ADOLESCENCE

Although the term "adolescence" has existed for centuries to describe (in various and contradictory ways) a period of life between childhood and adulthood, the modern conception of adolescence—as a time of increasing freedom, rebellion, stress, change, confrontation, experimentation, and tempestuous emotions—began (at least for the middle class) in America shortly after the Civil War. In fact some historians have suggested that adolescence is essentially an American phenomenon, linked most clearly to the still-developing (and perhaps fundamentally adolescent) nation. Certainly economic and social changes in postbellum America led many in the reunited nation to think of themselves as struggling against conventions of the past and their own conflicting desires, as members of an adolescent country long out of the childhood of the new Republic, jaded by recent experiences and uncertain about the future.

After 1865 many young people began moving out of primarily agrarian family situations, where they worked alongside their parents and remained at home until they married and started their own families, and into school, where they began to associate for the first time with large numbers of their age group. Also, changing notions of success in America placed value on different qualities from those that were prized in the early part of the century. A relatively clear sense of entitlement or place in society was rapidly being replaced by an ethos of individual achievement, which was seen as being advanced through personal restraint and denial of impulse. Consequently adolescents who challenged the authority of their parents, teachers, or employers were seen as difficult and perhaps dangerous.

Perhaps more important, adolescents after the mid-nineteenth century had less of a role as productive (i.e., income generating) citizens. No longer working on the family farm and being replaced by waves of adult immigrants in manufacturing jobs, America's youth were becoming increasingly marginalized. Not surprisingly, as adolescents were needed less to fuel the economy, they were seen as more of a threat to society, a threat that must be managed. One response was social institutions, like the Boy Scouts and public high schools, which functioned to keep young people occupied and out of trouble. The result, however, of this benevolent isolation, at least for middle-class adolescents who did not need to contribute financially to their families, was that they became an increasingly alienated (and often idle) subgroup of society.

WORKING CLASS, IMMIGRANT, AFRICAN AMERICAN, AND NATIVE AMERICAN ADOLESCENTS

In many ways adolescence can be seen as a distinctly middle-class phenomenon, as the luxuries of extended schooling and relatively benign conflicts with authority were not routinely available to children of the working poor. Young people from the working and immigrant classes had little economic choice but to follow their parents into usually underpaid and dehumanizing factory jobs, which often put them at odds with the values and practices of their traditional families. These working children expected more freedom and demanded more respect than their traditional, authoritarian parents were willing to give them. The children of former slaves had to grow up with little practical support from their parents, who were struggling themselves to survive their new freedom, and Native American children were forced by economic and political necessity to assimilate into white, Christian culture.

For the working poor and immigrant families, where young adults were expected to work to help support the family, conflicts arose as previously more sheltered adolescents were exposed to behaviors and values in conflict with those of their families. For example, many young women at the turn of the century who consistently violated the standards of their homes—arguing with their parents, staying out late, engaging in sexual activity—were reported to police and even committed to reformatories. In New York State in particular, an 1896 law resulted in "wayward girls" (most often accused of sexual indiscretions) being sent to correctional institutions like the New York State Reformatory for Women at Bedford Hills. The standard sentence was three years, and the results of such reformations were decidedly mixed, although the message to young women was quite clear—be good or be imprisoned.

Children of former slaves found that education and economics were often at odds, as families struggled to educate their children and still secure the necessary income from their work. The difficulties the Freedmen's Bureau (established in 1865) had with indentured child laborers is a case in point. The law provided that children could be indentured until the age of twenty-one if parents agreed, died, or could not support them. However, many white landowners took advantage of these desperate families and indentured even very young children (making them de facto slaves until their majority) without their parents' permission. When parents challenged the indentures, the courts wavered between supporting the often destitute parents and the often abusive white landowners.

As African American parents tried to secure the freedoms guaranteed by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, faced lynching and other violence, and tried to make a living through factory work, domestic service, or sharecropping, their children began their education. One historian reports that while only a small number of blacks were literate at the end of the Civil War, the majority of all African Americans could read and write by the turn of the twentieth century. Booker T. Washington (1865–1915) recounts these all-too-common difficulties and his particular determination to overcome them in Up from Slavery (1901). Although he was born a slave, Washington worked to educate himself, attended Hampton Institute in Virginia, and in 1881 founded Tuskeegee Institute, where students learned both academic and vocational skills. Other schools, such as the one for girls founded by Nannie Helen Burroughs in the District of Columbia in 1909, soon followed.

