• Epilogue
• Chapter
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• pp. 236-254
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Epilogue

Defining and explaining adolescence and reconciling the concepts of adolescence and femininity have engaged biomedical and social scientists from the mid-twentieth century to the present. This epilogue will highlight some of the most important contributions to the scientific discourse on adolescence and adolescent girlhood from 1930 onward. Recent aspects of the history of adolescence are, of course, worthy of full studies and have become a vibrant area of scholarly interest. The intent here is to show that the contested meanings of adolescence and female adolescence formulated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continue to inform scientific knowledge and broader cultural common sense about the teenage child, even as such meanings have been reworked in particular historical contexts marked by distinctive forms of social relations, cultural practices, and intellectual concerns.

As in the period from 1830 to 1930, the decades from the mid-twentieth century to the present have been marked by social, political, cultural, and economic changes that have shaped and been shaped by the experiences of boys and girls growing up. Many professionalized scientific experts have sought to understand, to explain, and to prescribe these experiences in various ways. Certainly, an important influence in young people’s lives throughout this period has been the growth of a mass consumer culture. As early as the 1920s, marketers and advertisers identified the “teenager” as a social category, with discrete needs and desires that could be satisfied by purchasing particular consumer goods. Historian Kelly Schrum demonstrates that white middle-class high school girls were the first young people marketers catered to; high school girls were not only models for certain attributes of adolescence but also were the “first teenagers.”¹

The commercial category of “teenager” and the scientific category “adolescence” intersect with and inform each other in ways scholars have just begun to probe. Marketers initially appealed to girls on the basis of contradictory attributes and behaviors that girls had been experimenting with for some time and that social scientists had endeavored to account for, contain, and legitimate: girls’ concern for their appearance, their interest in cultivating sex appeal, their susceptibility to influence by their peers, their longing to express themselves as individuals, their emotional volatility and vulnerability, and their intellectual capability. Juliet B. Schor, an economist and researcher of current commercial trends, argues, “Marketers took the psychology [of development] and reconceptualized the process of growing up as a process of learning to consume.” As marketers used the developmental paradigm throughout the twentieth century, they also further refined developmental stages, with such creations as “preteen” and “tween,” each with distinct physical, psychological, and behavioral characteristics. Marketers have also succeeded at undermining certain core tenets of the developmental paradigm in ways children’s rights advocates or critical developmental psychologists have not. Marketers have challenged the notion of the child’s growth into maturity as a slow, gradual process marked by innocence and dependence. They have pushed expectations for autonomous decision making (around consumer purchasing), self-expression, and worldly knowledge and pleasure into earlier stages of the life cycle. Marketers claim to offer children and teenagers new opportunities for independence and empowerment. What girls and boys have made of such opportunities, and what they have gained and lost in the process, interested scholars in both the sciences and the humanities during the second half of the twentieth century and has been a subject of ongoing cultural and political debates.²

From the 1930s through the 1950s, as the commercialized teenager came into its own and as attending high school became more widespread, the category of adolescence received renewed attention by scientists working in the interdisciplinary field of child development studies. Arnold Gesell and his colleagues at the Yale Clinic of Child Development and the Gesell Institute of Child Development (founded in 1950) further elaborated on the stage theory of growth, which continued to influence some child development experts and the public. Following his profiles of the normal infant, preschool, and school-aged child, Gesell arrived at the detailed exposition of the “intricate transitional years” of adolescence late in his career, with the 1956 publication of Youth: The Years from Ten to Sixteen.³ As in his work on the earlier stages of the child’s development, Gesell acknowledged the importance of each adolescent’s uniqueness and individuality, which he claimed was largely the product of genetic endowment, and of the role of environmental factors in “support[ing], inflect[ing], and modify[ing]” developmental progress. He also reasserted his predominating interest in the “underlying ground plan” of growth, which he deemed to be inherent in the species and the “prime causative force” of the “maturity traits” marking this period of life. On the one hand, Gesell’s meticulous accounting of the physical, mental, emotional, and social changes young people experienced during each year of this phase in the life cycle undermined some of the “loose, sweeping generalizations” about the adolescent epoch, particularly notions of its overwhelming turbulence and rebellious orientation. At certain moments during these years, Gesell assured, young people were capable of controlling their emotions and exhibiting a purposeful, rather than impulsive “spirit of independence.” On the other hand, by parsing out the qualities of adolescence in such an exacting way, Gesell further solidified their “characteristicness” and intensified expectations for their proper manifestation, in “obedience to [the] deep-seated laws and cycles” of development.⁴ With his emphasis on biologically driven maturation and standardized criteria for adolescents’ physical growth and mental development, Gesell both heightened and alleviated the anxiety of parents and teenagers concerned with measuring up to the normative characteristics of the adolescent stage. In an era in which deviance of any kind was highly suspect, his ideas appealed to parents seeking definitive answers about their adolescent children’s normality and explanations for their adolescents’ misbehavior in genetics or the vagaries of the developmental stage, rather than their own poor parenting.⁵

