Through the Looking Glass: Age, Stages, and Historical Analysis

Leslie Paris

The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, Volume 1, Number

1, Winter 2008, pp. 106-113 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2008.0005

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hcy/summary/v001/1.1paris.html

Access provided by username 'pablotoro' (5 Mar 2014 12:39 GMT)

LESLIE PARIS

THROUGH THE LOOKING GL A S S :

AGE , S TAGE S, AND HIS TORICAL ANALYSIS

Leslie Pariss essay delineates the way the experience of age, particularly childhood and
adolescence shifts shape, reaches forward into the future and dips back into time past. Even
as experts slice age into smaller and smaller cohorts trying to establish minute verities, it
eludes capture. Urging historians of childhood on, she argues that we will have achieved an
important goal, Once it is no longer possible to write history without greater awareness of
age.MS

n the summer of 1935, a group of girls attending Camp Andree, a camp

for adolescent Girl Scouts north of New York City, participated in what the
camps dramatics counselor called a Suppressed Desire Party. First the girls
bound together long tree branches in order to form a frame, or mirror, large
enough to step through. One of the campers, dressed as Alice in Wonderland,
then invited the others to come forward individually. Each girl stood in front
of the pretend looking-glass and performed a skit ostensibly illustrating her
future ambition. Like many camp skits, this one elicited mischievous and playful responses as well as serious ones. One girl declared that her wish was to
be a cook, another an elephant tamer, a third, a swimming teacher, a fourth,
the popular movie star Katherine Hepburn. Much merriment ensued, and as
the dramatics counselor at Andree concluded, Everyone enjoyed the party
very much.1
Andree campers were older girls, at least fourteen years of age, and many of
them chose the camp specifically because they wanted to vacation with their age
peers instead of younger girls. Suppressed Desire, the name of this party, suggests not only their (fanciful or serious) career ambitions but also their growing
sexual maturity. By no means, however, did the girls consider themselves to be
grown women. At one moment they might discuss their relationships with boys
or their college ambitions. At another, they playfully attended a Baby Party to
which they carried dolls which they had brought from home.2 As they passed
through childhood, taking up new roles and (at least partially) shedding older
Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (v.1.1) 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

107

ones, their age-bound identities were inevitably in play. Girlhood, childhood,

adolescence, womanhood: these terms mattered to the Andree girls, but their
experience of age was complex: at once defined and permeable, forward-looking and nostalgic.
Age-bound identities are contingent and continually revised throughout
the life cycle. These shifts are particularly visible in childhood and adolescence,
years marked by far-reaching processes of physical, emotional, and social transformation. The various stages of childhood regularly mandate new opportunities and forms of regimentation for the cohorts moving through them. Whereas
the racial, gender, and ethnic identifications of childhood generally persist
into adulthood, constituting a matrix for adult identity, identification with any
one particular stage of childhood is inherently fleeting. At Camp Andree, for
instance, a completely new cohort of girls cycled through the camp every few
years, as older adolescents aged out of the group and into young adulthood.
On the surface, age appears to be a natural category based on factual information. Just as most, if not all, newborns are immediately classed male or female
and maintain their sex of origin throughout life, we are all born at a precise date
in time. Indeed, given the ambiguity of sex in cases such as hermaphrodism and
transsexuality, age is generally considered to be more fixed, in that we all have
specific and immutable dates of birth. Whether or not we are honest about or
attentive to our birthdays, the idea that there is a fundamental and undeniable
truth to age is conventional wisdom. However, what age signifies is far more
fluid: a historically contingent system of power relations and cultural expectations. In different contexts, for instance, individual dates of birth are recorded
differently or accorded more or less weight. Moreover, the milestones by which
we measure youthful achievements have not been consistent over time and
place; variations in the material conditions of childhood have led to measurably
distinct developmental outcomes. Better nutrition, for example, has contributed
to a decrease in the age at which American girls first menstruate, such that
what was once a mid-adolescent rite of passage in the nineteenth century now
sometimes occurs at eleven or twelve years of age. Conversely, contemporary
American children, most of whom now spend their first years in disposable
diapers, toilet-train a year or two later than did their mid-twentieth century
predecessors, who were raised in a era of cloth diapers.3
Some American rituals of childhood are tied specifically to a particular number. Contemporary examples include entrance into kindergarten at age five; Bar
and Bat Mitzvah ceremonies which mark Jewish Americans entry into religious
adulthood at the age of thirteen; the Quinceaera which honors Chicana girls
coming of age as young Catholic women at fifteen; or older adolescents right to

