Introduction

Historicising adulthood

Historians have rarely thought directly about adulthood, despite the fact that it is the yardstick by which ideas of what it means to be ‘childish’, ‘elderly’ or ‘adolescent’ are measured. Even modern Global North concepts such as the ‘midlife crisis’ presume the existence of a healthy kind of adulthood that exists before you hit middle age. But in the same way as an analysis of femininity is incomplete without understanding what is meant by masculinity, we cannot really understand how concepts of childhood, adolescence or old age have changed without thinking about how adulthood is also given different meanings in different societies at different times. Without this empirical knowledge, we cannot fully use age as a category of historical analysis.⁸

Scholars of childhood have recognised this problem. As Sari Edelstein writes, we should not ‘subject childhood to scholarly analysis without attending to age more generally’ as ‘age is the larger paradigm in which childhood belongs’.⁹ Stephanie Olsen asked recently, ‘Why has childhood been so extensively historicized but adulthood has not? After all, aren’t humans at every stage in the life cycle always in a state of becoming as well as being?’¹⁰ However, a limited amount of historical work on adulthood has emerged.¹¹ Most existing histories focus on ‘middle age’ or the ‘midlife crisis’ rather than earlier stages of social maturity – work that is significant in its own right, but which does not historicise healthy adulthood.¹² Literary scholars of Britain and the United States have done important work on the presentation of adulthood in specific texts and on the emergence of a separate category of children’s literature – which entailed the production of a category of ‘adult literature’ – but these texts focus solely on nineteenth-century literary culture.¹³

There is currently no single historical text that considers the history of adulthood in Britain and the United States across a longer chronological span, allowing us to attend to how ideas about this life stage changed and how they stayed the same. Steven Mintz’s The Prime of Life (2015) comes closest to offering a history of adulthood itself, but this survey text, which focuses solely on the United States, is deeply flawed: rather than historicising adulthood, it reinscribes a sequence of modern stereotypes about what it means to be ‘grown up’, connecting adulthood to life-cycle markers such as marriage, paid employment and home ownership.¹⁴ Mintz unquestioningly accepts modern Global North assumptions about the capabilities of children and adults, writing that ‘adulthood is consequential in ways that childhood and adolescence are not … Adulthood is the time of life when individuals achieve emotional and intellectual maturity and support themselves and others’.¹⁵ This description highlights the key qualities that we often associate with twenty-first-century adulthood – independence, responsibility and psychological maturity – but assumes that this is actually what adults are like and takes the universal relevance of these qualities for granted.

For the medieval and early modern periods, research that could be described as focusing on adulthood in fact considers values associated with masculinity and femininity, and how they complemented each other in the patriarchal household.¹⁶ To some degree this reflects pre-modern ideas of adulthood that were closely linked with other status-conferring concepts including social status and gender. Rites of passage that conferred status on individuals were significant in medieval society, but not necessarily linked to chronological age.¹⁷ One exception is the recent work of Jacob W. Doss, which opens up a discussion of medieval adulthood by considering how twelfth-century Cistercian monks understood the ideal monk as ‘mature and masculine’, explicitly challenging earlier work on monkhood that focused solely on gender. Doss argues that the education of the Cistercian recruit, regardless of the recruit’s chronological age, was about making ‘boys’ into ‘men’.¹⁸

Marriage has been singled out by medieval and early modern historians as the most significant event in the lives of both men and women.¹⁹ Marriage and the associated status of householder conferred a degree of stability and responsibility on individuals that marked their entry into adulthood.²⁰ Women who never married could find it especially difficult to obtain householding status as independent work was often denied to never-married women by the authorities.²¹ Deborah Youngs notes that even after marriage, adults were required to continually demonstrate their new status as successful householders, spouses and parents.²² Similarly, modern historians have considered changing ideas of ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’, and marked the significance of marriage and parenthood as a rite of passage, especially for women.²³ Nevertheless, this important work is not primarily a history of adulthood. These historians use gender, not age, as their primary category of historical analysis. They analyse ‘girls and women’ and ‘boys and men’ through this lens, rather than considering how chronological age shapes the disempowerment of children, young people and older people, and hence the valorisation of adulthood.

