Table Of ContentYouth and History
Tradition and Change in European Age Relations,
7770- Present
Expanded Student Edition
JOHN R. GILLIS
Livingston College
Rutgers, The State University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
@
ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
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Cover illustrations: (top): The Greenwich Hospital School, 1855
(Permission of the National Maritime Museum, London); (bottom):
A selection from Honore-Victorin Daumier's "Alarms and Alarmists"
series (1848) from Plate 40, "The Dangerous Children," published in
Howard P. Vincent, Daumier and His World (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern
University Press, 1968).
Appreciation is expressed for permission to reprint selections
from Chapter VII of Bohemian vs. Bourgeois: French Society
and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century, by
Cesar Grana, © 1964 by Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, New York.
COPYRIGHT © 1981, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
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ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
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United Kingdom Edition published by
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Gillis, John R.
Youth and history.
(Studies in social discontinuity)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Youth—Europe—History. 2. Adolescence. I. Title.
II. Series.
HQT96.G51U 1931 305.2'3f09 81-7919
ISBN 0-12-7Ô5264-6 AACR2
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
91 92 93 94 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
In Memory of Randall Gillis
Preface
This book is dedicated to the proposition that youth makes
its own history, a history linked with and yet analytically separable
from that of the family, the school, and other adult institutions with
which it is usually associated. For more than 80 years now, ever since
the child study movement began in Europe and America, youth has
been the object of investigation by psychologists, sociologists, and,
most recently, historians. Yet, up to now, research has dealt less with
youth's own response to change and more with the educational,
penal, and welfare institutions that are supposed to be the agents of
its transformation.1 Youth's own role in creating the social and cul
tural forms that we associate with the part of the life cycle that spans
childhood and adulthood remains obscure; and so, too, do the "tra
ditions of youth," David Matza's term for the patterns of behavior
and styles of thought that have characterized the age group over long
periods of time and which demonstrate the historicity of youth and
its value systems. "Tradition" is a particularly useful term precisely
because it suggests that any explanation of youthful behavior at a
given point in time must take into account not only social and eco
nomic structures but the previous historical experience of the age
group, as an independent variable with a dynamic of its own.2
The very fact that many of the traditions of youth that we treat as
contemporary—student radicalism, bohemianism, gang behavior, de
linquency—can be traced back at least 200 years provides incentive
1 For a review of four recent books on the history of American youth that fall into
this category, see Gillis, "Youth and History."
2 Matza, "Subterranean Traditions."
/X
X Preface
to the historian interested in questions of continuity as well as change.
But it is also the opportunity to probe the causes of various forms and
values and to try to account for their rise and fall in terms of certain
key demographic and economic variables that provides motivation
for this kind of study. To identify the origins of the modern traditions
of youth requires that the history of the age group be related to that
of broader societal structures and values. These shape the situations
to which young people respond as they assess their passage to adult
hood; and as these change, so too do the traditions that youth creates
and sustains in its own interests. Parental expectations, economic op
portunities, conditions of education and leisure—all these affect the
way youth plots its social, economic, and cultural strategies. As the
history of the past two centuries amply demonstrates, demographic
and economic conditions have been primary factors in shaping the
historical phases through which the traditions of youth have passed
since the eighteenth century. As mortality and fertility rates have
changed, and the conditions of industrialization and urbanization
have altered, young persons have been confronted with a series of
different situations affecting the duration and character of that seg
ment of the life cycle which bridges childhood and adulthood. Be
cause the same factors have simultaneously affected the perceptions
and reactions of adults, we are dealing here with a history that oper
ates on two distinct levels, however. On one hand, there are those
expectations of youthful behavior that are established by adults in the
home, the school, and the workplace. On the other, there are the
youth groups themselves, sustained by their own independent tradi
tions, acting from habits and values that are sometimes closely aligned
with adult interests, at other times in opposition to them.
