An interview with Maria Cannon and Laura Tisdall about their co-edited collection, Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z
Our member, Dr. Laura Tisdall (Newcastle University, UK), and her co-editor, Dr. Maria Cannon (University of Portsmouth, UK), talk about their edited collection, Adulthood in Britain and the United States from 1350 to Generation Z (University of London Press, 2024).
Q: What is this edited collection about?
Maria: This collection explores how concepts of adulthood have changed over time in Britain and the United States from 1350 to the present day through eleven case studies. Adulthood has a history. Expectations for adults have altered across time, just as other age categories such as childhood, adolescence and old age have been shaped by cultural and social contexts.
Adulthood can operate as both a burden and a benefit, as groups can be framed as both ‘adultified’ and ‘childlike’. In the same way as an analysis of femininity is incomplete without understanding what is meant by masculinity, we cannot really understand how concepts of childhood, adolescence or old age have changed without thinking about how adulthood is also given different meanings in different societies at different times.
Adulthood is relational; it makes sense only when defined in opposition to those who are excluded from it. While children and adolescents, or ‘dependent subjects’, represent the principal group of non-adults, they are by no means the only one. Adulthood is intersectional: class, race, gender, sexuality and disability, including the disabilities of old age, might affect your access to it.
The collection explores inevitable contradictions between theoretical definitions of adulthood and people’s actual experiences of it. Even those who were firmly defined as adults might experience the limiting nature of adulthood, which relied on stereotypes about how one should be, feel and act at a given age or life stage. For this reason, historicising adulthood should mean not just demonstrating the unfairness of the exclusion of non-adults from this category but also questioning the usefulness of the category itself.
Q: What made you initiate this volume?
Laura: When I was doing my PhD on the history of childhood, I was talking to my supervisor, Siân Pooley, about different concepts of childhood across time. She made a comment along these lines: in the nineteenth century, it’s adulthood that gets reinvented as much, or more so, than childhood. This immediately started me thinking. Why had historians written so much on how childhood changed and so little on adulthood?
As I thought about this question, I realised that histories of childhood can’t really be disentangled from histories of adulthood. Children are often defined by what they are not, in relation to adults: immature, incapable of ‘reason’, ‘empathy’ or ‘wisdom’, needing certain kinds of guidance to grow up properly. But society’s expectations of adults depend on place and time. They aren’t the same across history, and this affects how historical actors thought about children.
I applied successfully for an Early Career Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, which allowed me to consider how children and young people imagined adulthood in Cold War Britain (c.1956-89). But I realised that it was also important to understand adulthood across a longer period of time. What ideas about children and adults were new in twentieth-century Britain, and which were not?
I organised a workshop, kindly funded by the Leverhulme Trust, to explore these questions by bringing together historians working on Britain and the United States from c.1350 to the present day. This edited collection emerged from that workshop.
An excerpt from the introductory chapter:
In twenty-first-century Britain and the United States, we are often told that adulthood is under threat. Its demise is blamed on millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996, as the oldest of this group are now reaching their early forties without necessarily acquiring traditional markers of maturity. There is no shortage of assertions, in both popular media and academic texts, that millennials are infantilised, immature and incapable.[1] In their turn, millennials have struck back, challenging the relevance and value of traditional adulthood. Journalist Catherine Baab-Muguira explored ‘Why so many American millennials feel that adulthood is a lie’ in July 2018, while fellow millennial Whizy Kim similarly asserted in Refinery29 in May 2021 that ‘For millennials, the dream of adulthood is dead – and that’s OK’.[2] These challenges highlight the social and economic difficulties faced by this generation, coming of age shortly before, during or after the financial crisis of 2008, with rising rent and house prices, precarious unemployment and, especially for Americans, skyrocketing student debt.