108

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

drive cars or work for pay (at an age which varies slightly from one jurisdiction
to another).4 But most scholars of childhood explore broader age-based cohorts,
or stages, rather than focusing on any one specific age. As systems of meaning,
these broader stages tend to suppress internal ambiguities, making categories
such as toddler or teen appear natural and fixed. In the American context,
we might think of the rise of adolescence in the late nineteenth century, or the
young baby boomers of the postwar generation, or the idea of the terrible
twos today. None of these stages are entirely clearcut, nor are they entirely
without ambivalence; for example, the rising ideal of adolescence defined its
subjects as at once autonomous and in need of adult protection.5
Over the past century, American adults efforts to parse youthful cohorts
more precisely have occurred in tandem with the rise of a protected childhood ideal and of a new, more explicitly scientific cadre of child experts.6
At the beginning of the century, Progressive reformers agitated for new laws
mandating that children and youth be kept from full-time employment and
dangerous occupations, extended the years of childrens formal schooling, and
tried to protect children from early sexual experience. Throughout the century,
pediatricians, psychologists, educators, and social workers sought to determine
appropriate developmental standards for each age cohort. Today, Americans
take for granted parenting advice geared specifically to the briefest of stages;
the month-by-month guidance of the contemporary parenting bestseller, What
To Expect the First Year, for example, details the specific skills that babies ought
to acquire every four or five weeks during infancy.7
Summer camps, institutions designed to provide healthful and uplifting leisure experiences to modern urban youth, help to illustrate the importance of age
for adults and for children, illuminating the ways in which age differences have
been articulated both by adults seeking to circumscribe youthful cohorts and
by children developing their own sense of belonging to a particular age-group.
Like the Andree girls, most children and adolescents have been at once eager to
assert their rising status, occasionally resistant to age-based expectations, and
wistful about the freedoms they have had to leave behind in growing up. These
hierarchies and ideas about progress from one developmental stage to the next
are not simply imposed by adults upon children; they have also resonated with
children assessing their own changing relation to age and power.
The late-nineteenth century leaders of the first camps hoped to invigorate
adolescent boys in natural surroundings. At New Hampshires Camp Chocorua
(18811889), for instance, pioneering camp director Ernest Balch envisioned
leading a cohort of boys aged twelve to sixteen, of an age old enough to benefit from rural adventure but still, in his words, plastic enough to mold.8

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

109

However, many of Balchs campers were preadolescents; Ernests brother Alfred

later recalled that the Chocorua clientele ranged from eight to fourteen years,
and some were so inexperienced in taking care of themselves that they could
not properly dress themselves or lace their own shoes. Scorned as Incapables
by their fellow campers, these younger boys struggled to catch up.9 The very
youngest camper at Camp Chocorua, on the other hand, had special rights befitting a pampered youngest son; this infant, as the lucky boy was called, could
eat ice cream whether or not he had helped to make it.10 Within a few decades,
as summer camps became more mainstream and served far more varied clienteles, their leaders came to enroll a wider age-range of boys and girls as young
as five years of age. Some larger camps encompassed the entire school-age
range. But early-twentieth century campers were, like their nineteenth century
predecessors, most likely to be on the cusp of early adolescence, with an average age of just over twelve.11
The number of adolescents over the age of sixteen who attended camps
as paying clients was always low, and by the interwar years it was negligible.
Many older adolescents withdrew from the youth groups which sponsored
camp vacations. Some were obliged or preferred to work for pay during the
summer, and many were no longer attracted to the idea of recreation under
adult oversight. A distinctive adolescent peer culture was growing, especially
among high school students. As the proportion of fourteen to seventeen year
olds attending high school rose from under ten percent in 1900 to almost eighty
percent in 1940, adolescents were increasingly likely to spend their days with
their peers rather than in mixed-age work environments.12 Those older adolescents who continued to fraternize with younger children sometimes paid a
social price for doing so. In 1935, one group of Camp Andree girls discussed
the perils of remaining in the Girl Scouts past the age at which most other girls
dropped out to pursue other interests. The uniform, which they had to wear to
meetings during the school year, was, they felt, unbecoming; more importantly, they faced significant peer pressure from their non-Scouting peers, who
taunted them, calling them good little girls and Girl Frights. These girls
specifically requested greater autonomy and a camp program better attuned to
their needs.13
The trend at camps, as in American culture more broadly, was toward a
greater demarcation of youthful age cohorts. Successful camp directors marked
age differences more systematically as their camps grew, incorporating campers into the larger group not only as children but as members of age-specific
cohorts with their own names, special spaces, developmental needs, rights, and
organized activities.14 At many camps, the youngest children had their own