The findings recorded in Youth were based on cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of interviews with and examinations and measurements of eighty-three boys and eight-two girls from white middle-class New Haven families. In commenting on the homogeneity of the sample, Gesell averred that he and his colleagues “assumed that these sequences [of development] are not fortuitous and that they would show a significant relation to maturity levels and chronological age despite diversities in individuality.” The universality of such maturity levels was, nonetheless, compromised by “sex variations,” which Gesell deemed to be the “most far-reaching constitutional factor” distinguishing adolescents and “the whole of humanity.” Although Gesell cautioned that gender differences could “easily be overstated” and suggested that girls and boys “meet most stages of development in a highly comparable manner,” he also ascribed to adolescent girls and boys distinct masculine and feminine characteristics that comfortably reinforced dominant expectations for cold war gender roles, which emphasized male bread-winning and female homemaking.⁶ According to Gesell, girls matured faster, were more oriented toward domesticity, marriage, and motherhood, and were “more sensitive to moral and personal issues” than their brothers. Boys were more concerned about careers than girls and, most notably, emerged from their sixteenth year with a “sense of independence” and “self-assurance,” aptly poised to take on their “share of the world’s work.” Born as he was “with certain inalienable traits which are inherent in the very patterns of his development,” the boy achieved what the girl never quite managed to—becoming “an individual personality in his own right.” In keeping with his conformist sensibilities, Gesell also reminded his readers of the complex and paradoxical nature of individuality in a democracy: It could only be made manifest and preserved within the context of “obedience” to both natural laws and social rules and regulations. As an ideal primer for the 16-year-old boy, he recommended the “Code of Conduct for American Servicemen While Prisoners of War.” More than a military manual, Gesell contended, this “remarkable document” would acquaint adolescent boys with the “ideals and traditions” of the United States, serve as a “bulwark against enemy political indoctrination,” and help to fashion them into the sort of “loyal Americans” that their progression through the stages of development guaranteed for and required of them as they came of age.⁷

Gessell’s ideas were both challenged and reinforced by Lawrence K. Frank, another important figure who shaped the concept of adolescence in this period. Trained in economics, Frank served as associate director of the Laura Spellman Rockefeller Memorial in the 1920s and 1930s and played a crucial role in facilitating research in the science of normal child development and in popularizing this body of scientific knowledge among a wider public. His interest in adolescence was prompted in part by new social concerns about juvenile misbehavior at home during the Great Depression and World War II, as well as by the participation of adolescents in totalitarian movements abroad in the same period. During his tenure at the Rockefeller Memorial and other philanthropic organizations, a spate of longitudinal studies of adolescent growth and development were launched at Harvard, Yale, the University of Iowa, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and other child development institutes. These studies began with and reinforced many of the assumptions about adolescence promulgated by scientists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably that adolescence was a particularly consequential stage of the life cycle that was important both to the individual and society and that the attributes and difficulties of the age resulted from some mix of biological and environmental influences.⁸

Frank’s own writings on adolescence emphasized anew that the primary mandate of the adolescent stage of life was individualization and also furthered the links established in both Hall’s evolutionary theory and Mead’s cultural anthropology between adolescent independence and the ongoing advancement of modern society. Departing from Gesell, Frank insisted that adolescents not be forced into blind obedience of their parents’ values or way of life because parents’ values would be rendered obsolete in a society advancing toward greater democracy and expanded scientific knowledge. He therefore praised the peer culture for enabling adolescents to rebel against such conventions, while also keeping the centrifugal forces of individualism in check. Nonetheless, he recognized that the pressure for adolescents to fit into the peer group, which was often sanctioned by parents, posed problems as well. His hope was that parents, teachers, and medical and psychological professionals would encourage adolescents to honor their individual differences and to adjust, without obliterating, their unique capacities and perspectives to the spectrum of thought and behavior considered “normal.”⁹

Both Frank and the child development researchers involved in the longitudinal studies modeled the individualizing adolescent after the white middle-class boy. These were the adolescents, in Frank’s scheme, who were to be given the most latitude in rebelling against stagnant adult conventions and who would guarantee the ongoing success of American democracy and scientific innovation. Like Gesell, Frank and the child development researchers set gendered parameters around such boys’ ability to deviate from the norm, worrying over adolescent boys who did not conform to masculine standards of physical prowess and flagging delayed puberty as a distinctly male developmental problem. However, for girls, the clash between the individuated adolescent ideal and compliance to female gender roles was more pronounced. In the face of a new round of threats to women’s domestic roles during the Depression and the Second World War and under the growing influence of a particularly virulent antifeminist strain of Freudian theory, Frank and the child development researchers worried about girls who went through puberty too early and who did not meet what they deemed to be appropriate physical and behavioral standards of femininity.¹⁰ Such standards were, indeed, modern, in that adolescent girls were expected to be physically appealing, sociable, popular, and exuberant. Lost to Frank’s and Gesell’s analyses were the links made by such thinkers as Parsons, Hollingworth, and Mead between the adolescent girl’s capacity for individualization and the potential for fundamental social change or, conversely, by Hall, Addams, and Blanchard between such change and the transformative possibilities of the more traditional virtues of femininity.