Adulthood and chronological age

The category of adulthood has long been used as a tool of power.²⁴ Holly Brewer argues that, from the late seventeenth century onwards, political understandings of childhood and adulthood fundamentally changed in the Anglo-American world. As ideas of government focused more on the ability to ‘consent’, children were no longer viewed as legitimate political actors. This contrasted with older patriarchal norms, where those who inherited young wielded power by virtue of their status rather than their age. This move ‘from status to contract’ meant children were the only group explicitly excluded from legal rights.²⁵ In political terms, age and maturity did not directly correlate until into the eighteenth century.²⁶ After this major shift, chronological age became increasingly important in Britain and the United States: first as a way of designating who had access to certain rights, and then, through the expansion of mass age-graded schooling from the late nineteenth century, as a way of separating childhood and adolescence into increasingly smaller units.²⁷

However, age-markers and laws conferring legal majority existed in various forms in medieval and early modern England. The legal age of marriage was twelve for girls and fourteen for boys. Fourteen was also the age individuals were liable to pay the poll tax in medieval England as this age ‘presumed increasing economic activity’ in rural areas where many of this age earned money in service or labour placements outside of their family homes.²⁸ There was no single age of majority and these laws were primarily guidelines by which to judge individual cases.²⁹ As noted by Miriam Müller, adulthood was not fixed by chronological age and laws indicating legal majority used age ‘to judge other factors of social maturity against’.³⁰ Most people in medieval society would not have known their birthdate or exact chronological age and so relied on collective, community knowledge to ascertain how old they were.³¹

The community also had a role in deciding whether the individual was mature enough to be granted independent ‘adult’ status. As age was not usually known, it could be amended to suit an individual’s circumstances.³² Thus, age and social maturity could be defined and altered depending on whether the individual was deemed to have sufficient qualities to be conferred an ‘adult’. Historians of old age have noted the importance of ‘functional’ age as individuals were often deemed to be elderly when they were no longer able to support themselves independently.³³ This dependence was largely dictated by circumstance and social context. Similar caveats were applied to those with disabilities who may not have been granted legal adulthood.³⁴ This definition could be flexible: for example, those with mental health issues could move in and out of legal wardship depending on the level of support they needed to manage their affairs.³⁵

Furthermore, even after the rise of ‘chronological age’ as a marker of adulthood in the modern period, it did not reign supreme. As Sarah Mulhall Adelman has recently argued in reference to nineteenth-century New York orphan asylums, institutions wanted to use precise chronological ages, but record-keeping took some time to catch up to their ambition, as dates of birth were often still unknown.³⁶ Holly N.S. White and Julia M. Gossard show that concepts of ‘double age’ were in play in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, with functional age still privileged above chronological age when it suited those who wanted to either grant, or remove, certain protections.³⁷

In both Britain and the United States, different and internally contradictory age-markers were constructed across the modern period to mark out precise chronological ages when individuals entered ‘adulthood’. In the nineteenth century, twenty-one was often used as the age of majority, despite the fact that many individuals remained uncertain of their age.³⁸ This was the age at which all white men in the United States gained voting rights, and the age at which those men who were able to vote under successive extensions of the franchise in Britain in 1832, 1867 and 1885 became legally qualified to do so. In Britain, this age was formalised by the 1832 Great Reform Act, based on the minimum age of property ownership. The United Kingdom was the first democracy to lower its voting age to eighteen, in 1969; the United States followed in 1971, as the World War II slogan ‘old enough to fight, old enough to vote’ gained further currency in the context of the Vietnam War.³⁹

This, however, did not signal a single legal age of adulthood: the age of sexual consent moved from ten to thirteen and finally to sixteen in Britain between 1860 and 1885.⁴⁰ And as Ishita Pande has recently argued, age of consent laws were amended across the British Empire in the last two decades of the nineteenth century but did not reach consensus. In India, for example, the age was raised to twelve; in the Cape of Good Hope, to fourteen; and in New Zealand, to sixteen.⁴¹ In the United States, ages of sexual consent and statutory marriage ages, which might be different from each other, were set by individual states: if no legislation was passed, marriage ages were supposed to be the common-law ages of fourteen for boys and twelve for girls. Different marriage ages based on sex often persisted until the 1970s, when states equalised them.⁴² The age of consent was sixteen or eighteen in all states after 1918 except Georgia, where it remained at fourteen until 1995. Meanwhile, Britain set a legal drinking age of eighteen in 1923, whereas in the United States, states instituted their own drinking age laws after the end of Prohibition in 1933, and a national minimum drinking age of twenty-one was established in 1984.⁴³

Oppressed and marginalised groups marked different legal paths to adulthood in modern Britain and the United States. African-American men did not gain the (theoretical) right to vote in the United States until 1868, and women of any race until 1919. Native Americans were not guaranteed voting rights in every state until 1962, despite the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act supposedly giving them rights to full citizenship. In Britain, the Representation of the People Act of 1918 established a universal male franchise but restricted the female vote to property-owning women or female graduates over thirty; the franchise was not equalised until 1929. In the British Empire, colonised subjects had even fewer rights: for example, despite the expansion of opportunities for Indians over twenty-one to vote in provincial elections from the early twentieth century onwards, especially after the Government of India Act 1935, the franchise was based on property qualifications until independence in 1947 and so only about a sixth of Indian adults could vote.⁴⁴ The age of consent, meanwhile, was set at twenty-one for men who had sex with men after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 in England and Wales (sex between men was not legalised until 1980 in Scotland). It was lowered to eighteen in 1994 and equalised at sixteen in 2000. As this shows, even in the modern period, concepts of adulthood were used to oppress those who would otherwise have been defined as adults by virtue of their chronological age, further challenging its neutrality.

