ADOLESCENCEof research on England highlights the contingent
nature of adolescence as a social category. Two
realities were prominent in defining adolescence
in premodern England (Gillis 1974). First, child-
ren of all social classes were often sent out of their
household of origin to become servants for anoth-
er family at about age seven. ‘‘Binding out’’ coin-
cided with the adoption of adult dress and codes of
behavior, although the young person was viewed
as neither fully adult nor child. Rather, this prac-
tice marked a form of semiautonomy: they partici-
pated in the labor market and resided outside
their parents’ home, but they did not marry and
they were not financially independent.
Second, marriage was often linked with the
establishment of an independent household. The
timing of this transition, which marked full adult-
hood, was in turn determined by when the father
conveyed dowries for daughters and annuities or
land to sons. Although the specifics of inheritance
were often far more complex than the rule of
primogeniture would suggest (Stone 1979), the
net result was that marriage was typically post-
poned among the poor and lower-middle classes
(that is, most of society) until young people were in
their late twenties, with males marrying about two
years later than females. For the proportion of the
population that never married (about one in five),
the commencement of adulthood hinged on occu-
pational achievements and financial independence,
which probably took place in the late twenties as well.
The coming of industrialism changed the ado-
lescent experience dramatically. Reactions to in-
dustrialism differed greatly by class and were com-
plicated by a wide array of factors. For many strata
of society, however, economic livelihood was often
enhanced by encouraging several wage laborers
within the family (Gillis 1974). In turn, wage labor
was a strong force in creating new and popular
pathways into marriage. Concerns over inherit-
ance were less common than in the earlier period,
and kin ties were defined along more pragmatic
lines that allowed youth greater freedom to marry
and to establish a household. The absence of
strong patriarchal control and new-found pocket
money led many youth to courting and consump-
tion patterns that shocked their elders. A new
adolescence had emerged.
This broad-brush view varied in important
ways from place to place, among social classes, and
by gender (for related accounts of the English
experience, see Anderson 1971; Musgrove 1964;
Smelser 1959; for the Continental experience, see
Mittauer and Sieder 1982; for the American expe-
rience see Demos 1970; Handlin and Handlin
1971; Hareven 1982; Kett 1977; Prude 1983). Yet
it is instructive for two reasons. First, most schol-
ars now agree that as a transitional stage of
semiautonomy, adolescence existed before the
emergence of modern societies, although it had
distinctive ‘‘premodern’’ characteristics. For ex-
ample, premodern adolescence was typically not a
period of identity formation, as Erik Erikson’s
(1963) putatively universal model of psychosocial
development maintains (Mitterauer 1992). Young
people knew their occupational and educational
futures, their parents arranged both their mar-
riages and home-leaving, and the realities of inher-
itance, fecundity, and infant mortality dictated
their reproductive behaviors. Furthermore, for
most youth, few real political or religious options
presented themselves. Although there are record-
ed instances of youth riots in urban areas and
many adolescents and young adults were active in
the Protestant Reformation, political and religious
beliefs generally reflected the traditions and cus-
toms of the locale.Second, although adolescence existed in
preindustrial times, historians such as Ariés main-
tain too sharp a distinction between premodern
and modern phases of the life course (Ben-Amos
1995). The adolescences of both the preindustrial
and contemporary West are not entirely dissimi-
lar, suggesting that there are distinctly ‘‘modern’’
features of preindustrial adolescence and ‘‘tradi-
tional’’ features of contemporary adolescence. For
example, many adolescents of both periods lack a
parent. In seventeenth-century England, life ex-
pectancy was approximately thirty-two years, so
that many youth, born when the mother was in her
early to mid-twenties, lacked at least one parent. In
contemporary society, parental separation is not
uncommon through the early life course. For ex-
ample, among cohorts born between 1967 and
1973, about 20 percent of white males and 60
percent of black males have lived in a mother-
only family between birth and age 15 (Hill et al.
1999). Parental separation and absence today is a
substitute for the parental mortality of the
premodern period.