Native American children and adolescents struggled with survival after they were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and struggled also with the loss of their identity as they were routed into Bureau of Indian Affairs schools. The first Indian school, and perhaps the best known and most representative, was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918), which was established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by the former U.S. Calvary officer Richard Henry Pratt to facilitate the assimilation of native children and train them for life as U.S. citizens. Pratt had been in charge of Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, and Caddo warriors who had been relocated to a Florida prison camp, and he asked those men to send their children to his new school, which they eventually agreed to do.

Once at school, the process of assimilation began with cutting the students' hair, which frequently resulted in much unhappiness. Students wore uniforms (the boys) or Victorian dresses (the girls); all children wore shoes (not moccasins) and were forbidden to speak their native languages. As was the case at Tuskeegee, students were trained in academic and vocational subjects, but they also studied art and music as well. In the thirty-nine years of its existence, more than ten thousand students were enrolled at Carlisle. Many found the process of being taken from their homes and immersed in white culture painful and confusing. For example, in American Indian Stories (1921), Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Simmons Bonnin), later a teacher at Carlisle, poignantly and eloquently describes her experiences at an Indian school in Illinois. Zitkala-Ša tells of her homesickness and confusion with the unfamiliar language and customs, the cutting of her hair (which in her mind designated her as a coward), the beatings, and finally, her eventual alienation from her own culture. For these adolescents, taken from their homes and forced to adopt completely new and contradictory ways, adolescence was a particularly difficult and painful process of separation and loss.

INFLUENCE OF G. STANLEY HALL

G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education (1904) is justly credited with creating the twentieth century's image of the adolescent. This massive two-volume work (1,373 pages) used Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary theories to call attention to the importance of the adolescent period in the development of the human species. According to Hall, in adolescence ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, with the history of the development of the species playing itself out in the development of the individual. Hall defined adolescence as a period of rebirth analogous to the development of the nation from a "primitive" beginning through a period of upheaval to a "civilized" adult nation. By influencing adolescent development, he said, civilization could be advanced.

In practice what this meant was that adolescence came to be treated as a period of psychological and intellectual stasis during which the individual prepares for adult life. Therefore more emphasis was placed on physical and less on intellectual development, particularly the rote learning of childhood. In terms of moral development, parents and educators used this period to gently guide (and not force) adolescents to make moral choices, recognizing the growing complexity of the adolescent moral sense. (This approach has much in common with John Dewey's Progressivist, constructivist ideas about public education.)

Although much of the science behind Hall's theories of adolescent development has since been discredited, vestiges of his attention to adolescence remain. The contemporary sense of adolescence as an important stage of transition from the protected (and relatively simple) world of childhood to the responsibilities of adulthood has its origins in Hall's theories. Also, the concern about the relationship of youth culture to the culture as a whole can be seen as an important part of Hall's legacy.

LITERARY REPRESENTATIONS OF ADOLESCENCE

The bildungsroman, or novel of adolescent moral education, has existed at least since Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (1796). American writers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century explored the genre as well, discussing not only education and acculturation but also social, psychological, and sexual development and the adventures and dangers of growing up. Written primarily for adults, although certainly read by adolescents, some works of this period treating white (usually male and middle-class) adolescence include Edward Eggleston'sThe Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871), E. W. Howe's The Story of a Country Town (1883), Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Henry James's Daisy Miller (1879) and What Maisie Knew (1897), and Edith Wharton's Summer (1917).

Twain (1835–1910) sets the standard for the coming-of-age book in America. The artistry of his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer rises far above most other "bad boy" novels of the period. However, it too asserts, as do most novels of this sort, that middle-class white boys, while they may briefly behave in savage and sometimes even dangerous ways, will eventually (as Hall predicted) mature into productive and staid members of the community. Twain's short pieces on good and bad boys and girls, such as "The Christmas Fireside," "Advice for Good Little Girls/Boys," and "The Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper," continue this tradition of showing that youthful high jinks are a necessary part of childhood and may in fact be a prerequisite for later success.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn offers an even more complex view of adolescence. In a story that has become familiar to most American schoolchildren, the novel takes Huck from being the abused son of a drunkard to a runaway to a free spirit who is willing to risk his soul and his freedom to help his friend Jim, a slave, escape captivity. Although the novel has been faulted for its racism, its sexism, and its problematic ending, as a provocative and entertaining story of male adolescent development it has had few rivals. Although the novel does provide a hero who may be more readily accepted and appreciated by young men than young women, Huckleberry Finn offers a model of adolescent self-determination that has influenced all subsequent adolescent fiction and probably many young adult lives.

