The Routledge History of American Sexuality

This article was downloaded by: 10.3.98.104 On: 30 Sep 2021 Access details: subscription number Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG, UK The Routledge History of American Sexuality Kevin P. Murphy, Jason Ruiz, David Serlin Age Publication details https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315637259-3 Nicholas L. Syrett Published online on: 02 Mar 2020 How to cite :- Nicholas L. Syrett. 02 Mar 2020, Age from: The Routledge History of American Sexuality Routledge Accessed on: 30 Sep 2021 https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315637259-3 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR DOCUMENT Full terms and conditions of use: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/legal-notices/terms This Document PDF may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproductions, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The publisher shall not be liable for an loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. 3 AGE Nicholas L. Syrett In its contemporary usage the phrase “robbing the cradle” connotes an older man dating or marrying a younger woman. But the phrase used to mean something different and unrelated to sex. Initially, it was employed in the Civil War era to describe the conscription policies of the Confederacy and was accompanied by a second part: “and the grave.” The Confederate army was so in need of soldiers that it was “robbing the cradle and the grave” in order to fill its ranks, drafting both the young and the old. In this usage the phrase is clearly dependent on age staging—the belief that some people should be considered too young or too old for military service—but it did not have anything to do with sex or marriage. As late as the 1940s the phrase “robbing the cradle,” now minus “and the grave,” was used to denote the signing of particularly youthful players to sports teams. A writer for the Los Angeles Tribune explained in 1944 of major league baseball teams’ recruiting practices: “Many teams are resurrecting old players—anybody with a spark of talent left. Others are robbing the cradle.” Only by later in the twentieth century was the transition to its current meaning complete; it had now been meaningfully repurposed to denote a practice that Americans found noteworthy: when an older man dated or married a girl or younger woman. In earlier eras, observers might have noted the occurrence of such a practice, but may not have found it particularly unusual.1 The evolution of the phrase is a useful way of thinking about how Americans have under- stood the connection between age and sexuality over the past 400 years. Put simply, as the significance of chronological age—the numbers we call ourselves—and sexuality—a discrete facet of our identities—have increased over the course of American history, so too has the relationship between the two categories. One brief example serves as an entrée into understanding the phe- nomenon. Some men in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American colonies forced sex upon girls in their teens (and below), and when they were not married to them were sometimes prosecuted for it, but in the absence of hegemonic understandings about the importance of age or sexuality to one’s identity, no category of what we might now call pedophilia emerged to explain these men’s actions. Or, as historian Richard Godbeer has demonstrated, seventeenth-century Connecticut resident Nicholas Sension repeatedly forced himself on men and boys who were younger than he, and while his neighbors seemed to acknowledge this pattern of behavior they also did not punish or censure him until he attempted to have sex with a man closer in stature to his own. They certainly did not call him a homosexual pedophile, neither word yet existing. Earlier Americans thus perpetrated acts that we would now note for the ways that age and sexuality converged, but contemporaneous observers might not have seen them as particularly significant, or at least not significant for the reasons that we do.2 21 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 18:11 30 Sep 2021; For: 9781315637259, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315637259-3 Nicholas L. Syrett The way that I have phrased the foregoing makes it sound as if the only way to think about age and sexuality together is through regulation. On the contrary, the rise of age consciousness and the development of increasingly specific sexual predilections have combined to partially create the very desires so named by the categories. That is, without the heightened significance attached to both age and sexual identity, it would not be possible for some men (or women) to focus their desires on those who are “twinks” or “barely legal,” as some pornographic magazines and websites describe their content, or conversely, to be a “daddy chaser.” Age and sexuality converge here in the creation of specific kinds of sexual subjects and objects. A related theme in the history of sexuality, and one linked closely to age, is that of generation. Though not the primary focus of this chapter, it is clear that generation has had a distinct impact on the history of sexuality in two ways. The first is through regulation, generally by one generation over another. Seventeenth-century colonists, particularly in New England, had greater oversight of their children than did those even one hundred years later. By the middle of the eighteenth century in some regions, children and youth operated largely independently of their parents when it came to courtship and marital prospects. This trend continued through the nineteenth century, but was always overlaid by class, religion, race, and region: some parents regu- lated more than others. While the general historical trend has been toward less regulation over sexuality, which has partially allowed for more premarital sex by young people, contemporary middle-class parenting, with its emphasis on oversight and control, may account for recent declines in rates of teenage sexual activity.3 The second generational trend relates to the first. Historians have demonstrated that the accept- ance of particular sexual practices—necking, petting, premarital sex, oral sex—has often changed between generations, with younger people accepting these practices as normal in ways that shocked their elders (if they even knew about them). So too did activists approach sex in ways that differed by generation. Younger, radical feminists in the second wave often put a higher priority on sexual liberation (including lesbianism) than did older, liberal feminists. This generational divide further informed the contentious “sex wars” between feminists in the 1980s. Generation has clearly gov- erned the history of sexuality in the United States in important ways.4 Historians of sexuality and those reading this book are much more likely to be familiar, fol- lowing the work of Michel Foucault, with the development of sexual identities over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the birth of sexuality itself as a discrete facet of one’s personality. Less well known is that chronological age also has a history in the United States. Rather than simply being a biological marker, age is also a social construction, bound to a specific calendar invented by human beings. The meanings that different societies attach to specific ages, themselves often codified by lawmakers somewhat arbitrarily, also have a history. In the American context, the ages eighteen, twenty-one, and sixty-five all carry a specific meaning that is only partially related to actual bodies.5 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was quite possible to live in the American colonies and be unaware of one’s age or even birthday. This was not universally true, as many families recorded birthdays and other significant events in family Bibles, and those who were lit- erate were more likely to be aware of their own ages. The ages of the enslaved, for instance, while important for masters who might want to sell their human property, were often not known by bondspeople themselves. Life stage, by contrast, was important to colonists, but they often had a more functional understanding of these stages than they did a strictly chronological view. The difference between a child, an adult, and an elderly person mattered largely because of what that person could be expected to do, how he or she might labor on behalf of his or her family, and whether or not she was of an age where she might reproduce. All of this is to say that early Americans were certainly aware of age, but they did not treat it as an identity marker the way contemporary Americans do.6 22 Downloaded By: 10.3.98.104 At: 18:11 30 Sep 2021; For: 9781315637259, chapter3, 10.4324/9781315637259-3 Age The rise of age consciousness occurred alongside the shrinking of the middle-class family and the increased valorization of childhood and the individual identities of children that accompanied it. One manifestation of this awareness was the spread of schooling, and especially age-graded schooling, which grouped same-aged peers in classrooms, simultaneously emphasizing and produ- cing shared characteristics among those of the same age. Elementary schooling began in the Northeast in the antebellum era, and had spread across the country by the turn of the century, only becoming mandatory by the Great Depression when high school also became much more widely attended.

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