Evolution of age categories in American Society

  1. Pre-school, primary, and secondary school, college
  • Progressive, rigid, precise, uniform, and prescriptive
  1. Children embrace adolescence and adult behaviour
  • Adults mimic styles and fashion of the young

Age

Chronological Marker

  • Sign posts measuring progress through life

Subject Experience

  • Weighs on mind as people get older and older

American Society

  • cognitive , emotional, and physiological stages of development

System of power and hierarchy

  • Legal rights (vote, marry, drink, and smoke)
  • Legal consequences (offences that can be committed under 18)

Historians

Dynamic, Diachronic Approach

  • How age categories and age consciousness shift over time

Contemporary Societies

  • Earlier society and amorphous age categories

What does age mean?

  • Intense age category of mid-twentieth century

Is age being lost?

  • Losing organization category in the twenty first century

Social and cultural context intersect with social organization and social difference

Attentiveness to class, ethnicity and gender

  • Age coexist

Issues in the Young People’s Competency and Maturity

  • Capital punishment
  • Youthful offenders
  • Contraceptives and Abortion
  • Custody decisions

Gender: A useful category of historical analysis

Gender is an important category of historical analysis

Socially constructed meanings, ideas, and assumptions

Challenge materialist and psychoanalytical approach to gender

  • Dimension of normative, symbolic, institutional, subjective, and preformative

Advantages

  • Problematised historians vocabulary
  • More attentiveness to agency
  • Compare and contrast gender to categories of difference and oppression

Age and Gender

Gender and age has changed over time

Cultural System

Age is not natural

  • Imbued with cultural assumptions, meaning and values

Social and cultural construct meaning

  • Attributed with particular age categories

System of power relationships

  • Aspects of social organization
  • Difference in age are organised along historical lines

Age Categories

  • Embedded in personal relationships
  • Institutional structuring
  • Social practices
  • Law
  • Public policy
  • Politics

Gender and age function culturally, socially and psychologically

Age is fluid

  • Variation wider
  • Change after time (age categories and consciousness)

Gender

  • Shapes life course even in culture that emphasizes gender equality

Age is modified by class, ethnicity, gender, nationality and religion

Biology of aging changes in ways gender does not

  • Age is less fixed than gender
  • Age category are malleable
  • Age does not define individual identity

Bibliography

Mintz, Steven. “Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis.” The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 1, no. 1 (2007): 91-94. Accessed January 10, 2019. doi:10.1353/hcy.2008.0003.