View the h-women Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-women's August 1996 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-women's August 1996 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-women home page.
Editor's note: Please respond to Patrick Ryan at the address listed below. KL ******************************************************************************** From: Patrick Ryan <pxr11@po.CWRU.Edu> To Scholars of the History of Families and Children: I am searching for partners for a session proposal at the Third Carleton Conference on the History of the Family at Carelton University, Ottawa, Canada, May 15-17, 1997. My work explores the transformation in cultural and social arenas that allowed adolescent-life to develop between 1870 and 1940 in the United States. The paper I hope to deliver in May, "Unbinding Kin: Transforming Generational Reciprocity and the Political Economy of American Adolescence, 1870 to 1940," argues that Americans widely shared a reduction of the economic reciprocity of the generational tie in the early twentieth century. This is significant because the economic life shift in youth exposes a deeply embedded transformation in the way we learn to be members of our society that has subtly transformed the human condition. By compelling attendance in high schools, detailing a separate law and courts, enveloping them in sports and clubs we have reproduced generations increasingly detached from their parents and aloof from the functioning moral life of their society. In C. Lasch's words, "At the very moment when capitalism has not only outlived its usefulness and created the conditions for its own supersession, the will and capacity to replace it have atrophied." (HAVEN, 1977) I believe the nub of the change is not a 'prolonged' youth as so many sociologists seem to think; it is a disappearing youth. We have constructed an innocent, 'priceless' childhood and extended it to the doorstep of adulthood. Somehow in our seemingly unprecedented attentiveness to our offspring, we have managed to squeeze youth transitions into a few short ceremonies called graduations and weddings. No longer are these events markers for long years of mingled experience with adults; the world has been divided and the generations "no longer stand in apprentice relation to each other." (EP Thompson, CUSTOMS, 1991). If you are doing work on the life-course, youth or childhood, household or family political economics, or some other area and you are interested in forming a panel for the Carelton Conference please write, e-mail, or call soon. The deadline for proposals is set for November 1, 1996. (216) 397-9836 3250 Berkshire Rd Cleveland Hts., OH 44118 pxr11@po.cwru.edu -- Patrick J. Ryan Ph.D. Candidate Department of History Case Western Reserve University
|