James's (1843–1916) and Wharton's (1862–1937) novels focus on the awakening—both sexual and social—of female adolescents. Wharton's Summer features Charity Royall, a young woman who, after being "rescued" by a prominent local lawyer from a life of poverty and deprivation, dreams away her time working in a local library. Roused from her lethargy by Lucius Harney, Charity starts a romance with him and becomes pregnant. After Harney rejects her to marry someone of his social and intellectual class, Charity runs away from her lawyer guardian to try to find her parents. Eventually Charity decides to marry her guardian, who agrees to care for her and the baby. A story of sexual awakening and emotional development, Summer shows the consequences of one particular kind of adolescent rebellion and provides a morality tale for young women: stay within the bounds of approved sexuality or you may find yourself forced into a marriage of convenience.

Younger than Charity, Maisie in James's What Maisie Knew is the pawn in the struggle between her careless and selfish divorced parents. In this novel Maisie's parents trade her between them, threatening to withhold (or sometimes to send) her at inconvenient times. The parents both remarry (the father to Maisie's beloved governess), and the much younger stepparents dote on Maisie. Maisie's biological father and mother fight with each other, argue with their new spouses, and seek other lovers during their second marriages, while Maisie tries to figure out what in the world is going on. Eventually the two stepparents fall in love with each other, and Maisie, who thinks she has brought them together, is initially thrilled, because her surrogate parents are much nicer than her biological ones.

At the end of the novel, though, Maisie realizes that her stepparents (who have not yet divorced her natural parents) have put her in a troubling moral position, and she decides to reject them all and take up life with her new governess, a long-suffering widow. The child Maisie thus proves herself to be ultimately more insightful and moral than the adult characters, even if she is not always as quick as they are to notice the subtleties of relationships. James's position on the life of the developing adolescent appears to be that adults are frequently selfish and mysterious and their young charges are often at their mercy, even though the young can come to determine their own lives. Although she is unable to control much of what happens to her initially, finally Maisie is able to make morally correct choices, showing that she knows quite a great deal.

Daisy Miller (in James's novel of the same name), however, is another story. Trailed across Europe by her precocious younger brother and her completely ineffectual mother, Daisy seems unable (or perhaps unwilling) to acknowledge that there might need to be constraints on the behavior of a young, unmarried woman. In spite of the well-intentioned advice given her by Frederick Winterbourne (whose interest is likely more than avuncular) and sharper reprimands by others in the American expatriate community, Daisy continues to go about unchaperoned with various men, eventually settling on an Italian dandy of uncertain pedigree. Winterbourne, who at first champions Daisy, eventually turns his back on her; nevertheless, he is saddened by her death of "Roman fever," officially the result of a late evening in the Coliseum but metaphorically punishment for her rash behavior. In this novel, it appears, independence from social convention (at least for young women of the leisure classes) can lead only to death.

Louisa May Alcott's (1832–1888) Little Women (1868–1869) and Horatio Alger's (1832–1899) Ragged Dick (1868) represent other aspects of emerging American adolescent life and provide interesting commentary on gender stereotypes in the late nineteenth century. Little Women shows the various ways in which girls make the transformation into wives and mothers, whereas Ragged Dick forms the template for the adolescent American Dream. These novels, unlike those by James and Wharton, were directed toward a young readership and thus spoke more directly to their concerns.

Alger's novel, more entertaining than subsequent generations have given it credit for, features "Ragged Dick," who is transformed in the course of the novel from a bootblack living on the streets and sleeping in straw to Richard Hunter, Esquire, with a job in a counting room, a trusted friend, and prospects for the future. Dick achieves all of this through hard work, a cheerful countenance, and an inbred sense (coming from who knows where) of right and wrong. Dick is willing to lie, fight, smoke, and gamble, but he stubbornly refuses to steal and always keeps his promises. The message was satisfying to the emerging American middle class, which wanted to believe that urban children and youth were poor because of their own shiftlessness and dishonesty, but it also set a standard for (male) adolescent achievement. In Dick's world (and he is merely the first of many Alger novels in the same vein), success is possible with hard work, cheerful stoicism, frugality, and a little bit of luck.