Chronological age clearly became a more significant legal and social marker in modern Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century, although it was neither insignificant before this period nor totally dominant thereafter.⁴⁵ However, when we look at individuals’ own concepts of adulthood, these are not always tied tightly to chronological age, even in the modern period. As this collection will show, adulthood is often viewed as an individual attitude, situation or state of mind. This reflects a key division in the limited historiography on age: those who focus on ‘age grading’ versus those who focus on ‘age consciousness’.⁴⁶ Although little has been written on adulthood on both sides of this divide, ‘age consciousness’ seems especially ill-served, with historians often focusing on legal ages of majority rather than on how people themselves thought about adulthood. This approach can be distorting: for example, Britain technically established the legal age of majority at eighteen in 1969, but British teenagers and young adults reflecting on adulthood in the 1970s and 1980s very rarely refer to chronological age, instead highlighting life-cycle markers like leaving school, getting a job and getting married.⁴⁷

Adulthood through time: static, idealised, oppressive

Adulthood has been seen as a static state both throughout history and during the human life span. Patrick Alexander, John Lowenthal and Graham Butt argue that relatively new sociological concepts, such as Jeffrey Arnett’s ‘emerging adulthood’, imply that adulthood is changing over time but actually still fix adulthood as a coherent, unchanging category that is ultimately achieved.⁴⁸ Even in medieval and early modern ages of man schemata which could allow for multiple stages of adulthood, it was still positioned as the apex of the life cycle. This reflects what Bernadette Baker has called ‘the developmental conception of the child’, which positions childhood and adolescence as an ever-changing journey and adulthood as their fixed destination.⁴⁹ As Valerie Walkerdine has written, modern developmental psychology understands ‘adulthood as a stable state of being’ and ‘childhood as unstable’, but the stability of adulthood is ‘fictional’.⁵⁰ A number of scholars have also pointed out that, if adulthood is understood in this way, elderly people risk becoming non-adults again as they age past reliable independence.⁵¹ As the radical American children’s rights campaigner and educator, John Holt, wrote in Escape from Childhood (1974), ‘we are more and more coming to think of human life as a series of crises – the crisis of puberty, the crisis of adolescence, the crisis of middle age, the crisis of old age. It is almost as if the only age to be is between twenty-one and thirty-five’.⁵²

The term ‘adult’ was not used in medieval literature, but other categories such as ‘full’ or ‘perfect’ age were used to indicate the apex of the human life course. Historians have analysed written and visual depictions of the ‘ages of man’, the different life stages man could expect to experience from birth to death.⁵³ Simple schema contained three or four stages but they could depict up to twelve stages. By the sixteenth century, the ‘seven ages’ had become the most popular and were increasingly presented in a step form with adulthood at the pinnacle.⁵⁴ These schemes were mainly an intellectual exercise intended ‘to integrate the life of man into the larger order of the natural world’.⁵⁵ They were idealised depictions and did not represent all men’s (and certainly not women’s) experiences. They nevertheless show that medieval people thought intellectually about the physical and mental changes that men could expect to experience through their life course. Adulthood could be a stage on its own in a three- or four-stage schema, or made up of multiple stages in a larger schema, but it usually functioned as an apex where physical strength and mental capacity were ideally balanced.

In the modern period, the creation of increasingly complex stages of development to map childhood and adolescent experience coupled with the assumption that adulthood is a fixed end-point led to the idealisation of psychological adulthood.⁵⁶ Teresa Michals argues that this modern view of adulthood emerged only from the late eighteenth century onwards, as adulthood became more associated with personal qualities than formal power, and that this introduced a fundamental contradiction into the term: ‘The psychological sense of adulthood as an age-leveled norm … is in tension with its meaning as an aspirational ideal.’⁵⁷ Teri Chettiar echoes the idea of the modernity of this kind of adulthood in her history of the growing political significance of emotional intimacy in postwar Britain, writing that, after World War II, adulthood ‘increasingly became an emotional category rather than a demographic designation’.⁵⁸ However, Michals and Chettiar fail to recognise that adulthood was associated with personal qualities as well as social status in the medieval and early modern period as well; the same tension between norm and ideal existed before the eighteenth century, despite chronological age being much less significant.