If the history of youth is to be written, it must focus on that inter
face where the expectations of the young and those of their elders
interact in a dynamic manner. The task is further complicated, how
ever, by the fact that at any point in time the demographic and eco
nomic experiences of differently situated class and status groups are
also so varied. Differences in the life cycles both between and within
major social classes have contributed substantially to the dynamics of
European age relations since the eighteenth century. Chapters 2 and 3
explore the emergence of separate working-class and middle-class
traditions of youth; Chapter 4 traces the conflict between these tradi
tions, as it was institutionalized in the academic and extracurricular
cultures of the early twentieth century.
Social history cannot be separated from institutional history, but
the latter must not be allowed to obscure the existence of those
autonomous traditions of youth that are associated with class, ethnic-
Preface XI
ity, and locality. A purely functional approach should also be avoided,
for it, too, ignores the age group's sense of connectedness with its
own past and thus vastly underestimates the historical sources of
moral and social authority that, quite apart from adult sanctions,
shape youthful behavior. Restoring youth to its own history is a com
plicated task, not only because we must deal with different levels of
historical reality—the personal, the group, the societal—but because
each of the major phases in the history of youth since 1770 has pro
duced a unique layer of tradition which continues to affect the pres
ent.3 The historian must operate much like an archeologist as he at
tempts to discover the different strata of behavior and connect each
to its historical orgins; and he must also use the tools of the demogra
pher and sociologist in explaining how changing social conditions
have caused these traditions to shift over time. Yet, none of these
methods is complete in and of itself if the feelings and perceptions
of those involved, the young themselves, are not given a primary
place in the historical investigation. For, however important the his
torical context may be, it is the consciousness of the young, de
termined in part by the past experiences of their age group, that has
determined the direction of change.
Clearly, any history of a largely anonymous group like youth re
quires methods different from those ordinarily employed. Because it
was important to capture the voices and faces of the young, as well
as those of the adults who claim to speak in their name, I have chosen
to work on two levels, the national and the local, in order to research
the whole spectrum of society. Two university towns with similar
characteristics, Oxford and Göttingen, were the locations of intensive
research during the year 1969-1970. This was combined with work
on a national scale in both England and Germany, for the purpose
of isolating those general trends that span cultural boundaries. The
findings presented in this volume reflect more intensive use of Eng
lish materials, if only because the kinds of demographic and eco
nomic materials I wished to use are more abundant there than in
Germany. The history of German youth, particularly the middle class,
differs in important ways from that of its English counterpart, but,
on the whole, similarities in the timing and sequence of youth groups
and cultures in the two countries support the notion that the history
of youth in Europe has everywhere moved along the broad lines laid
down by economic and demographic modernization.
3 A model for the psychohistory of youth, a dimension which is excluded in this
study, is discussed in Keniston, "Psychological Development."
x/7 Preface
"Modernization," as it is used here, is not to be equated with
"progress." I use it only as a convenient covering term for the gen
eral direction of change that has been occurring since the middle of
the eighteenth century, of which the history of youth is an integral
part. The major turning points of youth's history have coincided with
the important economic and demographic transformations of the past
200 years, transformations that have strongly affected every major
social institution, including the family. I have attempted here to use
the fruits of the demographers' labors, supplemented by my own
social research, to establish the conditions under which children have
come into the world, how these children have been treated once
part of a family, and how they have coped with those social and
economic situations imposed on them by birth into a particular class
or status group. The conditions confronting the young have varied
enormously in accordance with such things as family size and class
situation. The more closely their history is interwoven with both eco
nomic and demographic factors, the more concrete and understand
able it becomes.
I have also attempted here to explore the ways the traditions of
youth have interacted with the political history of the past two cen
turies. Abstracted too much from this more conventional type of nar
rative, social history is always in danger of losing its significance and
interest. It has not been my intention to open up yet another special
ized field of inquiry, but rather to demonstrate the integral nature of
the historical process. Readers will have to judge the success of this
effort by the degree to which this volume's treated matter contributes
to their understanding of their own fields. My hope is that social sci
entists will find insight into the origins and evolution of an age group
about whose contemporary structures and functions they are rela
tively well-informed, but whose historical dynamics they have almost
entirely neglected.4 As for my fellow historians, I offer the approach
used here as a possible starting point for further investigation of other
age groups, including the middle-aged and the elderly, whose past is,
at this point, at least as obscure as that of the younger age groups.
