Adulthood has a history. In this post, Maria Cannon and Laura Tisdall introduce their new edited collection Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z which explores how concepts of adulthood have changed over time in Britain and the United States.
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.
Collectively, the volume’s 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.
Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z (November 2024) is the 20th volume in the Society’s New Historical Perspectives series published by the University of London Press. All 20 titles are available as free Open Access editions as well as in paperback print.
‘Is Western culture stopping people from growing up?’ asked The Economist in August 2024. In case the reader didn’t get the point, the article added a subheading: ‘RIP adulthood’.[1] The Economist is not the first or last media outlet to tell us that adulthood is disappearing. Popular anxieties in the press and on social media claim we’re afflicted by a plague of ‘kidults’ who are doing ‘adulting’ wrong.
The usual target is our generation—millennials—born between 1981 and 1996, who are supposedly failing to meet traditional milestones of adulthood. Sometimes, it’s not our fault. Sonia Sodha wrote recently in the Observer that millennials are inhabiting a ‘stretched adolescence’ because of the rising numbers living with parents; but, she allows, they are not to blame as they didn’t choose this ‘Peter Pan lifestyle’: this failure to launch is due to ‘harsh economic realities’ such as higher rents and soaring inflation.[2]
Achieving the status of adult has always been shaped by intersectional identities of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability.
Sometimes, however, it is our fault. ‘Why the choice to be childless is bad for America’ blared a Newsweek headline in 2013.[3] Millennials who are supposedly choosing to remain ‘childfree’ are pigeonholed as intrinsically selfish and irresponsible—in other words, as not proper adults. They are blamed for not producing the next generation of workers who can support an ageing population, and for not providing their parents with the emotional satisfaction of grandchildren.[4] This is in spite of the fact that it is as yet unclear whether this demographic trend is better characterised as childlessness or delayed childbearing.[5]
The next generation down, Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are also doing adulthood wrong. But in contrast to ‘spoilt’ millennials, who have been seen as unreliable employees since they first started entering the workplace, Gen Z are often portrayed as ‘old before their time’. Rather than ‘Generation Me’, they are ‘Generation Sensible’, missing out on the partying that ought to define adolescence and young adulthood.[6] Growing up too fast is, apparently, just as bad as not growing up at all.
This fraught debate reveals both how historically contingent our idea of a ‘right kind’ of adulthood is. ‘Fifty years ago, the average 24-year-old would have been married, living with their partner, and probably already a parent,’ Sodha argues. But in the early 1970s, British people were getting married and having children younger than ever before. These were anomalous decades, not a yardstick of normality.
The collection addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides?
Our new edited collection, Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z, touches on themes that have framed people’s worries about, and experiences of, adulthood over the past six centuries. Older people have told younger people throughout history that they need to step up to their responsibilities. Ask the medieval monks who despaired over the ‘childishness’ of newly recruited men, who, as the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux put it in the twelfth century, were ‘vehemently indiscreet, indeed absolutely intemperate, and exceedingly stubborn’.[7]
Adults themselves have struggled with successfully ‘adulting’. J.B. Atkins, a British journalist, remembered ‘the profound and surprising satisfaction’ he felt in 1896 when he realised he would never again have to ask his father for any money; Atkins was already twenty-five at the time.[8]
The collection is the first to employ adulthood as a category of analysis, thus providing a crucial intervention for all scholarship that addresses power and inequality. As scholars of childhood and old age have shown, age has been a significant factor shaping power structures and individual experiences in different cultural and social contexts. Adulthood as a life stage is no different. It has been subject to changing expectations and norms and has never been a static phase in the life course. Achieving the status of adult has always been shaped by intersectional identities of gender, race, class, sexuality and disability. The collection addresses two central questions: who gets to be an adult, and who decides?
The chapters in the collection cover more than 600 years and two continents. Each demonstrate the importance of examining adulthood as a category of analysis, focused around four key themes: adulthood as both burden and benefit; adulthood as a relational category; collective versus individual definitions of adulthood; and adulthood as a static definition.
Several chapters use personal source material to examine individual definitions of adulthood and how they might differ from collective ones.
Highlighting the benefits and burdens of adult status, Holly N. S. White shows in her chapter on seduction suits in early America that for white women, female dependence could be used to benefit a family’s reputation, while undermining their adulthood and independence. In the context of late twentieth century Scotland, Kristin Hay examines the benefits of contraception that young women could access, despite the burden of being denied sexual and reproductive autonomy based on societal perceptions of their maturity. Jack Hodgson’s chapter considers how far a conception of adulthood defined by race could burden the lives of black children in the nineteenth and twentieth century US criminal justice system.
Many of the chapters consider how far adulthood as a category is defined in relation to other life stages. Two of the early modern chapters provide an insight into this theme as Emily E. Robson examines how far Protestant clergy could claim spiritual maturity alongside the physical decline of biological old age. And Barbara Crosbie argues for the eighteenth century as a transition point for adulthood when youth was increasingly valorised as old age was seen more negatively.
Ages of man: third stage, from the age of thirty-two to forty-eight, and the classical orders of architecture: ionic. Engraving by J. Wierix, 1577, after J. Vredeman de Vries. Wellcome Collection. © Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain
The collection is the first to employ adulthood as a category of analysis, thus providing a crucial intervention for all scholarship that addresses power and inequality.