A central component of the ‘ages of man’ was an examination of the qualities associated with each life stage. Children and the elderly were understood to have different physical constitutions and mental capacities compared to adults who, as in modern concepts of adulthood, were capable of shouldering responsibility and behaving moderately and rationally. It was possible for people to exhibit qualities of a different life stage with positive and negative effects. For instance, many saints were described as exhibiting mature levels of wisdom and intelligence during their childhoods, but people who behaved youthfully in old age were criticised. Even in these idealised depictions, developmental stages were linked to wider societal understandings of adult maturity.⁵⁹

Despite the clear association of certain characteristics with the broad life stage of adulthood, pre-modern concepts of political and social status perhaps explain the lack of a general term for ‘adult’. Although marriage and heading a household conferred a degree of maturity and independence, dependence/independence and youth/adulthood did not always correlate directly. Lower-status people were not deemed politically mature by those in power, even if they were economically independent. Alexandra Shepard has shown that dependence was linked more closely to social status than age in early modern English society. When accounting for their own wealth, those of elite social ranks were more likely to be financially reliant on their parents, even at an adult chronological age, than poorer social groups who supported themselves. Shepard sums up the contradiction that ‘paradoxically, for those in the “fast stream” to adulthood, dependence on parental patronage was much longer lasting’.⁶⁰ The young adults of elite families could expect to be conferred with political maturity in the future, despite the fact that poorer people of the same chronological age might have already been financially independent for years. This complicates Michals’s assertion that, in the pre-modern period, ‘those who remained economically dependent had to remain perpetual children’.⁶¹

Excluding a physically mature group of people from adulthood was one way it might be used as a tool of oppression. In the British Empire, colonised subjects were often framed as both effeminate and childlike to justify the ‘necessity’ of British domination; discourse about ‘tutelage’ was used to refer to both colonised countries and their native elites.⁶² In the nineteenth-century United States, Corinne T. Field has shown how both white women and formerly enslaved black people had to fight for equal recognition as ‘adults’.⁶³ Across Britain, western Europe and the United States, Freudian psychology framed homosexual people as developmentally arrested from the late nineteenth century onwards, unlikely to achieve ‘adult’ milestones such as marrying or having children.⁶⁴ Working-class children in twentieth-century Britain were not expected to meet the same milestones of intellectual development as their middle-class peers.⁶⁵ As Patrick McKearney has explored, disabled people in the Global North have been understood as ‘childlike’ because of their inability to live ‘independent lives’; this fails to recognise how all humans are ultimately interdependent.⁶⁶

While these exclusions made adulthood seem like a privilege, the conferral of premature adulthood could also be used as a tool of oppression within both colonial and domestic contexts. Satadru Sen argues that ‘delinquent’ native children in British India were framed as ‘small, perverse adults’; unlike their white counterparts, they were seen as unamenable to reform, needing punishment rather than education.⁶⁷ Danielle Kinsey builds on these assertions by examining the earlier British fascination with child maharajas in the 1840s; these child rulers were seen as a symbol of India’s corrupt state, a reversal of the natural order of things.⁶⁸ Historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slavery in Jamaica and the United States have claimed that enslaved children had their childhoods ‘stolen’ as they were pressed into labour or used as ‘breeding wenches’ early in adolescence.⁶⁹ Tera Eva Agyepong has shown how this ‘adultification’ of black children extended into the twentieth century within the US juvenile court system, a theme explored further in Jack Hodgson’s chapter in this collection.⁷⁰

However, historians can recognise these dynamics of exploitation without framing childhood falsely as a desirable identity. As Sen goes on to argue, by stripping childhood from native children in India, British colonisers also ensured these children could never be considered true adults, as ‘the premature adult is frozen in a permanently unreasoning, childish state’.⁷¹ In his consideration of black childhood in the United States in two different historical eras – the antebellum period and the twenty-first century – Jacob Breslow reaches similar conclusions.⁷² He argues that black people were viewed in both eras as ‘childlike’. Black minors were not treated as children because, in João Costa Vargas and Joy A. James’s words, they were ‘already framed by the image of the menacing black [adult]’, but nor were black adults considered genuinely grown-up.⁷³ Neither the category of childhood nor of adulthood protected black people because they were positioned as outside the normal trajectories of maturation accessible to whites.

