Back to home page
United States of America (Newark, Delaware)
JOURNAL OF FAMILY HISTORY
1992 - VOLUME 17, NUMBER 4
93.12.01 - English - Barbara A. HANAWALT,
Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455 (U.S.A.)
Historical Descriptions and Prescriptions for Adolescence (p. 341-
351)
The use of the term "adolescence" for any period other than the
late 19th or 20th century has been much debated. Ariès denied that
the medieval period has a life phase that could be described with
such a term; others have argued that the term carries a
particular, very modern meaning even if Augustine did use the term
adolescentia. This introduction to a collection of essays on the
history of adolescence shows that the life stage was a well
recognized and defined one through the Middle Ages and into the
modern period. While the modern period did not invent adolescence,
it did modify the definition. Constants in adolescence from the
13th through the 20th century are the struggle between adults and
youth over entry and exit from adolescence and for control during
that period. But much changes over the centuries. Social
scientific discussions that aid in our historical analysis are
almost entirely based on the male rather than the female
experience. While cultural change modifies the male definitions of
adolescence, the medieval and 20th-century definition of female
adolescence stays closer to biological than social definitions of
puberty. (ADOLESCENCE, LANGUAGES, CULTURE)
93.12.02 - English - Kathryn L. REYERSON,
Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455 (U.S.A.)
The Adolescent Apprentice/Worker in Medieval Montpellier (p. 353-
370)
This study explores the experiential dimensions of apprenticeship
and work as part of the adolescent life phase in 14th-century
Montpellier on the basis of approximately 200 surviving notarial
contracts. The strong role of family in apprenticeship of young
men and women, the acquisition of specific occupational skills,
character formation, and the well-being of the apprentice/worker
are discussed. Apprenticeship for Montpellier youth represented a
lengthy (early teens to late 20s) and elaborate transition between
childhood and adulthood). (FRANCE, ADOLESCENCE, APPRENTICES,
HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
93.12.03 - English - Stanley CHOJNACKI,
Department of History, Michigan State University, East Lansing,
Michigan 48824 (U.S.A.)
Measuring Adulthood: Adolescence and Gender in Renaissance Venice
(p. 371-395)
The prescriptive threshold of adulthood among late-medieval
Venetian patricians appears very different for men and for women,
centering on social (i.e., public) puberty as the gauge of male
adulthood, physiological (i.e., childbearing) puberty that of
female. Yet in practice men did not inevitably achieve the
normative patriarchal outcome of a graduated, formalized
adolescence; nor did adolescence end for all women with teenaged
marriage and motherhood. Non-patriarchal male adulthoods and the
graduated phases of the uxorial cycle for women modify the
impression of sharp gender contrast that results from viewing age
at marriage as the pivot of adulthood. Graduated adulthood in both
sexes gave men and women alike the possibility of varied adult
identities, responding to a range of choice and circumstance.
(ITALY, ADOLESCENCE, ADULTHOOD, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
93.12.04 - English - Mary Jo MAYNES,
Department of History, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis,
Minnesota 55455 (U.S.A.)
Adolescent Sexuality and Social Identity in French and German
Lower-class Autobiography (p. 397-418)
Although sexuality has become a subject of interest to historians,
sexuality among the lower classes has too often served as a
"natural" foil for the more explicitly historicized sexuality of
the propertied classes. This study of the adolescent sexual
experiences portrayed in 19th-century European workers"
autobiographies suggests important variations in popular sexuality
that followed the contours of gender, chronology, and milieu.
Moreover, the sexual identity that was established in adolescence
was linked to other aspects of social identity and life
trajectory. (FRANCE, GERMANY, EUROPE, ADOLESCENCE, SEXUALITY,
HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
93.12.05 - English - Kathleen ALAIMO,
Department of History, St. Xavier University, Chicago, Illinois
(U.S.A.)
Shaping Adolescence in the Popular Milieu: Social Policy,
Reformers, and French Youth, 1870-1920 (p. 419-438)
This article examines the emergence of a modern concept of
adolescence in France during the early Third Republic and its
influence on social reform policies designed for youths from the
popular classes. The author looks at reforms in the areas of
general education, labor, vocational education, and juvenile
corrections in order to demonstrate the growing official awareness
of adolescence as a distinct and unique stage of life. The author
suggests that vigilant adult supervision, institutional
representation, as well as expert articulation of a psychology of
adolescence characterize the modern notion of adolescence that
developed in the decades around 1900. (FRANCE, ADOLESCENCE, SOCIAL
POLICY, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
93.12.06 - English - J. Robert WEGS,
Department of European History, University of Notre Dame, South
Bend, Indiana (U.S.A.)
Working-class "Adolescence" in Austria, 1890-1930 (p. 439-450)
Building on previous work of John Gillis, Joseph Kett, Harry
Hendrick and others, this article examines evidence from a
country-Austria-included only minimally in the debate concerning
adolescence and focuses on the conceptual aspects of the debate as
reflected in the attitudes and actions of those authorities
responsible for "creating" or "discovering" an adolescent life
phase at the turn of the century. The argument is that the modern
adolescent image was created as a result of authorities' attempts
to institutionalize the offspring of the poor initially to remove
a "threat" to society and later as a result of new social-
scientific theories about youth development. (AUSTRIA,
ADOLESCENCE, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
93.12.07 - English - W. Scott HAINE
The Development of Leisure and the Transformation of Working-class
Adolescence, Paris 1830-1940 (p. 451-476)
The evolution of the pastimes of Parisian working-class youth
between 1830 and 1940 reveals the interconnection between the rise
of modern leisure and the development of modern adolescence. Two
striking images halfway between literature and sociology, the
gamin and the apache, illuminate the transformation of working-
class adolescence from social and spatial exclusion during the
1830s to exclusivity by the 1900s. By the Belle Epoque, working-class
adolescents had articulated their own subculture through the
abundant and varied diversions of "the city of light": dance
halls, cafés, cinemas, sports, and newspapers. The growing sense
of exclusivity among working-class adolescents, however,
undermined a wider sense of class consciousness. Working-class
youth, especially after 1900, increasingly identified more with
leisure and youth than with work and class. In general, the work
place ceased to be a site where expression and creativity could be
exercised and instead became an instrument, a means to an end: the
wage. (FRANCE, ADOLESCENCE, WORKING CLASS, HISTORICAL DEMOGRAPHY)
Back to home page