Erik H. Erikson advanced a complicated gender perspective and arguably made the most important contributions to ideas about adolescence during the mid-twentieth century. Erikson’s biographers connect his early life with the concept of the identity crisis, with which he is so prominently associated. Erikson was born in 1902 in Germany to a single mother from a prominent Jewish Danish family and a biological father, most likely a Danish Gentile, whom he never knew. He was somewhat ambivalently adopted by the German Jewish pediatrician his mother married when he was 3 years old. As his biographer Lawrence J. Friedman notes, Erikson eventually recognized that “his whole childhood involved learning to navigate borders—between Judaism and Christianity; Denmark and Germany; mother, stepfather, and biological father.” Following his years as a markedly unhappy student of classical literature and languages at the Karlsruhe gymnasium, where he graduated in 1920, he spent the next seven years studying art and “wandering” through Germany and Italy. In 1927, at the behest of his former classmate and friend Peter Blos, he traveled to Vienna, where he trained in psychoanalysis with Anna Freud, a pioneer in the field of child analysis; became acquainted with some of the concepts of early ego psychology, as propounded by Anna Freud and fellow psychoanalysts Heinz Hartmann, Wilhelm Reich, and Paul Federn; completed a teaching degree in Montessori education; and taught at the Heitzing School, an experimental institution that brought psychoanalytic principles and work to bear on children’s education.¹¹ This rich environment enabled Erikson to further develop a theme he had begun to formulate in his early twenties, before he was familiar with Sigmund Freud’s ideas or studied with Anna Freud, and that would become the central intellectual concern of his career—the interaction between children’s inner emotional life and outer social worlds as they moved through the stages of the life cycle. In the face of political turmoil in central Europe and his growing disillusionment with the Vienna psychoanalytic community, whose members were largely uninterested in what he would eventually refer to as his “configurational approach” to the understanding of the human personality, Erikson and his family immigrated to the United States in 1933. In the years before the publication of his first book, Childhood and Society, in 1950, he developed his career as a child analyst, researcher, lecturer, and writer and cultivated professional, intellectual, and personal relationships with the most important figures in child development studies in the United States, including William Healy, Lawrence Frank, and Margaret Mead.¹²

Childhood and Society comprises a collection of essays revised from Erikson’s writings, published and unpublished, of the late 1930s and 1940s. Several of his chapters—including those on childhood among the Sioux and Yurok American Indian tribes, the “legends” of Adolf Hitler’s and Maxim Gorky’s childhood and youth, and “the American identity”—reflected the influence of the culture and personality school of thought on his work and contributed to the studies of national character that occupied many prominent behavioral and social scientists during and after World War II. Other chapters drew on psychoanalytic theory and Erikson’s own clinical work to take thinking about child development in innovative new directions, most notably by recasting Freud’s psychosexual developmental stages into biopsychosocial stages; extending these across the life cycle, from infancy into old age; and giving more attention to the role of the normally developing ego in autonomously facilitating connections between the inner emotions and external social conditions.¹³

These essays elaborate on the importance of establishing identity for the human personality, a task that Erikson depicted, somewhat contradictorily, as occupying the individual throughout the life cycle, while reaching its point of most crucial achievement during adolescence. Identity, as Erikson defined it, was “the accrued experience of the ego’s ability to integrate … [childhood] identifications with the vicissitudes of the libido, with the aptitudes developed out of endowment, and with the opportunities offered in social roles.” As with the other polarities that the ego struggled to resolve during development (trust vs. basic mistrust, autonomy vs. shame and doubt, etc.), identity was wrested out of a conflict with its opposite—role diffusion. In Nazi Germany, the inability of wayward male youth to resolve their identity crises successfully made them susceptible to Hitler’s enticements toward militarism and racial hatred and helped to explain the Führer’s rise to power. In the increasingly industrialized and standardized society of the United States, adolescents in Erikson’s adopted country faced a similar danger of losing their individual identities and succumbing to conformist pressures, if not of authoritarian demagogues than of a technological and bureaucratic social organization. Mitigating such danger in Erikson’s analysis, however, was the historic promise of America to sustain possibilities for choice, opportunity, dynamism, and tolerance in individual and social life. While Erikson did not always adequately recognize the intellectual influences that contributed to the formulation of his concept of identity, he also expressed some concern that popularizers too facilely credited him with originality. Childhood and Society garnered attention from midcentury cultural critics, socially concerned academics, and, following the highly successful publication of a revised paperback college textbook edition in 1963, college students who were worried about threats to individual selfhood in a technological and bureaucratic American society. We know, too, that Erikson’s ideas resonated with a long history of ideas about adolescence in American thought—about the challenges and possibilities that made this stage unique in modern society, about this stage of life as a period of personality integration and individualization, and about the importance of adolescent adjustment to the social progress, freedom, and democracy of western civilization.¹⁴

