Evolution of age categories in American Society
- Pre-school, primary, and secondary school, college
- Progressive, rigid, precise, uniform, and prescriptive
- 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.