Youth

Youth, a life stage situated between childhood and adulthood, was an important social category in America through the late nineteenth century. Eventually replaced by the concept of adolescence—a more truncated life stage ending by the end of one's teens—youth in early American society had less to do with one's age than with whether one had taken on manly responsibilities such as marriage and an occupation. Americans understood male youth as preparatory to manhood, and the full assumption of independence marked the end of one's youth. However, the degree of dependency experienced in youth—and, therefore, the precise relation between youth and manhood—was historically and regionally variable.

For males in the American colonies, youth was generally a period of exaggerated and prolonged dependency. In colonial subsistence farm communities, young men's claims to manhood were problematic. Masculinity was predicated upon independent mastery of a household, but parents relied heavily on their sons' labor and were slow to let them establish their own families. With a highly restricted land market and few opportunities for wages, sons had to wait for an inheritance before they could become self-sufficient. Furthermore, parents controlled, and often delayed, their sons' independence by having a significant say over prospective partners. Puritan fathers negotiated patrimonies and dowries before agreeing to any proposed match, while Quaker men and women investigated young couples through committees of their Monthly Meetings before allowing a couple to wed. Where patriarchy was strong, adults closely controlled young men's entry into adulthood.

Yet the nature of patriarchy and the extent of patriarchal restrictions on male youths varied. Some young men in the colonies, especially those living in regions where agriculture was an avenue for profit rather than subsistence, could escape patriarchal rule more easily. Young men from Europe who crossed the Atlantic to become indentured servants, for example, no longer had to answer to their parents, though they were expected to obey the quasi-paternal household authority of their masters. On southern plantations, the presence of slave labor allowed household patriarchs to be more indulgent with their youthful sons, who themselves had control over slaves— and thus exercised a fundamental prerogative of southern manhood—long before reaching adulthood.

Traditional barriers between youth and manhood were lowered by challenges to fathers' patriarchal rule during the era of the American Revolution. In the decades approaching and following the war, Americans consumed English novels that decried fathers' interference in marriage. Overthrowing a patriarchal king further delegitimized patriarchy in the young country. In addition, fathers lost much of their economic leverage over their sons as land supplies were depleted by successive partible (divisible) patrimonies in older village communities. Declining patriarchy is apparent in the booming rates of premarital pregnancy in these years. Some young men forced their fathers to assent to a proposed match, and thus verify their arrival at manhood, by impregnating a young woman.

Adults fought back, however, using seduction tales to express growing concerns about the ability of young people to negotiate marriage on their own. Bemoaning the wiles of young male seducers, authors urged chastity to stem the tide of sex and pregnancy among the young. Although parents never reassumed control of courtship, they did succeed in curtailing premarital pregnancy. Thus, young males' control over this [Page 514]route from youth to full manhood had been substantially reduced by the early nineteenth century.

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