And, as this study is concerned mainly with the traditions of mascu
line youth, there is obviously work to be done on the traditions of
their feminine counterparts.
4 Most of the literature in the social sciences remains essentially ahistorical in its
approach, valuable for its structural-functional analysis of the young at various
points in time but ignoring almost entirely the dynamics of continuity and change.
For example, Eisenstadt, Generation to Generation; Parsons; Kingsley Davis; and
Gottlieb et al.
Acknowledgments
The research for this work, completed in Oxford and Göt
tingen during the academic year 1969-1970, was made possible by
the Rollins Bicentennial Preceptorship Fund of Princeton University.
I am particularly thankful to the Fellows of St. Antony's College
and their Dean, Theodore Zeldin, for making the months in Oxford
such enjoyable ones. Their hospitality was matched by that of the
officials of the Bodleian Library and the City of Oxford Library. Spe
cial permission to use unpublished records was generously granted
by the Clerk to the City Justices, the Education Department, and the
Town Clerk, Keeper of the Oxford City Muniments. Nuffield College
opened the G. D. H. Cole Papers to me, and I was helped greatly by
the generosity of individuals in charge of the archives of various pri
vate organizations, including Mr. George Springall and Mr. W. R.
Willis of the Scouts, Mr. DelNevo of the Y.M.C.A., and Dr. Willis
Bund, Dean of Balliol College. Mr. Thomas Dunn allowed me to use
the log books of St. Barnabas School, while Mr. F. S. Green graciously
shared his memories of a career in Oxford youth work, providing me
with unpublished material in his possession.
The officials of the Göttingen Stadtarchiv were no less helpful than
their Oxford counterparts; and Dr. Hans Wolf, Director of the Wan
dervogel archive at Burg Ludwigstein, was most energetic in his as
sistance. Frau Luebbecke of Reckershausen made our stay in the valley
of the Leine a delightful as well as profitable experience.
I regret I cannot mention all those who have listened at one time
or another to my rambling commentaries on social history. However,
I would like to express my special thanks to Charles Tilly, Joseph Kett,
Edward Shorter, James McLachlan, Dorothy Ross, John E. Talbott,
XIII
XIV Acknowledgments
Peter Steams, and Richard Andrews. I am indebted to those members
of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, Rutgers Uni
versity, and the Davis Seminar who have discussed parts of this work
in seminars over the past three years. Those who participated in the
Conference on the History of Youth, held at Princeton in April, 1971,
also provided constructive criticisms, as did the members of the So
cial History Croup at Rutgers. Last but not least in this bill of grati
tudes are the students of Livingston College, who responded with
tolerance and insight as this book unfolded in lecture and seminar.
It is my hope that they find something of themselves in these pages.
1
Like a Family and a Fraternity:
Youth in Preindustrial Europe
By the standards of today's biologically exacting vocabulary,
the language of age in preindustrial Europe is hopelessly vague. Even
as late as the eighteenth century, the French and German words
garçon and Knabe referred to boys as young as 6 and as old as 30 or
40. In part, such confusions stemmed from the fact that such terms
also denoted status or function, garçon meaning "servant" as well as
"boy." Even today, "lad" and "boy" still carry traces of this original
double meaning; and among Irish peasants it is still common to call
unmarried, propertyless men "boys," regardless of their age, because
this denotes their low status in a community where marriage and
inheritance mark one of the most important social boundaries. The
same holds for the American South, where the low status of blacks
is regularly reinforced by reference to them as "boys" or "girls,"
whatever their real ages may be. 1
Philippe Aries has argued from this linguistic evidence that pre
industrial Europe made no distinction between childhood and other
preadult phases of life. There was, he says, "an ambiguity between
childhood and adolescence on the one hand and the category known
as youth on the other. People had no idea of what we call adoles
cence, and the idea was a long time in taking shape." 2 Noting that
the Latin terms puer (child) and adolescens were used interchange
ably until the eighteenth century, and arguing that youth was wholly
1 Aries, pp. 25-29; Arensberg and Kimball, p. 55.
2 Aries, p. 29.
7