Chapter summaries and conclusion

The eleven chapters in this collection, alongside the Afterword, examine how adulthood has been both persistent and highly mutable in Britain and the United States since c.1350. It compares these two major imperial nation-states, although due to its chronological span, there are fewer chapters that focus on the United States, as it did not become a formal entity until later in the time period covered by this book. This comparative approach has been chosen for three reasons. First, this comparison allows us to consider two countries that share much of the same international psychological and sociological influences via the language of ‘progressivism’, but still are sometimes differentiated quite sharply in their approaches to adulthood.⁷⁴ Second, these two countries have some of the most developed historiographies of childhood and adolescence, which allow us to situate our assertions about adulthood. Third, as imperialist nations, both countries exported their ideas about adulthood – Britain throughout its formal and informal empire, and the United States to its indigenous and formerly enslaved populations and to other geographical areas where it exercised influence, such as Central and South America.⁷⁵

This collection does not directly consider the wider empires of Britain and the United States, but it does explore how colonialism shaped the experiences of those living within those nation-states. Hodgson looks at the experiences of both Native Americans and Mexican Americans, as well as African Americans, within juvenile courts, exploring the impact of imperialism and colonisation both within the USA and its expansion into Central America. Laura Tisdall’s chapter shows how second-generation immigrant African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents in Britain were profoundly impacted by their countries’ histories of colonial exploitation, and this changed how they understood age and generation, as their parents gave them a direct, experiential link to these histories that they themselves lacked.

By using 1900 as a rough halfway point in our chronology, this collection critically engages with the idea that adulthood is a late eighteenth-century invention. Both Deborah Youngs’s and Maria Cannon’s chapters argue that adulthood was constructed as part of the ‘ages of man’ in medieval and early modern England and western Europe, but that it was not a single, unchanging state. Medieval and early modern concepts of the life cycle allowed for different stages of adulthood, considering a variety of midlife transitions. Emily E. Robson’s chapter on English Protestant conceptions of ‘childishness’ and ‘spiritual maturity’ builds on these discussions of the ‘ages of man’ by exploring competing conceptions of adulthood that valorised old age as the pinnacle of spiritual maturity; however, in order to make this rhetorical move, they had to reckon with the realities of physical decline. Barbara Crosbie’s chapter on adulthood in eighteenth-century England further exposes how many of our concerns about adulthood are not new. Crosbie explores the kind of conflict between the ‘young’ and the ‘old’ that is sometimes associated solely with modernity, considering definitions of adulthood as a battle fought between generations.

As Robson’s and Cannon’s chapters show, individuals who had attained adulthood might be denied the status of adults as a way of limiting their power and agency. This is a theme that continues into the modern period, as White’s chapter on the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States demonstrates. Adult daughters in this period never achieved true legal adulthood, and were expected to pass from their father’s authority to their husband’s. In this context, gender trumped age, despite the existence of statutes that defined adulthood chronologically. Kristin Hay’s chapter explores how these gendered ideas about adulthood and women’s sexual and marital agency played out in the very different context of late twentieth-century Scotland, where unmarried women were treated as ‘girls’ in relation to their reproductive choices. While possessing far more power over their own lives than their earlier counterparts, their freedom was still restricted by assumptions about their maturity and the need to control their sexuality. Meanwhile, Lucy Delap argues that disabled adults had to claim the right to sex and marriage in twentieth-century Britain; society’s ableism excluded them from stereotypical ideas about adulthood, but also allowed them to explore new kinds of intimacy and family formations, challenging the idea of a linear trajectory.

Similarly, other oppressed and socially marginalised groups have been unable to achieve the stereotypical qualities that would define them as ‘adults’. Grace Whorrall-Campbell explores how applicants to the War Office Selection Boards, the Civil Service Selection Boards and the Unilever Company Management Development Scheme in wartime and postwar Britain underwent psychological selection processes that could flag them as ‘immature’ or ‘childish’. Whorrall-Campbell argues that this coded language allowed employers to identify candidates who were suspected to be homosexual because homosexuality was viewed at the time as a form of arrested development. The treatment of adolescents of colour in Cold War Britain also indicates how certain groups struggled to prove their ‘maturity’, as Tisdall considers in her chapter. African-Caribbean and South Asian adolescents were aware that they had to perform adulthood to higher standards than their white counterparts to be taken seriously, while sometimes rejecting the conventional norms that defined hegemonic concepts of adulthood.