Erikson expanded on the themes in Childhood and Society in subsequent works, including his biographies of Martin Luther and Gandhi, Insight and Responsibility, and Identity: Youth and Crisis. In these writings, he prominently associated the identity crisis, and the adolescent stage of the life cycle, with male development. He assumed the normativeness of the boy’s development and, relying on Freudian orthodoxy, depicted the developing girl as different and deficient because she lacked a penis. Determined by her biological imperative to mother, he explained, the girl faced a narrower range of identity options that precluded her from fully engaging in autonomous, active self or social creation. Moreover, once the girl became a woman, she often acted as a foil to the boy’s achievement of individualism, as mothers served as the primary vehicle through which the conformist expectations of the older generation were conveyed to children.¹⁵

Such indictments of femininity notwithstanding, however, Erikson also saw himself as construing a model of development that was congenial to girls and women and that valorized the essential female strengths of nurturance, generosity, and empathy. In his essay, “Inner and Outer Space: Reflections on Womanhood,” in which he reported on his findings about sexual difference from observing the play of boys and girls participating in a child guidance study at the University of California, he outlined a “post-Freudian position” on female development that demanded that “feminine ego-strength be studied and defined in its own right.” Here, Erikson grounded the establishment of female identity on “the existence of a productive inner bodily space,” which he now claimed had “a reality [for the developing girl] superior to that of the missing organ” of the penis. In doing so, he perpetuated a long tradition of thought about the auspiciousness of female developmental difference that had been expressed by scientists and intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More immediately, he drew on the ideas of mid-twentieth-century psychoanalytic psychologist Helene Deutsch, who located women’s capacity for sexual pleasure, psychological health, and personal fulfillment in the distinctive attributes of the female body and its unique role in reproduction. Longstanding struggles to reconcile expectations for femininity and adolescence and his own configurational approach to development, however, also required Erikson to qualify his biological determinism. He thus characterized adolescence as a period of “psychosocial moratorium” from adult activities in the girl as well as the boy, during which she was “relatively freer from the tyranny of the inner space” (compared with the stages of childhood or adult womanhood) and could pursue identities as an individual “somebody” in political and economic life. In the case of male and female alike, he conceded, “anatomy, history, and personality are our combined destiny.” Even so, the “reality” of the “inner space” exerted an influence over the girl’s development that in one way or another, she was ultimately unable to deny. “ [A] true moratorium,” Erikson remarked, “must have a term and a conclusion: womanhood arrives when attractiveness and experience have succeeded in selecting what is to be admitted to the custody of the inner space ‘for keeps.’”¹⁶

Erikson’s allusions to girls closed in by their inner space, at best, or tyrannized by it, at worst, conveyed the message that female development was both different from and inferior to male development. In addition to insisting that the girl’s honoring of her inner space was essential for her own psychological well being, though, he also proclaimed that society needed the feminine virtues that female bodily experience made possible. In place of “ruthless self-aggrandizement,” he declared, mid-twentieth-century America required “new kinds of social inventions and … institutions which guard and cultivate that which nurses and nourishes, cares and tolerates, includes and preserves.” He also entertained the possibility that boys and men were not precluded by biology from adopting such maternal values.¹⁷ Indeed, the fundamental premise of Erikson’s developmental scheme was that the individual’s sense of self across the life cycle arose out of reciprocity and mutuality with his or her immediate caretakers and the larger social world. This interdependence made possible the other overlapping achievements of development—intimacy, generativity, and ego integrity—from infancy to old age.