Little Women, on the other hand, celebrates the virtues of home life and domesticity while at the same time offering a variety of possibilities for young women. Certainly marriage and children is one avenue open to the March girls, but at least for a time Jo manages to make her own living and support herself by her writing. The eventual marriages in the novel are various as well: from the moral domesticity (but long separations) of Marmee and Father, to the child-centered home of Meg, to the romantic marriage of Amy and Laurie, and finally to the working relationship of Jo and Professor Bhaer. Like Ragged Dick, Little Women praises hard work and sacrifice, but its emphasis on home and hearth provided young women with clearly domestic role models.

The experiences of working-class, immigrant, and African American adolescents are treated in several different ways in the literature of the period. Works of interest in this area include Stephen Crane's Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893), Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods (1902), Willa Cather's O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), and Theodore Dreiser's "Old Rogaum and His Theresa" (1918).

Crane's (1871–1900) and Dreiser's (1871–1945) stories have much in common: both treat young women who run into conflicts with their families and are turned out of the house for what their parents consider to be their immoral behavior. The final outcome for each girl is very different, however. Maggie is thrown out by her drunken mother and takes up with a man who first "ruins" and then abandons her. She turns to prostitution and eventually dies, at which point her unrepentant mother finally agrees to "forgive" her. Theresa's traditional German immigrant father locks her out for violating his curfew, but he repents and frantically searches for her. Theresa is returned with virtue (and stubbornness) intact, but the reader recognizes just how close to disaster she was. Both stories accurately depict the reality of life for working-class women: without a secure home (and income) the only alternative is prostitution, followed quickly by illness and death. They also chronicle the in-between state of female adolescence, when girls are perched between adult independence (which in these cases may be dangerous) and childish subservience to the family.

Dunbar's (1872–1906) novel tells the story of the African American Hamilton family, the father of which is falsely accused of theft and imprisoned. The family moves to New York, where the daughter and son go astray—the daughter becoming a stage singer and the son a drunk, a womanizer, and eventually a murderer. The lesson of this novel seems to be that young people, especially those belonging to disfranchised minorities, are safer in the bucolic (if racist) South, carefully guarded by a watchful family. Much like the girls in Dreiser's and Crane's stories, Dunbar's young people go from being set loose in the city to disillusionment and immorality.

Cather (1873–1947) tells a more positive story of Nebraska's Norwegian and Bohemian immigrants, who succeed as a result of hard work and determination. The two young women in her novels, Alexandra Bergson in O, Pioneers! and Ántonia Shimerda in My Ántonia, grow from girls on the brink of financial ruin into independent women with families and prosperous farms, but their material achievements come at a price. Alexandra has to assume the financial and managerial role in the family after the death of her father, sacrificing a romantic life until late in the novel, and Ántonia, whose father also dies early in her life, works the family farm like a man, becoming (at least in the narrator Jim Burden's opinion) coarse and hardened in the process. For these two girls adolescent development is mostly a process of subduing individual desires to the necessities of the land. Still, these girls (and the women they become) are portrayed as compelling figures of power, energy, and self-determination. Clearly adolescence is less dangerous for young people on the frontier than it is for their urban counterparts.

During the last part of the nineteenth century a wide variety of books explicitly for adolescents began to be published which would continue into the twentieth century and contribute to the evolving definition of adolescence. Harry Castlemon's Frank, the Young Naturalist (1864), Martha Finley's Elsie Dinsmore (1867), Thomas Bailey Aldrich's The Story of a Bad Boy (1870), Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did (1872), and Oliver Optic's The Boat Club (1885) are some of the best known.

In two novels directed at young women, one can see divergent representations of female adolescence. The eponymous heroine of Elsie Dinsmore, a self-sacrificing adolescent girl like Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin and countless other sentimental novels, was probably as well known at the time as Huckleberry Finn. Highly religious and endlessly persecuted by her unsympathetic family, Elsie exhibits an unyielding piety that finally wins over her father. What Katy Did gives readers perhaps one of the first glimpses of an independent, active young woman. Katy is funny and energetic, engaging in schoolhouse pranks and planning to do (not just be or have) something in her later life. An accident causes Katy to change from tomboy to invalid and the emotional center of the home, but her confidence and spirit resemble that of later twentieth-century heroines of young adult fiction, like those of Katherine Paterson, Judy Blume, Mildred Taylor, Cynthia Voigt, Karen Cushman, and Francesca Lia Block.