Adulthood is not always a desirable state, nor one that is pursued by those who are excluded from it. Hodgson’s chapter explores how children of colour have been more likely to be treated as adult defendants than their white counterparts since the inception of juvenile courts in the US since 1899, and even children of colour who are treated legally as children are less likely to be judged leniently. Meanwhile, more privileged adolescents and young people may seek to extend adolescence and defer adulthood, perhaps conceptualising ‘young adulthood’ as a new life stage in its own right due to the associations of adulthood with responsibility, duty and limited freedoms. Andrea Sofía Regueira Martín suggests that twenty-first-century US ‘emerging adulthood’ films present a rejection of standard adulthood, foregrounding protagonists who avoid commitment and stability in search of ‘new ways’ of being an adult. But these responses are conditioned by a worsening economic background since the financial crisis of 2008, making traditional milestones of modern adulthood less attainable for both millennials and Generation Z.

Adulthood is a contradictory state: both burden and benefit, static and ever-changing, relational and individual. Even those who managed to successfully ‘achieve’ adulthood, a status that has historically not been available to all, found themselves negotiating different sets of expectations during this ‘perfect age’. And as Kristine Alexander argues in her Afterword, Anglo-American ideas of adulthood are not the only ones, even as they were forcibly imposed upon other peoples through colonialisation and imperialism. This collection is only the beginning of the many different histories of adulthood that could be written once we no longer treat it as an invisible, or a desirable, norm.

Notes

1. 1. Tisdall’s research for this chapter was funded by the Leverhulme Trust, grant number ECF-2017-369.

2. 2. Frank Furedi, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Kyle Smith, ‘Millennials Need to Put Away the Juice Boxes and Grow Up’, New York Post, 21 March 2016.

3. 3. Catherine Baab-Mugeira, ‘Failure to Launch: Why So Many American Millennials Feel That Adulthood Is a Lie’, NBC News, 8 July 2018; Whizy Kim, ‘For Millennials, the Dream of Adulthood Is Dead – And That’s OK’, Refinery29, 21 May 2021.

4. 4. Barbara Herman, ‘Gen Z: Nonrebels with a Cause’, FutureVision, 21 February 2021.

5. 5. David Batty, ‘ “Generation Sensible” Risk Missing Out on Life Experiences, Therapists Warn’, The Guardian, 19 August 2022.

6. 6. Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain (London: Penguin, 2018); Moya Sarner, When I Grow Up: Conversations with Adults in Search of Adulthood (London: Scribe UK, 2022).

7. 7. Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2005).

8. 8. Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, ‘Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 125, no. 2 (2020), 371–84.

9. 9. Sari Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

10. 10. Zsuzsa Millei, ‘Temporalizing Childhood: A Conversation with Erica Burman, Stephanie Olsen, Spyros Spyrou, and Hanne Warming’, Journal of Childhood Studies, 46, no. 4 (2021), 64.

11. 11. Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘Youth in the Devil’s Service, Manhood in the King’s: Reaching Adulthood in the Eighteenth-Century British Army’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 8, no. 2 (2015), 163–90; Aaron William Moore, ‘Reversing the Gaze: The Construction of “Adulthood” in the Wartime Diaries of Japanese Children and Youth’ in Sabine Frühstück and Anne Walthall (eds.), Child’s Play: Multi-Sensory Histories of Children and Childhood in Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 141–59; Laura Tisdall, ‘ “What a Difference It Was to Be a Woman and Not a Teenager”: Adolescent Girls’ Conceptions of Adulthood in 1960s and 1970s Britain’, Gender and History 34, no. 2 (2022), 495–513; Teri Chettiar, The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

12. 12. John Benson, Prime Time: A History of the Middle Aged in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1997); Kay Heath, The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009); Sue Niebrzydowski (ed.), Middle-Aged Women in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011); Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (New York: Scribner, 2012); Suzanne Schmidt, Midlife Crisis: The Feminist Origins of a Chauvinist Cliché (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2020); Ben Hutchinson, The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); Ella Sbaraini, ‘ “Those That Prefer the Ripe Mellow Fruit to Any Other”: Rethinking Depictions of Middle-Aged Women’s Sexuality in England, 1700–1800’, Cultural and Social History, 17, no. 2 (2020), 165–87; Mark Jackson, Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis (London: Reaktion Books, 2021).

13. 13. Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions; Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Teresa Michals, Books for Children, Books for Adults: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

14. 14. Steven Mintz, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

15. 15. Mintz, The Prime of Life, x–xi.

16. 16. Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (London: Routledge, 1999); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Barbara Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Bonnie Wheeler (eds.), Becoming Male in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 2000).

17. 17. J.A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: A Study in Medieval Writing and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 93.

18. 18. Jacob W. Doss, ‘Making Masculine Monks: Gender, Space, and the Imagined “Child” in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Identity Formation’, Church History, 91, no. 3 (2022), 467–8.

