulthood and whiteness need to be understood as outcomes of the ‘economy of affirmation and forgetting’ that, according to Lisa Lowe, is at the heart of modern liberal humanism.² Thinking intersectionally about age and adulthood across time and space, as this book begins to do, offers significant insights about power, lived experience and the construction of hierarchies. It can also encourage us to question the ways of thinking that have, in many contexts, empowered ‘adults’ at the expense of others.

Ranging chronologically from the medieval period to the (post)modern present, the chapters in this volume historicise adulthood by looking critically and creatively at a wide range of primary documents. From fourteenth-century poetry to early modern visual culture to eighteenth-century dictionaries and satirical texts, the evidence marshalled here reveals a valuable longue durée story about time and the multiplicity of life stages. This usefully complicates the still pervasive assumption that the late eighteenth-century ‘age of reason’ represented a decisive break with popular understandings of adulthood that came before. The chapters that explore the nineteenth and twentieth centuries analyse a still broader range of sources including legal records, news media, life-writing, oral history interviews, feature films and the pronouncements of experts in the fields of medicine, social work, education, psychology and psychiatry. Some of these case studies feature first-person reflections about the meanings and experiences of adulthood, while others focus on how self-proclaimed adults (who were, unsurprisingly, often white men) made claims about the maturity and capacity of others.

A number of the book’s chapters discuss lives shaped by what Holly N.S. White and Julia M. Goddard call ‘double age’ – the process through which some individuals are ascribed a functional age that differs from their chronological one.³ Two of the most striking examples of this phenomenon appear in case studies by Jack Hodgson and Laura Tisdall, each of which traces the uneven distribution of developmentally defined rights and protections (associated variously with ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’) among boys and girls who had yet to attain the age of legal majority. Focusing on murder cases in the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Hodgson highlights a number of ways in which non-white youngsters have consistently received harsher judicial treatment than their white counterparts. His work demonstrates that the association of (white) childhood with innocence, redeemability and the need for protection could – and often did – have devastating consequences for the young people who were excluded from this category.⁴ Tisdall’s chapter, meanwhile, addresses the structural racism of British schooling in the 1970s and 1980s by tracing the different ways in which African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents were pathologised by teachers and social workers for their apparent failure to conform to ‘normal’ timelines of physical, emotional and intellectual development. White supremacy, Tisdall argues, led these young people – in ways they and their parents often contested – to be seen variously as ‘adultified children and childlike adolescents’.

These case studies exemplify the claim, made by Tisdall and Maria Cannon in the Introduction to this volume, that ‘understanding adulthood is crucial to understanding power’. They also provide clear evidence that the history of adulthood – like the history of childhood – cannot be disentangled from histories of colonialism and race.⁵ The findings of this book as a whole, in fact, need to be understood in the context of a centuries-long Anglo-American chronology of empire, Indigenous dispossession, white settlement and slavery. While medieval Europeans were developing dynamic understandings of ‘the ages of man’, for example, the original inhabitants of North America – Indigenous peoples who would later be categorised by white settler colonisers as incapable and improvident children – approached ageing and intergenerational relations in ways characterised by collectivity, responsibility and reciprocity.⁶ The early modern religious and demographic shifts discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 occurred in tandem with English (and later British) attempts to establish colonies on Indigenous lands in what is now the eastern seaboard of the United States. And by the time the figure of the embarrassing and irrelevant old ‘fogram’ emerged in late eighteenth-century British society and culture, the United Kingdom had come to dominate the transatlantic trade in enslaved African people.

The permanent migration of millions of white Britons to colonies in the so-called ‘New World’ began in earnest at the same time, and coincided with a new Anglo-American emphasis (in politics, Protestant Christianity and English common law) on age, reason and consent.⁷ The emergence of this Manichean understanding of malleable, vulnerable and incapable children and capable, autonomous, rights-bearing adults culminated, as Holly Brewer has written, in the apparently ‘natural’ legal incapacitation of children and those who could be compared to children.⁸ This unequal and metaphorical understanding of adulthood and childhood was used, as several scholars have written, to justify slavery and empire in a wide range of contexts from the late eighteenth century on.⁹ It was also at the heart of what Ishita Pande, writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century India, has called the liberal epistemic contract on age: the ‘implicit agreement that age is a natural measure of legal capacity for all humans’.¹⁰

The uneven affordances of the category of adulthood, so clearly linked to histories of race and empire, were also centrally about gender. The association between adulthood and normative masculinity, reinforced through the status given to traits like authority, strength and gravitas, is a consistent thread that runs throughout this volume. These masculine ideals were constructed relationally, often through the infantilisation of women – as demonstrated, for instance, by Holly N.S. White’s argument that nineteenth-century American parents and judges often struggled to understand unmarried women as anything other than childlike dependants. The persistence of this way of thinking is evident in Kristin Hay’s analysis of Scottish debates about the birth control pill in the decade and a half after 1968; unmarried women, she finds, ‘were disproportionately represented as inherently juvenile – regardless of their age – and lacking the key social indicators which made them independent adults’. The association of maturity with masculinity also shaped individuals’ employment chances in mid-twentieth-century Britain, as Grace Whorrall-Campbell’s chapter shows. The psychological and psychiatric experts hired by the British army, the British civil service and Unilever during the mid-twentieth century, she writes, found it hard to imagine that women, gay men and working-class people might be capable of maturely (or ‘convincingly’) wielding authority in the workplace.

Looking closely at gender also demonstrates a number of links between the history of adulthood and the history of emotions. The valorisation of masculine emotional restraint as a hallmark of adulthood was central, as Emily E. Robson’s chapter shows, to early modern British Protestant ministers’ assertions about their superior spiritual maturity. A similar gendered belief in the value of emotional control shaped employment cultures in Britain some 400 years later, as shown by Whorrall-Campbell’s analysis of the preferences of mid-twentieth-century psychological selection boards. The idealisation of emotional control as a somehow inherently masculine and ‘adult’ trait, she writes, ‘marked a number of overlapping and mutually reinforcing hierarchies’. Other chapters in the book discuss anger (at supposedly entitled young women enjoying premarital sex without consequences), frustration (as experienced by some disabled Britons in their pursuit of sexual intimacy, love and marriage) and fear – of the decline associated with ageing and of imagined threats to the social order posed by non-white children.

These are strong emotions, and the stakes involved are substantial. Taking an intersectional approach to the history of age and empire is therefore a political as well as an intellectual project, and I agree with Tisdall and Cannon’s argument that ‘historicising adulthood should not just mean demonstrating the unfairness of the exclusion of non-adults from this category, but questioning the usefulness of the category itself’. The late twentieth- and early twentieth-century ‘emerging adult’ films discussed in Andrea Sofía Regueira Martín’s chapter offer one critique of the project of adulthood, although – as she notes – the viewpoints they represent are firmly rooted in the white American middle class. Queer, antiracist and Black feminist theory offer still more useful tools for questioning the pervasiveness of our attachment to what Habiba Ibrahim describes as the ideal of ‘the possessive individual, the free-willed subject, a normative gender binary, [and] a presumptive separation between public and private life’.¹¹ Embracing interdependence and ‘reading sideways’ (a method proposed by Ishita Pande, using the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton) are good places to begin, as is a willingness to reckon with failure – in our own ‘adult’ lives and in the scholarship we produce.¹² As queer theorist Jack Halberstam reminds us, failure (an outcome that Western children and adults are both taught to fear) can sometimes be rewarding – not least because it can allow us ‘to escape the punishing norms that discipline behaviour and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods’.¹³