Whatever Erikson’s intended meanings, the complexities and ambivalences in his thinking about gender exposed him to a range of (mis)interpretations by both supporters and critics. Many popularizers and synthesizers of his work ignored both his emphasis on the centrality of interdependence in development and his interest in female development to reduce the realization of identity at adolescence to the achievement of atomistic individualism, a capacity most often associated with boys. Meanwhile, in the context of the second wave of women’s rights activism of the 1960s and 1970s, liberal feminists issued harsh indictments of Erikson’s alleged Freudian-inspired biological determinism and his justifications for women’s position of social inequality, emphasizing instead, as some feminists had in the past, the similarities in the developmental mandates and capacities of boys and girls. He fared little better with the emergence of the cultural feminists in the mid-1970s, whose valorization of female difference actually had much in common with his own rendition of the inner space. It was in part Erikson’s purported conception of identity formation as a function of separation that spurred Carol Gilligan, his former teaching assistant and an architect of female adolescence in the late twentieth century, to formulate her own theory of female development that emphasized the role of relationship in the life of the adolescent girl.¹⁸

Other developmental thinkers contributed to mid-twentieth-century thinking about adolescence. Most notably, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who garnered intense interest among American psychologists in the 1950s, proposed a biologically based theory of cognitive development, which asserted that at adolescence the developing child became capable of abstract thought and logical reasoning. He also offered a related theory of moral development, which posited that morality developed in phases and was a function of moral reasoning over behavioral response. American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg further expounded a cognitive developmental view of morality. Kohlberg mostly focused on the phases of morality that developed with the capacity of hypothetical thought, that is, during or after adolescence.¹⁹ Anna Freud, who was a frequent visitor, lecturer, and teacher in the United Stages from the 1950s until her death in 1982, offered a psychoanalytic account of the developing child that exclusively emphasized biology as the primary cause of the storm and stress of the teenage years. She maintained that because of the emergence of the genital drive at puberty, which entailed both quantitative and qualitative changes in the “libido economy,” the equilibrium between the id, ego, and superego normally attained in early childhood was inexorably upset, causing emotional disturbances and dramatic changes in behavior. Rhetorically posing the “ever-recurrent question” about “whether the adolescent upheaval is welcome and beneficial as such, whether it is necessary, and more than that, inevitable,” she answered affirmatively on all counts. In responding to the new anxieties raised by the change in sex drive, the ego experimented with new defenses, the most important of which was the adolescent’s “breaking of the tie” with the love objects of childhood—the parents. The adolescent accomplished this by affiliating with peers who offered alternative ways to think and behave and provided appropriate partners with whom to establish heterosexual adjustment. Freud’s view was challenged at midcentury by several studies that revealed that many “normal” young people did not reject parental values at adolescence and also that many parents encouraged the development of independence in their adolescent children. Even so, she certainly had the weight of history behind her. Freud echoed Hall’s acceptance of the adolescent sensibility as essentially “inconsistent and unpredictable.” She also joined numerous other thinkers in the past and present, including Parsons, Mead, Hollingworth, and Erikson, in asserting that wresting out independence from members of an older generation who were not especially eager to confer it was the primary challenge of adolescent development and, indeed, the only way for the child to attain maturity and truly “grow up.”²⁰

These ideas continued to be synthesized, interpreted, elaborated on, and applied during the mid-twentieth century by an array of professional experts in mental hygiene, child guidance, and child psychology. Beginning in the 1950s, they were joined by another group of scientific professionals devoted specifically to the care of the adolescent body and mind—physicians in the newly formulated adolescent medicine specialty. As historian Heather Munro Prescott explains, adolescent medicine emerged out of heightening scientific and cultural concern about the adolescent stage of life, as well as the efforts of mid-twentieth-century pediatricians to expand the scope of their field. The first institution devoted to adolescent health was the Adolescent Unit at Boston’s Children’s Hospital, founded in 1951. The unit was headed by J. Roswell Gallagher, M.D., who before his appointment to Boston Children’s Hospital served as the director of health services at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for fourteen years. At both institutions, Gallagher provided clinical treatment for his patients, conducted research into their growth and development, and published his findings in both major scientific journals and popular magazines and advice manuals, hereby establishing his reputation as a midcentury national authority on adolescence.²¹

Claiming that physicians such as himself were better attuned to the needs of the whole child than the child psychiatrists who headed up child guidance clinics, Gallagher marketed the Adolescent Unit to parents by lauding its attention to the emotional, behavioral, and physical problems—and the complex relationship among them—of their adolescent children. Such an approach appealed to parents who sought an “uncomplicated biomedical solution for their children’s problems” that did not indict their child-rearing capabilities. Yet, Gallagher’s clinical approach and intellectual contributions resisted both biological reductionism and the primacy of parental needs and points of view. Along with Mead, Frank, Erikson, and Anna Freud, he endorsed the predominant view among developmental thinkers at midcentury that individualization (whether necessitated by biology or culture) was the most important task of the adolescent stage of life. Like Piaget, he also believed that adolescents had the mental capacity to understand and to decide their own medical care. Even so, Gallagher’s critique of conformity and support of adolescent independence, as with other developmental thinkers of the period, was limited by his concomitant reinforcement of cold war era gender roles. Thus, when he treated female patients and when he wrote about female development, he was mostly concerned with helping adolescent girls achieve appropriate “feminine role identification,” which entailed that girls accept their “natural” inclination toward protecting their sexual virtue, caring for their physical appearance, and assuming the roles of wife and mother in the private home.²²