19. 19. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 208; Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–1500 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 132; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood, 73–4; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 288; Hurl-Eamon, ‘Youth in the Devil’s Service’, 163.

20. 20. Lucy Underwood, Childhood, Youth and Religious Dissent in Post-Reformation England (London: Palgrave, 2014), 4, acknowledges that transitions to adulthood were ‘gradual and various’ but does exclude married people from her source base, even if they were still chronologically young.

21. 21. Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

22. 22. Youngs, The Life Cycle, 157; Susan D. Amussen and David E. Underdown, Gender, Culture and Politics in England, 1560–1640: Turning the World Upside Down (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), also show that men and women used various means to uphold their place in the patriarchal order of society.

23. 23. For example, Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (London: Pluto Press, 1983); Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991); Nancy F. Cott, No Small Courage: A History of Women in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lynn Abrams, Feminist Lives: Women, Feelings and the Self in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

24. 24. Satadru Sen, Colonial Childhoods: The Juvenile Periphery of India, 1850–1945 (New York, 2005); Field and Syrett, ‘Chronological Age’; Ishita Pande, Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

25. 25. Brewer, By Birth or Consent.

26. 26. Michals, Books for Children, 81.

27. 27. Howard P. Chudacoff, How Old Are You? Age Consciousness in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett (eds.), Age in America: The Colonial Era to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Kathryn M. Anderson-Levitt, ‘The Schoolyard Gate: Schooling and Childhood in Global Perspective’, Journal of Social History, 38, no. 4 (2005), 987–1006; Stephen Lassonde, ‘Age, Schooling, And Development’ in Paula Fass (ed.), The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).

28. 28. Miriam Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs in Medieval Rural England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 59.

29. 29. Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs, 59; Youngs, The Life Cycle, 127.

30. 30. Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs, 59.

31. 31. Joel T. Rosenthal, Social Memory in Late Medieval England: Village Life and Proofs of Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs, 59.

32. 32. Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs, 59.

33. 33. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (eds.), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500 (Harlow: Routledge, 2001), 4; Albrecht Classen (ed.), Old Age in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: Interdisciplinary Approaches to a Neglected Topic (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2007), 12.

34. 34. Irina Metzler, ‘Reflections on Disability in Medieval Legal Texts: Exclusion – Protection – Compensation’, in Cory James Rushton (ed.), Disability and Medieval Law: History, Literature, Society (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 19–53; Anne Digby and David Wright (eds.), From Idiocy to Mental Deficiency: Historical Perspectives on People with Learning Disabilities (London: Routledge, 1997).

35. 35. Wendy J. Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout: Brepols, 2013); Wendy J. Turner, ‘Angry Wives of Madmen: The Economic Constraints of Families under Royal Guardianship in England’ in Wendy J. Turner and Tory Vandeventer Pearman (eds.), The Treatment of Disabled Persons in Medieval Europe: Examining Disability in the Historical, Legal, Literary, Medical, and Religious Discourses of the Middle Ages (Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010), 51–69.

36. 36. Sarah Mulhall Adelman, ‘ “How This Occurred I Cannot Say”: Record-Keeping and Double Age in Nineteenth-Century New York City Orphan Asylums’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 3, no. 15 (2022), 363–75.

37. 37. Holly N.S. White and Julia M. Gossard, ‘Considering “Double Age” in the History of American Childhood and Youth: An Introduction’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 15, no. 3 (2022), 355–61.

38. 38. Corinne T. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America (Durham, NC: North Carolina Press, 2014), 7.

39. 39. Thomas Loughran, Andrew Mycock and Jonathan Tonge, ‘A Coming of Age: How and Why the UK Became the First Democracy to Allow Votes for 18-Year-Olds’, Contemporary British History, 35, no. 2 (2021), 284–313.

40. 40. Louise Jackson, ‘The Child’s Word in Court: Cases Of Sexual Abuse in London, 1870–1914’ in Meg Arnot and Cornelie Usborne (eds.), Gender and Crime in Modern Europe (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), 223.

41. 41. Ishita Pande, ‘Vernacularizing Justice: Age of Consent and a Legal History of the British Empire’, Law and History Review, 38, no. 1 (2020), 267–79.

42. 42. Nicholas L. Syrett, ‘Statutory Marriage Ages and the Gendered Construction of Adulthood in the Nineteenth Century’, in Field and Syrett (eds.), Age in America, 103–23.

43. 43. Timothy Cole, ‘ “Old Enough to Live”: Age, Alcohol and Adulthood in the United States, 1970–1984’, in Field and Syrett (eds.), Age in America, 238, 242.

