Reflections on Age as a Category of Historical Analysis

In: The Journal of the history of childhood and youth, Band 1, Heft 1, S. 91-94

Abstract

Steven Mintz lays out some of the complex ways age functions, both to describe expected processes of maturation and to allot legal statuses and categories of responsibility. Like other scholars, he likens the category of age to that of gender as a way to organize power, but points out that age has less definitional power than gender and has undergone more change over time as a prescriptive system. He sees age, paradoxically, as gaining power as a prescriptive system while gender loses it.-M.S.