Adding to the field of young adult novels were the hundreds of books produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a group of ghostwriters organized by the writer and publisher Edward Stratemeyer (1862–1930) around the turn of the century. These series books, mostly adventure and mystery, included Tom Swift (published from 1910 to 1941) and Ruth Fielding (1913 to 1934) and later the Hardy Boys (from 1926) and Nancy Drew (from 1930). At least 100 million copies of 600 titles have been published over the years. Sinclair Lewis even wrote a novel in this vein, although not for the syndicate, called Hike and the Aeroplane (1912). These series books tend to support stereotypes of boys as adventurers and primary actors, but both Nancy Drew and Ruth Fielding gave generations of girls characters who were brave, curious, and self-determined.

The message of much of the literature about adolescents at this time is that while young adults can make a stab at independence, ultimately they must succumb to adult authority. The books for young adults, however, offer a more hopeful picture. Ragged Dick rises by his own hand and with only a little adult intervention; Nancy Drew has only the most benign of parental influences in her widowed father; Hike can pilot an airplane back and forth across the continent, rescuing maidens, subduing rebels, and saving shipwreck victims, with the full support (but not the interference) of the adults in his life; and Katy can make plans to do something with her life. Not surprisingly, the adult novels about adolescence suggested the submission of adolescents to adult authority; the young adult novels for adolescents, on the other hand, hinted at something more subversive, and perhaps more modern.

See alsoAdventures of Huckleberry Finn; Children's Literature; Daisy Miller; Maggie, A Girl of the Streets; My Ántonia

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868–1869. Edited by Valerie Alderson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. The Story of a Bad Boy. 1870. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1927.

Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York. 1868. New York: Signet, 1990.

Castlemon, Harry [Charles Austin Fosdick]. Frank, the Young Naturalist. 1864. Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates, 1892.

Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.

Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! 1913. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Coolidge, Susan [Sarah Chauncy Woolsey]. What Katy Did. 1872. London: Collins, 1955.

Crane, Stephen. Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (A Story of New York). 1893. Edited by Kevin J. Hayes. New York: Bedford, 1999.

Dunbar, Paul Laurence. The Sport of the Gods. 1902. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1902.

Eggleston, Edward. The Hoosier Schoolmaster. 1871. New York: Hart, 1976.

Finley, Martha [Martha Farquharson]. Elsie Dinsmore. 1867. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

Howe, E. W. The Story of a Country Town. 1883. Edited by Claude M. Simpson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961.

James, Henry. Daisy Miller. 1879. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1906.

James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897. New York: Scribners, 1908.

Lewis, Sinclair. Hike and the Aeroplane. 1912. Hawley, Pa.: Yale Books, 1999.

Optic, Oliver [William Taylor Adams]. The Boat Club. 1855. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1882.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1885. Edited by Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford, 1995.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. 1876. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1903.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1901.

Zitkala-Ša [Gertrude Simmons Bonnin]. American Indian Stories. Washington, D.C.: Hayworth, 1921.

Secondary Works

African-American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship. Library of Congress exhibit. Available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html.

Alexander, Ruth M. "'The Only Thing I Wanted Was Freedom': Wayward Girls in New York, 1900–1930." In Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950, edited by Paula Petrick and Elliott West, pp. 275–300. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1992.

Ashford, Richard K. "Tomboys and Saints: Girls' Stories of the Late Nineteenth Century." School Library Journal 26 (January 1980): 23–28.

Donelson, Kenneth L., and Alleen Pace Nilsen. Literature for Today's Young Adults. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2001.

Elliott, Glen R., and S. Shirley Feldman, eds. At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Grinder, Robert E. "The Concept of Adolescence in the Genetic Psychology of G. Stanley Hall." Child Development 40 (1969): 355–369.

Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence: Its Psychology, and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton, 1904.

Handlin, Mary F., and Oscar Handlin. Facing Life: Youth and the Family in American History. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Hawes, Joseph M., and N. Ray Hiner, eds. Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985.

Goodman, Madeline, and John Modell. "Historical Perspectives." In At the Threshold: The Developing Adolescent, edited by Glen R. Elliott and S. Shirley Feldman, pp. 93–122. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.

Riis, Jacob A. The Children of the Poor. New York: Scribners, 1892.

Sanger, William W. The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World. New York: Harper, 1858.

Soderbergh, Peter A. "Birth of a Notion: Edward Stratemeyer and the Movies." Midwest Quarterly 14 (1972): 81–94.

Spacks, Patricia Meyer. The Adolescent Idea. New York: Basic, 1981.

White, Barbara. Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1985.

Caren J. Town