110

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

play spaces, a higher counselor-camper ratio, and the attention of a Camp

Mother (often the wife or mother of the camp director), while the oldest children enjoyed special privileges such as later bedtimes or inter-camp dances.
Campers most intense personal relationships tended to emerge within their
own age cohorts. Returning campers ascended the hierarchy from year to year.
Middlers became glamorous Seniors, who by virtue of their age ran sports
teams and attended dances with neighboring campers. Seniors felt themselves
to be distinctly superior to the Midgets and Juniors they once had been. At a
time when few camps were coeducational and fewer still were interracial, age
remained camps single most important organizing distinction.
Camps were worlds of age hierarchy. Adults asserted the authority to organize childrens time, activities, bodies, and access to various spaces: planning
campers days; monitoring them to make sure they brushed their teeth, wore
clean clothing, and were in bed at night by the time the last bell struck; and
forbidding them from wandering into camp kitchens or swimming in the lake
without adult supervision. Campers were expected to defer to adults, and any
camper who disobeyed adult leadership risked being sent home. But even as
camp leaders consolidated age cohorts and worked to define their limits, they
made space for a playful reappraisal of rigid age-bound identities. Campers
took pleasure in playing at being babies, and in acting out in socially prescribed ways. At the Suppressed Desire party, where older adolescents played
a game of pretend, they experienced a temporary reprieve from age-bound
expectations.
The image of Andree girls stepping through a portal and imagining their
adult selves is both evocative and incomplete. Some of the girls may not have
felt free to share their ambitions in this public performance space. They were
coming of age in the Depression years, a time when women were under great
pressure to leave the paid workforce, not to aspire to it.15 Most of these middleclass white girls likely expected to attend colleges, to marry, and to become
homemakers and mothers. Perhaps some had other career ambitions, but we
do not know if they discussed such interests more seriously among themselves
before dramatizing their playful Suppressed Desires. Moreover, the source of
this particular anecdote is the drama counselor who organized the party, who
had a stake in its success, and who was perhaps not the most disinterested
observer. Because the girls voices are filtered through her testimony, we might
well ask what else was suppressed in her report.
Despite these lacunae, the Andree girls are precisely the kind of youth
cohort about whom historians know the most: a group of adolescents under
adult supervision. The historical record is generally more forthcoming about