With the second wave of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s, such buttressing of conventional expectations for femininity came under heated attack by feminist intellectuals, both within and outside the purview of the biomedical and social sciences.²³ Psychologist Carol Gilligan issued the most important challenge to midcentury conceptions of female adolescence. Gilligan was born in 1936 into a family that cultivated her interests in music, language, and literature. Her childhood home was also one that fostered awareness of the importance of human connection and of social responsibility. “I grew up … during the Holocaust,” she explains,” with refugees from Europe constantly through the house, and so the sense of what you have to value, and how people help one another, and how that’s key to survival, and people don’t live alone—that was all part of my childhood.” Gilligan studied literature at Swarthmore College and graduated with a doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 1964, where she was schooled in midcentury experts’ ideas about female development. After a brief respite from academia, she went on to teach at Harvard and eventually became one of a small number of women faculty members to be tenured at that institution.²⁴ Her first book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, examined the moral “judgment and action” of males and females at various points in the life cycle in several situations of “moral conflict and choice.” Taking on both Erik Erikson and her mentor Lawrence Kohlberg, who deemed adolescent boys and men more capable of exercising the supreme moral power of abstract judgment, she argued that girls and women made moral decisions and achieved a sense of self “through [their] relationship with others.” Furthermore, the “quality of embeddedness in social interaction and personal relationships” that differently marked girls’ and women’s lives was, Gilligan proposed, as important in human development, if not more so, as men’s achievements of separation, individuation, and sense of impartial justice.²⁵

Following the feminist sociologist Nancy Chodorow, Gilligan argued that the distinctive developmental paths of boys and girls emerged out of the differences in each sex’s pre-Oedipal relationship with the mother. At adolescence, she went on to explain, “when identity and intimacy converge in dilemmas of conflicting commitment,” the boy’s orientation toward “self-expression” and the girl’s toward “self-sacrifice” gave rise to quite distinctive developmental problems—for the former, “a problem of human connection” and for the latter “a problem of truth.” Gilligan asserted that the association she was making between women and relationship was “not absolute” and that the “contrasts between male and female voices” that she observed in her research were presented “to focus a problem of interpretation rather than to represent a generalization about either sex.” In addition, she also identified as the central paradox of human development the “truths” that “we know ourselves as separate only insofar as we live in connection with others, and … we experience relationship only insofar as we differentiate other from self.”²⁶ These caveats and nuances notwithstanding, however, Gilligan’s text played a pivotal role in launching the sensibility, intellectual standpoint, and politics of a cultural feminism that above all else valorized girls’ and women’s distinct and superior capacity for care, compassion, and connection. It also revitalized a scientific and cultural debate about female adolescence that had not been so vigorously engaged since the turn of the twentieth century.

Gilligan continued to develop the themes of a distinctive and valuable relational female morality and sense of identity through her role as a founding member of the Harvard Project on the Psychology of Women and Girls’ Development during the 1980s and 1990s. This feminist collective carried out several research studies employing a “relational approach to psychological inquiry” that entailed listening to the voices of girls from varying socioeconomic backgrounds—ranging from “at-risk” girls at an urban public high school to privileged girls attending the prestigious Emma Willard School in Troy, New York. The result was a spate of publications by Gilligan and her colleagues that focused on the problems and possibilities that the girl’s distinctive developmental orientation posed for her at adolescence. Gilligan was already well known inside of and outside of academic and scientific circles because of the phenomenal success of In a Different Voice. She now achieved national celebrity, with Time magazine naming her one of the twenty-five most influential people in the United States in 1996.²⁷ In Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationship, Gilligan and fellow researchers Jill Taylor McLean and Amy M. Sullivan summed up the Harvard Project’s fundamental conclusion about female adolescence. “At adolescence,” they argued, “a shift takes place for many girls as they experience a relational impasse and a developmental crisis. To be in relationship at this juncture often jeopardizes ‘relationship.’” Faced with the challenge of both conforming to the standard of adult femininity for “selflessness” and achieving the standard of maturity for “separation and independence,” adolescent girls found themselves in a lose-lose situation. On the one hand, the authentic relationships they knew in childhood were compromised by new requirements of adult femininity that they please and serve others. On the other hand, the possibility for any relationship was undermined by expectations that they become autonomous individuals “entire unto themselves.” Being in this position potentially gave rise to tremendous stress, confusion, and unhappiness in adolescent girls, putting them at risk for various psychological and social difficulties. Yet, McLean, Taylor, and Gilligan insisted, if psychological researchers such as themselves and society were to attend to girls’ capacity for resilience and resistance in the face of their unique developmental challenge, a more humane society might at last be born. “The margins,” they asserted, “can also offer a potentially transformative perspective on institutional and social norms, beliefs, and practices—an epistemological privilege that allows for an awareness and critique of standards of behavior or attitudes that diminish, demean, or disempower individuals or groups.” In reflecting on the girls’ voices she listened to at the Emma Willard School, Gilligan pondered how such girls might have, more simply, conceived of their relationship to fundamental social change. “What would happen,” she imagined them wondering, “if what was inside of us were to enter the world?”²⁸

