Inventing Modern Adolescence: The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America

Sarah E. Chinn

Published by Rutgers University Press 2008

Inventing Modern Adolescence

The Children of Immigrants in Turn-of-the-Century America

Sarah E. Chinn

In the series Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

https://doi.org/10.36019/9780813545950

Overview
Contents

About this book

The 1960s are commonly considered to be the beginning of a distinct "teenage culture" in America. But did this highly visible era of free love and rock 'n' roll really mark the start of adolescent defiance? In Inventing Modern Adolescence Sarah E. Chinn follows the roots of American teenage identity further back, to the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. She argues that the concept of the "generation gap"—a stereotypical complaint against American teens—actually originated with the division between immigrant parents and their American-born or -raised children. Melding a uniquely urban immigrant sensibility with commercialized consumer culture and a youth-oriented ethos characterized by fun, leisure, and overt sexual behavior, these young people formed a new identity that provided the framework for today's concepts of teenage lifestyle.Addressing the intersecting issues of urban life, race, gender, sexuality, and class consciousness, Inventing Modern Adolescence is an authoritative and engaging look at a pivotal point in American history and the intriguing, complicated, and still very pertinent teenage identity that emerged from it.

Author / Editor information

SARAH E. CHINN is an associate professor of English at Hunter College, and the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Reviews

"Through close readings of literary and photographic texts, Chinn substantially revises and re-periodizes the history of youth culture in the United States, showing how non-elite cultural agents forged teenage identity decades earlier than historians have previously supposed."

— Robin Bernstein, Assistant Professor, Harvard University

"In prose alive with the bold, fun-loving, risk-taking energy of the adolescents she studies, Sarah Chinn uncovers the American origins of the very idea of a rebellious and distinctive youth culture. Chinn's sharply original and convincing arguments show how the specific conditions of immigrant life fostered the generational conflict and leisure consumption that have come to seem the very nature of adolescence. Inventing Modern Adolescence describes in lively detail how 'the teenager,' that quintessentially American figure, was formed through the work and play of brave, independent, immigrant kids.

"

— Karen Sánchez-Eppler, author of Dependent States

Sarah Chinn is an extraordinarily creative scholar who draws on an unusually rich palette of sources to create this provocative work. Inventing Modern Adolescence, our immigration history to our contemporary concerns about youth in an original and exciting way.

— Virginia Yans, Board of Governors Distinguished Service Professor, in History, Rutgers Universi

"Sarah Chinn brilliantly reads Lewis Hine photographs, Abraham Cahan fictions, Margaret Mead anthropology, dance hall pamphlets, museum brochures, even White House reports to illuminate how early 20th-century working kids produced what we know today as 'adolescence.' What she does, remarkably, is make teen culture interesting, even meaningful, to adults."

— Paul Lauter, Allan K. & Gwendolyn Miles Smith Professor of Literature, Trinity College

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: “I Don’t Understand What’s Come Over the Children of This Generation” Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. “Youth Must Have Its Fling”: The Beginnings of Modern Adolescence Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2. Picturing Labor: Lewis W. Hine, the Child Labor Movement, and the Meanings of Adolescent Work Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	29
3. “Irreverence and the American Spirit”: Immigrant Parents, American Adolescents, and the Invention of the Generation Gap Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
4. “Youth Demands Amusement”: Dancing, Dance Halls, and the Exercise of Adolescent Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	103
5. “Youth Is Always Turbulent”: Reinterpretations of Adolescence from Bohemia to Samoa Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	130
Epilogue: Smells Like Teen Spirit Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193