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Adulthood has a history.
This book explores how concepts of adulthood have changed over time in Britain and the United States from 1350 to the present day through eleven case studies. Ideas of adulthood are currently under intense scrutiny, as individuals increasingly reach midlife without necessarily acquiring the 'traditional' markers of maturity. Yet this volume shows that this is not a uniquely turbulent period, and it does not represent the overturning of norms that were previously settled and unquestioned. Expectations for adults have altered over time, just as other age-categories such as childhood, adolescence and old age have been shaped by their cultural and social context.
In historicising adulthood, this collection is the first to employ adulthood as a category of historical analysis, arguing that consideration of age is crucial for all scholarship that addresses power and inequality. Collectively, the authors explore four key ideas: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual definitions of adulthood; and adulthood as a static definition.
The book also engages with the intersectional identities of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability, and how these affect understandings of adulthood: who gets to be an adult, and who decides?
This fascinating book brings together the newest scholarship on adulthood. It usefully interrogates how being an adult was defined from the medieval to the modern period, in relation to other life stages, and examines the ways in which age intersected with other categories, to think through dynamics of power and inequality amongst different groups.
— Laura King, Associate Professor of Modern British History, University of Leeds
- Introduction
Maria Cannon and Maria Laura Tisdall - 1 'Middle Age' in the Middle Ages of Western Europe, 1300–1500
Deborah Youngs - 2 'The Most Constant and Settled Part of Our Life?': Adulthood and the Ages of Man in Early Modern England
Maria Cannon - 3 Spiritual Maturity and Childishness in Protestant England, c.1600—1660
Emily E. Robson - 4 The Rising Generation and the Fogram: Locating Adulthood in Eighteenth-Century England
Barbara Crosbie - 5 Seduction Suits and Gendered Adulthood in the Court Systems of the Early United States, 1820–1850
Holly N.S. White - 6 'They're Not Children Anymore': Juveniles as Adult Defendants in US Criminal Justice, 1786–2000
Jack Hodgson - 7 'Childish, Adolescent and Recherché': Psychoanalysis and Maturity in Psychological Selection Boards, c.1940s–60s
Grace Worrall-Campbell - 8 ”The Pill for the Unmarried Girl is Hardly Going to Improve Her Character”: The Impact of Changing Sexual Behaviours on the Construction of Adulthood in Scotland, c. 1968–1980
Kristin Hay - 9 African-Caribbean and South Asian Adolescents, Adulthood and the ‘Generation Gap’ in Late Cold War Britain, c.1970–c.1989
Laura Tisdall - 10 Marriage, Intimacy and Adulthood in Disabled People’s Lives and Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain
Lucy Delap - 10 A Road of One's Own: The Rejection of Standard Adulthood in US Emerging Adult Films
Andrea Sofia Regueira Martin - Afterword: Against Adulthood Kristine Alexander