Certainly, the work of Gilligan and her colleagues took a pioneering approach to the study of female adolescence. Indeed, no other scientific researchers in the past expressed such a deeply moral respect for their subjects, reflected so critically on their own role as producers of psychological knowledge, or made such forceful connections between the problems and possibilities of girls’ development and the psychological and social empowerment of women. Even so, certain continuities with the past are worth noting as well. Most obviously, members of the Harvard Project built on a long tradition in scientific thought about girls’ and women’s greater capacity for connectedness and their corresponding superior morality, a perspective that has been employed by as many conservative thinkers as progressive ones. More subtly, perhaps, Gilligan and her colleagues were not the first to discover that girls faced a conflict between “love and ambition” at adolescence. Nor were they even the first feminist psychologists to suggest that an interdependent female self was a model for human development that had the potential to remake the world.

Much of the criticism of Gilligan’s work has fallen out along some familiar lines, as well.²⁹ One group of critics includes feminist psychologists and intellectuals who take issue with both Gilligan’s research methods and her conclusions. Their concern is that her conception of female development is essentialist in that it posits the existence of an “authentic” self before the influence of social forces and that it presumes women’s inherent and unchanging difference from men. “Imagine, if you will,” Carol Tarvis proposes, “that femininity is fragmented, messy or haphazard rather than coherent and authentic. Or that the expression of identity is a contingent and temporary business rather than a matter of finding one’s true self. Or that femininity is a kind of ongoing project which has to be ongoingly constructed through social interaction rather than an object to be discovered, suppressed, or lost. In other words, femininity is a social construction rather than a psychological entity.”³⁰ These critics also contend that despite some attention to the categories of race and class, Gilligan’s work reifies gender difference as the fundamental distinguishing characteristic between human subjects. Moreover, these critics claim, although Gilligan attributes the greater female capacity to care to the different ways girls and boys are mothered in early childhood, she does not adequately attend to the larger context of social conditions and power relationships within which the different female voice, insofar as it exists, emerges. Like Hollingworth, Pruette, and Mead, such feminist researchers and thinkers maintain that boys and girls are more similar than not in their developmental capacities and mandates and that what differences do exist are the product of socialization.

Meanwhile, other critics charge that Gilligan’s portrait of girlhood is overly optimistic and sentimentalized. Indeed, some of her colleagues have begun to investigate girls’ capacity for anger, aggression, emotional cruelty, and pleasure-seeking sexuality and to study how, why, and with what effects such inclinations develop during childhood and adolescence. Although such tendencies certainly did not go unnoticed in the past, by thinkers ranging from Hall and Freud to Blanchard and Pruette, the current round of research offers up a decidedly critical feminist analysis of them, variously interpreting them as a dangerous product of or an empowering challenge to the values and relations of patriarchy shaping contemporary society.³¹ Finally, many of Gilligan’s critics worry that the far-reaching effect that her paradigm (or more reductive popular versions of it) has had on ideas and practices in psychotherapy, education, the law, and business will ultimately hurt girls and women’s opportunities to achieve full economic, political, and social equality in the twenty-first century.

Another group of critics claims that Gilligan’s research has done a deep disservice to boys, by eclipsing the particular developmental challenges they face in growing up, ignoring their own capacity and need for connectedness with others, devaluing their uniquely male qualities and capacities, and requiring them to conform to a “feminized” standard for moral, emotional, and social development. Such concerns resonate with earlier developmental thinking. In the 1870s, Mary Putnam Jacobi and other critics of Clarke sought to counterbalance the exclusive focus on the girl’s development by turning their attention to the physical, mental, and emotional vulnerabilities the boy experienced during his own “epoch of development.” The closing decades of the nineteenth century then witnessed a heightened interest in the civilized boy’s growth into manhood, a process most thoroughly explored by G. Stanley Hall. By valorizing the masculine traits of virility and self-control, decrying against the effeminate influences pervading civilized society, and holding girls up as a model for some of the moral and emotional qualities he admired, Hall actually presaged the range of contributions that composes the contemporary discourse on male development.