44. 44. John Darwin, ‘Imperialism in Decline? Tendencies in British Imperial Policy between the Wars’, Historical Journal, 23, no. 3 (1980), 657–79.

45. 45. Chudacoff, How Old Are You?; Corinne T. Field and Nicholas L. Syrett, ‘Introduction’ in Field and Syrett (eds.), Age in America, 6.

46. 46. Field and Syrett, Age in America, 5.

47. 47. Loughran et al., ‘A Coming of Age’; Tisdall, ‘ “What a Difference It Was to Be a Woman”’; Frank Coffield, Carol Borrill and Sarah Marshall, Growing Up at the Margins: Young Adults in the North East (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986), 183; Susan Hutson and Richard Jenkins, Taking the Strain: Families, Unemployment and the Transition to Adulthood (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), 89–90, 95, 107.

48. 48. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Emerging Adulthood: The Long and Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Patrick Alexander, John Lowenthal and Graham Butt, ‘ “Fuck It, Shit Happens (FISH)”: A Social Generations Approach to Understanding Young People’s Imaginings of Life after School in 2016–2017’, Journal of Youth Studies, 23, no. 1 (2020), 109–26.

49. 49. Bernadette Baker, ‘The Dangerous and the Good? Developmentalism, Progress, and Public Schooling’, American Educational Research Journal, 36, no. 4 (1999), 813.

50. 50. Valerie Walkerdine, ‘Developmental Psychology and the Study Of Childhood’ in M.J. Kehily (ed.), An Introduction to Childhood Studies (New York: Open University Press, 2008), 117.

51. 51. Edelstein, Adulthood and Other Fictions, 15, 126–7; Jenny Hockey and Allison James, Growing Up and Growing Old: Ageing and Dependency in the Life Course (London: Sage, 1993), 5; Jane Pilcher, Age and Generation in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Botelho and Thane (eds.), Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, 3.

52. 52. John Holt, Escape from Childhood: The Needs and Rights of Children (Boston, MA: E.P. Dutton, 1974), 18.

53. 53. Elizabeth Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Burrow, The Ages of Man.

54. 54. Mary Dove, The Perfect Age of Man’s Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 11; Sears, The Ages of Man, 153.

55. 55. Burrow, The Ages of Man, 2.

56. 56. Clementine Beauvais, ‘Ages and Ages: The Multiplication of Children’s “Ages” in Early Twentieth-Century Child Psychology’, History of Education, 45, no. 3 (2015), 304–18.

57. 57. Michals, Books for Children, 10.

58. 58. Chettiar, The Intimate State, 5.

59. 59. Müller, Childhood, Orphans and Underage Heirs, 61.

60. 60. Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 206.

61. 61. Michals, Books for Children, 81.

62. 62. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Sen, Colonial Childhoods; Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (eds.), Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

63. 63. Field, The Struggle for Equal Adulthood.

64. 64. Kate Fisher and Jana Funke, ‘The Age of Attraction: Age, Gender and the History of Modern Male Homosexuality’, Gender and History, 31, no. 2 (2019), 266–83.

65. 65. Laura Tisdall, A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

66. 66. Patrick McKearney, ‘L’Arche, Learning Disability, and Domestic Citizenship: Dependent Political Belonging in a Contemporary British City’, City and Society, 29, no. 2 (2017), 260–80; Hockey and James, Growing Up and Growing Old, 5.

67. 67. Sen, Colonial Childhoods, 1.

68. 68. Danielle Kinsey, ‘Atlantic World Mining, Child Labor, and the Transnational Construction of Childhood in Imperial Britain in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Atlantic Studies, 11, no. 4 (2014), 455.

69. 69. Colleen A. Vasconcellos, Slavery, Childhood and Abolition in Jamaica, 1788–1838 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015); Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995).

70. 70. Tera Eva Agyepong, The Criminalization of Black Children: Race, Gender and Delinquency in Chicago’s Juvenile Justice System, 1899–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2018).

71. 71. Sen, Colonial Childhoods, 33.

72. 72. Jacob Breslow, ‘Adolescent Citizenship, or Temporality and the Negation of Black Childhood in Two Eras’, American Quarterly, 71, no. 2 (2019), 473–94.

73. 73. Breslow, ‘Adolescent Citizenship’, 483.

74. 74. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); Alan Petigny, The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Emily Robinson, The Language of Progressive Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2017).

75. 75. Robin D.G. Kelley and Stephen Tuck (eds.), The Other Special Relationship: Race, Rights and Riots in Britain and the United States (New York: Palgrave, 2015), 4, explores Britain as a site of ‘overlapping African diasporas’ of primarily first-generation immigrants in comparison to the United States.

References