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.