As in the past, what literary scholar Kenneth B. Kidd calls the “new boyolgy” owes much to broader cultural anxiety about an imperiled white middle-class masculinity, as expressed in the contemporary men’s movement, and to current conceptions of female development. Some architects of the “new boylogy,” including psychologists William S. Pollack, Dan Kindlon, Michael Thompson, and Eli H. Newberger, acknowledge their indebtedness to Gilligan’s work and proclaim an interest in taking it in new directions, rather than rejecting it, or its feminist principles, outright. By doing so, they end up reinforcing the notion that boys and girls are fundamentally different (with these differences rooted in both nature and nurture), while also claiming that boys have a similar need to have their voices heard and to develop their own moral and emotional capacities for relationship with others. Drawing on Chodorow and Gilligan, these psychologists maintain that boys’ capacity for intimacy is threatened long before their adolescence, when in early childhood the imperative to establish a masculine self requires them to separate from the close emotional bonds established with their mothers. Thus, they contend, helping boys understand and express the range of feelings that make up their emotional lives, especially their longing to care for and be cared for by others, must be addressed from an early age.³²

Other contemporary boyologists, such as psychologist Michael Gurian and cultural critic Christina Hoff Sommers, virulently denounce this feminist perspective on boys’ development, rejecting any claims that deny essential differences between boys and girls. Boys must not be raised or educated in the same manner as girls, they argue, but rather must be allowed to express their innate capacities for energy, independence, and wildness, qualities that place them in a position of opposition to and power over all that is feminine within themselves and in the broader social world.³³ The important differences among them notwithstanding, all of these boyologists deem white middle-class boys to be in a state of crisis, at risk of academic failure, low self-esteem, identity confusion, depression, suicide, drug abuse, and delinquency. If ignored, they warn, such a condition can only portend the direst consequences for such boys and the society in which they are coming of age. The literature on male development intimates that such consequences are worse than the effects experienced by boys living under conditions of racism and poverty, whose experiences boyologists largely ignore. The literature also suggests that such boys’ problems are worse than the developmental crisis faced by their white middle-class sisters, which boyologists once again envision alternatively as a model for and foil to the boy’s own, while also finally determining it to be one of less personal and cultural significance.³⁴

A final response to Gilligan’s work has arisen from a group of developmental psychologists influenced by postmodern critical theory. The task of these scholars, psychologist Erica Burman explains, is to expose the developmental paradigm as “a modern, Western construction,” whose theory and practice is suffused with “inequality and differential treatment on the basis of class, culture, gender, age and sexuality.” In their scheme, Gilligan’s reconceptualization of female development does not go far enough because it continues to operate within the terms of the paradigm that it seeks to challenge. As Valerie Walkerdine insists, “Other stories which have been the object of domination through their incorporation into schemes of pathologization cannot be spoken within a developmental framework.” The solution she is proposing, then, is not merely the “tacking [of] difference onto a developmental model,” for “that ship is holed below the water line.” Rather, it is to provide “specific concrete and local analyses” of how subjects are constituted through “discursive practices,” resulting in “[s]tories about change and transformation” that are not reductive, essentialist, universalizing, hierarchical, or relativist. Such an approach, Walkerdine and Burman promise, offers up a radical alternative to what they deem to be the oppressed and oppressive modern subject, which has been constituted through a developmental paradigm that privileges individualism, reason, progress, and the nature/nurture dualism at the expense of what they consider to be more morally sustainable ways of being and knowing in the world.³⁵

This study of the early invention of the category of female adolescence draws from this critical approach to provide some further historical explanation for how the norms for adolescent development were established and authorized by physicians, psychologists, and anthropologists working within and participating in the formulation of the developmental paradigm in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States. One of the goals here has been to show that ideas about the white middle-class girl were quite important for that process. Beginning with the nineteenth-century physicians involved in the health reform movement through the contributions of Margaret Mead in the field of cultural anthropology, thinkers and scientists took up the problem of female development as an object of particular concern, hereby giving rise to the figure of “the adolescent girl” and helping to formulate the modern concept of adolescence. Efforts by these thinkers to reconcile the concepts of femininity and adolescence went a long way in contributing to the constitution of the modern subject as described by contemporary critical developmental psychologists. It was also, however, at that very juncture where expectations for adolescence and femininity did not quite fit together that the hegemony of the developmental paradigm was sometimes questioned and the limits of developmental orthodoxy probed. Whether the ongoing project of issuing such a critique ought to come from within the developmental paradigm or only can only be effective from “beyond” or outside of it is unclear. However, Erica Burman is correct: It is worth pursuing one of the promises of the developmental framework held out by several of the thinkers explored in this book—that we can sustain a mode of thinking through which we might imagine “how we can create, and can become, the people who can bring about and can inhabit a very different world.”³⁶