Several chapters use personal source material to examine individual definitions of adulthood and how they might differ from collective ones. Deborah Youngs demonstrates the complex ways in which medieval people assessed ‘middle age’ in literary writings. Grace Worrall-Campbell’s chapter on psychological selection boards in mid-twentieth-century Britain reveals how adulthood was constructed as a characteristic performed via social interactions, not just an interior state. Laura Tisdall also considers the ways in which psychological language shaped conceptions of adulthood in the personal writings of young people of colour in late Cold War Britain. Emerging adulthood is also the subject of Andrea Sofia Regueira Martin’s chapter on filmic explorations of the contradictions between individual experiences of attaining adult social markers against the expectations of late twentieth century US society.
The collection challenges assumptions of adulthood as a life stage only to be achieved, and marked by stability. Maria Cannon shows how sixteenth-century writers and illustrators used ancient ages of man schemes to explore expectations of development in adulthood. Lucy Delap’s chapter on marriage and intimacy in the lives of disabled adults in twentieth-century Britain explains that disability can disrupt the lineality of the life course, thus subverting expectations and requiring resistance to stereotypes.
As Kristine Alexander observes in the collection afterword, ‘Adulthood, it turns out, is many things.’ By interrogating adulthood as a category of analysis we hope this collection opens up new avenues of research that consider how far adult life, shaped by intersectional identities, has defined relationships of power across time and place.
The editors are grateful for the support of the Leverhulme Trust in funding the original workshop from which this collection emerged.
References
[1] ‘Is Western culture stopping people from growing up?’, The Economist, 16th August 2024, https://www.economist.com/culture/2024/08/16/is-western-culture-stopping-people-from-growing-up?
[2] Sonia Sodha, ‘A university education doesn’t have to lead to a lifetime of debt. There is another way’, the Observer, 14 May 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/14/a-university-education-doesnt-have-to-lead-to-a-lifetime-of-debt-there-is-another-way. The comparison with Peter Pan is odd given that Peter Pan and his Lost Boys famously fled their parents.
[3] Harry Siegel, ‘Why the choice to be childless is bad for America’, Newsweek, February 19th, 2023, https://www.newsweek.com/why-choice-be-childless-bad-america-63335
[4] Catherine Pearson, ‘The unspoken grief of never becoming a grandparent’, New York Times, November 11th, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/11/well/family/grandparent-grandchild-childfree.html
[5] ‘Childbearing for women born in different years, England and Wales: 2020’, ONS, 27 January 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/conceptionandfertilityrates/bulletins/childbearingforwomenbornindifferentyearsenglandandwales/2020
[6] Judith Warner, ‘The why-worry generation’, New York Times Magazine, 30th May, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/magazine/30fob-wwln-t.html; Antonia Hoyle, ‘A generation with a huge sense of entitlement: Bosses complain that Millennials are spoilt, full of themselves, averse to hard work and expect ‘success on a plate’ so what does that mean for society?’, the Daily Mail, 16 February, 2017, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4232696/Millenials-generation-huge-sense-entitlement.html; David Batty, ‘ “Generation sensible” risk missing out on life experiences, therapists warn’, the Guardian, 19th August 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/19/generation-sensible-risk-missing-out-life-experiences-therapists
[7] Jacob W. Doss, ‘Making masculine monks: gender, space, and the imagined “child” in twelfth-century Cistercian identity formation’, Church History, 91, 3 (2022), 486, https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/5E654F28224D8C13F836973E2381E297/S0009640722002098a.pdf/making_masculine_monks_gender_space_and_the_imagined_child_in_twelfthcentury_cistercian_identity_formation.pdf
[8] Laura Ugolini, Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c.1870-1920 (London, 2021), 191, https://www.routledge.com/Fathers-and-Sons-in-the-English-Middle-Class-c-1870-1920/Ugolini/p/book/9780367767600?srsltid=AfmBOopY3qCvM20nc4whuwIYsbKd-5Q7Klne6yoCD1RCumGczuCCOKY1
About the Authors
Laura Tisdall is a senior lecturer in history at Newcastle University, UK. She is a historian of childhood, adolescence, adulthood and chronological age in modern Britain and the United States. Her first book, A Progressive Education?, was published by Manchester University Press in 2020, and her most recent previous publication is a ‘state of the field’ article on the history of childhood in History (2022).
She is currently working on a book on age and adulthood in Britain between c.1956 and c.1989, which is under contract with Yale University Press London.
Maria Cannon is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth. Her research interests are family, gender, emotions, and the life cycle in early modern England. Her current project ‘Blending the Family: Affection, Obligation and Dynasty in Early Modern English Stepfamilies’ explores emotion and authority in blended families.
She is a co-convener of the Life Cycles seminar at the Institute of Historical Research and a committee member of the Children’s History Society.
About the ‘New Historical Perspectives’ book series from the Royal Historical Society
New Historical Perspectives (NHP) is the Society’s book series for early career scholars (within ten years of their doctorate), commissioned and edited by the Royal Historical Society, in association with University of London Press and the Institute of Historical Research.
The series publishes monographs and edited collections by early career historians on all chronologies and histories, worldwide. Contracted authors receive mentoring and an author workshop to develop their manuscript before its final submission.
All titles in the series are published in paperback print and open access (as pdf downloads and Manifold reading editions) with all costs covered by the Royal Historical Society and partners. Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z is the 20th volume published in the series (November 2024). For more on current and forthcoming titles on the series, please see here.
HEADER IMAGE: The ages of man represented as a step scheme. Reproduction of an engraving by C. Bertelli. Wellcome Collection. © Source: Wellcome Collection. Public Domain.