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

111

the ideas and attitudes of such older children, who have been more likely to
speak in public, write about their experiences, and otherwise participate in
public culture, than about those of younger children, who often appear in the
historical record as objects of reform but rarely as individuals representing or
commenting on their own experiences. As we work to expand the knowledge
produced in the field of childrens history, it remains a challenge to find sources and methods that allow us to explore younger childrens histories more
fully, especially where very young and unlettered children are concerned.
While those of us who work in modern periods can draw on research from
such fields as folklore studies and sociology for evidence of younger childrens
games, art, and songs, those who study earlier historical eras have access to
fewer such sources.
Historians tendency to focus on adolescents may also reflect a desire
to locate agency among our subjects. Like much of the scholarship that has
emerged in the new social history since the 1960s, childrens history has had as
one of its aims the recuperation of the stories of a group of relatively (if only temporarily) powerless people. The impulse to find power in the lives of children,
who traditionally have been understood to possess very little, may make the
lives of relatively more autonomous adolescents more captivating than those of
younger children. Children understand that new rights and entitlements await
them as they age: they will escape their relative subservience to adults, rising to
positions of relative power over others younger than themselves. But children
also know that the movement from one stage to another sometimes carries a
price, whether it be entrance into the labor force or new restrictions on their
freedom of movement. Unsurprisingly, they have sometimes been ambivalent
about the childish pleasures they have had to leave behind.
In recent years, historical scholarship on children and youth has rapidly
expanded. However, it has yet significantly to reshape the history survey courses
and textbooks which are often students first and only exposure to the field. In
standard textbooks, childhood generally remains peripheral. A few childrens
stories might be presented as an interesting detail or sidebar. But in contradistinction to such categories of analysis as race, gender, and class, age is usually not
yet represented as a central category of historical inquiry. Telling the history of
childhood is important in and of itself. But we will have accomplished something
different once it is no longer possible to write history without greater awareness
of age, including attention to childrens voices and ideologies of childhood. After
all, the meanings of adulthood and childhood are co-determined, and both are
always in process of being articulated. A more explicitly theorized approach to
age has much to offer historians of adulthood as well as scholars of youth.

112

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

NOTES
1.

Report of Dramatics Activities at Camp Andree1935, Girl Scouts of the USA Historic
Preservation Center, New York City (hereafter GSUSA), 84. I offer a more detailed discussion of Camp Andree and other early summer camps in Leslie Paris, Childrens Nature:
The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

2.

Camp Andree Reports 1937, GSUSA.

3.

On the history of girls and menstruation, see, for example, Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The
Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (New York: Random House,
1997), 2756. On the history of disposable diapers, see Stephen Van Dulken, American
Inventions: A History of Curious, Extraordinary, and Just Plain Useful Patents (New
York: New York University Press, 2004), 1112.

4.

See, for example, Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish
Culture 18801950 (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 89134, on Bar Mitzvah and Bat
Mitzvah ceremonies, and Karen Mary Davalos, La Quinceaera: Making Gender And
Ethnic Identities Frontiers 16, nos. 23 (1996): 101127, on the Quinceaera.

5.

On adolescence, see, for example, G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Its Psychology and Its
Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education
(New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1904).

6.

On the rise of childrens pricelessness, see Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child:
The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985).

7.

Arlene Eisenberg, Heidi E. Murkoff, and Sandee E. Hathaway, What To Expect the First
Year (New York: Workman, 1989).

8.

As Balch confessed in a later book, Amateur Circus Life, the term twelve-sixteen is used
for convenience. All people in touch with boys and girls observe that the period I write
about begins and ends, at times, earlier or later. Ernest Balch, Amateur Circus Life: A
new method of physical development for Boys and Girls (New York: The MacMillan
Company, 1916, rep. 1924), 162.

9.

Alfred Balch, A Boys Republic McClure vol. 1 (August 1893), 247.

10.

A Sketch of Camp Chocorua, in The White Birch vol. 1, no. 1 (1899), 2, New Hampshire
Historical Society, Concord, New Hampshire.

11.

For camp age figures, see Welfare Council of New York City, Preprint of Summary and
Conclusions of A Survey of Work for Boys in Brooklyn (New York: Welfare Council
of New York City, 1931), 29, New York Public Library, New York; and Arthur T. Wilcox,
Organized Camping in New York State: A study of attendance, facilities and finance,
together with suggestions for meeting the camping needs of the State (masters thesis, New
York State College of Forestry, Syracuse University, 1941), 55.

12. Elliott West, Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference

Guide (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996), 4244. On early-twentieth-century
adolescent cultures, see Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York:
Basic Books, 1996); Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, eds., Generations of Youth:
Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (New York: New York
University Press, 1998); Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage
Girls Culture, 19201945 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Ilana Nash, American

Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth

113

Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture (Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 2006).
13.

Andree Experiments, 1935, 13, GSUSA.

14.

Alcott Farrar Elwell, The American Private Summer Camp for Boys, and its Place in a
Real Education (Thesis, Division of Education, Harvard U., 1916), 5355.

15.

See, for example, Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s
(Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).