dynamic in American culture of the societal marginalization of youth on the one hand and teenagers embracing marginalization and acting as agents for social change on the other.
MISFITS AND REBELS
Like Nettle, whose story I began with, many activists recall being teenage misfits or rebels who were seen and saw themselves as outsiders. Rod Coronado wrote to me from prison that during his teenage years he did not fit in and had “little interest” in what was popular with other teenagers: “Not a lot of teenagers thought it was cool to want to ‘save the whales,’ so I struggled with wanting to fit in . . . I simply could not focus on wanting things or a career while I knew whales were being slaughtered and baby seals clubbed.” Coronado heard about the ALF and became even more convinced that “the only career for me was as this sort of person.” During high school he recalls “simply biding my time until I was done with school and could join the struggles.” At seventeen, he left home and moved to Seattle to start working with Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society, an activist organization focused on protecting marine mammals.47 Like Coronado, many activists felt like outcasts until they found activist organizations, the vegan straightedge subculture, a school’s ecology club, feminism, contemporary Paganism, or other causes and movements that gave meaning to their ostracism and nurtured their activism.
Even when they felt at odds with other students, high school offered some activists a separate space away from parental influence in which activist identities could emerge. Chelsea Gerlach, who was sentenced in 2007 to eight years in prison on twenty-five charges, including arson at a Vail, Colorado, ski resort, joined her high school’s ecology club and was only sixteen when she experienced her first arrest for civil disobedience. In a 1993 South Eugene (Oregon) High School yearbook, her sophomore picture depicts her wearing a black T-shirt with white letters reading “RESIST.” In a short article about the school’s environmental organization she is quoted as saying, “Our generation was born to save the earth . . . if we wait until we’re out of school it might be too late.”48 Between 1996 and 2001, Gerlach’s ELF cell was supposedly responsible for setting fire to more than twenty lumber companies, a wild-horse corral, and genetic engineering facilities.49 For teenagers like Gerlach who find a high school niche and embrace their own identities as outsiders, who become involved with animal rights or environmental issues with teenage peers, high school and its associated extracurricular activities may serve as an important space in which activist identities are forged.
Like other social movements before them, radical environmentalism and animal rights in the United States have been significantly impacted by the historical contingencies of middle-class white high school and college-age youth at the turn of the millennium, even though not all activists come from white middle-class backgrounds. Post–World War II radical youth movements like the antiwar movement of the 1960s and the animal rights movement of the 1990s were in part made possible by a separate youth culture that developed in the United States during the decades after World War II. This separate youth culture developed not only as a market force, but also as a space in which the forces of capitalism could be questioned and challenged. In this historical trajectory, “teenager” and “youth” became charged and ambiguous categories. Youth culture made possible by high schools provided opportunities for young people to identify with their own visions and values.
The emergence of “teenage” as a special stage of life with symbolic and economic importance did not come about until the nineteenth century, even though urban youth groups appeared in America as early as the 1770s. The term juvenile delinquent was coined in the 1810s, a foreshadowing of what would become a difficult assumption to shake: that youth gathering in groups and/or outside adult supervision were socially and politically dangerous.50 Representations of vulnerable and threatening youth from at least the nineteenth century on tended to identify teenagers as quintessential liminal or boundary figures. Cultural critic Henry Giroux argues that young people are “condemned to wander within and between multiple borders and spaces marked by excess, otherness and difference. This is a world in which old certainties are ruptured and meaning becomes more contingent, less indebted to the dictates of reverence and established truth.”51 In this way, the demonization and othering of some youth created a space for dissent and protest in which taken-for-granted truths such as human exceptionalism could be questioned.
Teenagers accumulated economic and cultural power throughout the first decades of the twentieth century. Although “teenager” as a category had emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was introduced in the popular lexicon only in 1941.52 Sociologist Talcott Parsons coined the term “youth culture” in a 1942 article; the magazine Seventeen aimed at teen girls was launched in 1944; and in 1945, Vogue magazine heralded a “teen-age revolution.”53 After World War II there was a significant shift from what historian Oded Heilbronner calls a “culture for youth to a culture of youth.”54 The culture of youth, recently empowered, would follow at least two divergent courses: those who embraced their market role and facilitated America’s economic and geographic expansion, and those who pushed for revolution against what they saw as an out-of-control industrial nation, both racist and imperialistic.
During the 1950s, teenagers increasingly came to inhabit a world of their own due at least in part to the growth of the high school and an expanding culture of teenage consumption. Their autonomy became a source of tremendous anxiety for the adults who had created high schools and the accompanying separate teen culture in the first place. With the baby boom (1946–1964), youth definitively displaced age as a source of power in the United States.55 Even though the 1950s are often seen as being family oriented (at least for the white middle class), in fact, a parallel trend during this decade was the increasing importance of “extrafamilial institutions” in socializing the young.56 For this and other reasons, teenagers were looked on suspiciously as being increasingly outside of adult control and inhabiting their own spaces.57 From their parents’ perspectives, there was reason for concern, since it was often in these autonomous teenage spaces that teenagers encountered activism and other subversive activities.
Many scholars have identified “the unique susceptibility of youth to social change” as a shaping factor in youth activism.58 According to historian Christopher Lasch, young social reformers in the early twentieth century were also in rebellion against the middle class.59 This rebellion established a pattern for later youth revolts, such as those of the 1960s, that also rejected middle-class values. Youth activists have been characterized by scholars as educated, middle class, the offspring of loving parents who fostered independent thinking, and members of subcultures who are cynical towards the larger society.60
In the 1950s, dissatisfaction with suburbia and capitalist ideals was simmering across diverse populations of American youth. The 1950s Beat movement of artists and writers and the involvement of youth (white as well as African American) in the civil rights movement during the 1950s and early 1960s are two examples.61 As anthropologist Margaret Mead explained the situation in an interview, the Beat generation consisted of young people “not interested in the kind of society we have.”62 Mead’s “uninterested” young people flourished in the 1960s, when protest movements took up many themes that remain salient to twenty-first-century activists, especially the rejection of middle-class aspirations.
By the 1960s, Americans in their teenage years and early twenties increasingly had autonomous lives and separate spaces in which to express and experiment with new political identities. Within these separate youth spaces, as in earlier eras, they also called into question structures of power and authority. Some white middle-class youth dropped out of college in the 1960s and 1970s to pursue a different kind of American dream than that of their parents. Many of them engaged in new forms of protest. The 1960s saw the emergence of environmentalism, feminism, radical politics, and unconventional expressions of religiosity, all of which were influenced and/or made possible by youth culture. These movements, with their roots in the 1960s, would later shape the concerns of radical environmentalism and animal rights activism.