The next generation down, Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are often portrayed, in contrast to ‘lazy’ millennials, as ‘old before their time’, missing out on the life experiences that ought to define youth.[3] A British psychotherapist recently quoted in a Guardian article said: ‘I do have the sense that [this generation] are possibly missing out on making mistakes and the sense of being young’, citing evidence that Gen Z drink less alcohol and tend to have a smaller number of close friends rather than meeting lots of people in clubs and bars.[4] Both millennial ‘childishness’ and Gen Z’s ‘premature maturity’ are framed as problems, underlining the idea that there is a ‘right kind’ of adulthood that can only be experienced at a specific chronological age. Meanwhile, sociologists, policymakers, psychologists and neuroscientists increasingly suggest that adulthood begins later than we thought and ends earlier than we expected. ‘Brain science’ purports to show that our frontal lobes, seat of our executive functioning, are not fully mature until age twenty-five or thirty, then begin to decline again after age forty.[5]
The current tensions between the ideal of adulthood and the reality of ‘adulting’ are nothing new. Although ‘adulthood’ is under intense scrutiny in contemporary Britain and the United States, this is not a uniquely turbulent period, nor does it represent the overturning of norms that were previously settled and unquestioned. Adulthood has a history. Expectations for adults have altered across time, just as other age-categories such as childhood, adolescence and old age have been shaped by cultural and social contexts. In the past, just as in the present, historical actors have wrestled with the contrast between their own experiences and the life-stage markers they were expected to meet. Older generations have feared that younger generations will never be ready to assume the full responsibilities of maturity. Adulthood has been presented as the idealised peak of the life cycle, a period of life that is often very brief or impossible to achieve before the slide into middle and old age begins.
Both Britain and the United States developed a range of chronological ages linked to the achievement of adulthood in the modern period. However, individuals, just as they had done in the pre-modern period, were more likely to associate adulthood with individual roles or qualities, whether that was getting married, holding property, or becoming an ‘independent’ and ‘responsible’ person. This created an inevitable contradiction between theoretical definitions of adulthood and people’s actual experiences of it. In this way, even those who were firmly defined as adults might experience the limiting nature of adulthood, which relied on stereotypes about how one should be, feel and act at a given age or life-stage. For this reason, historicising adulthood should not just mean demonstrating the unfairness of the exclusion of non-adults from this category, but questioning the usefulness of the category itself.
Adulthood is relational; it makes sense only when defined in opposition to those who are excluded from it. While children and adolescents, or ‘dependent subjects’, represent the principal group of non-adults, they are by no means the only one. Adulthood is intersectional: class, race, gender, sexuality and disability, including the disabilities of old age, might affect your access to it. It can operate as both a burden and a benefit, as groups can be framed as both ‘adultified’ and ‘childlike’. This makes adulthood an important historical category, even for scholars who do not focus on chronological age or the life-cycle. Since the late seventeenth century, the category of adult has been used to define citizenship in both Britain and the United States, and hence who is allowed to hold political authority; it is the foundation of the modern state.[6] Prior to that, adulthood was a stage of life associated with suitability for governance through the values of maturity and wisdom, albeit with a less clearly defined identity around the term ‘adult’. Understanding adulthood is crucial to truly understanding the dynamics of power.
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[1] Frank Furedi, Why Borders Matter: Why Humanity Must Relearn the Art of Drawing Boundaries (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020); Kyle Smith, ‘Millennials Need To Put Away the Juice Boxes and Grow Up’, New York Post, March 21st, 2016.
[2] Catherine Baab-Mugeira, ‘Failure To Launch: Why So Many American Millennials Feel That Adulthood Is A Lie’, NBC News, July 8th, 2018; Whizy Kim, ‘For Millennials, The Dream of Adulthood Is Dead – And That’s OK’, Refinery29, May 21st, 2021.
[3] Barbara Herman, ‘Gen Z: Nonrebels With a Cause’, FutureVision, February 21st, 2021.
[4] David Batty, ‘ “Generation Sensible” Risk Missing Out On Life Experiences, Therapists Warn’, the Guardian, August 19th, 2022.
[5] Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain (Middlesex: Penguin, 2018); Moya Sarner, When I Grow Up: Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood (London: Scribe UK, 2022).
[6] Holly Brewer, By Birth or Consent: Children, Law and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2005)