notion of psychological maturity, which at that time began to develop into a metaphor for adult status. Jordan identifies as crucial to the emergence of the mature individual qua adult the transformation of Calvinist predes-tinarianism into a theology that emphasized individual effort as the means to salvation: “Only when the individual's own struggles were given far greater weight in the process of conversion would there be room for a process of reaching psychological maturity” (1978: 190). So, the emergence of adulthood is inextricably linked to processes of individualization, that is, individuals' gradual liberation from the determinants of birth and religious conformity, and their simultaneous charging with an ever-increasing self-responsibility for all aspects of their lives.
Toward the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century adulthood became the default position: a life stage situated between adolescence and old age. G. Stanley Hall's (1904) work on adolescence was pivotal in this regard. Hall's thought was influenced by post-Darwinian evolutionary biology. His work was an important precursor to developmental psychology, which, particularly in its early to mid-twentieth-century form, set about segmenting the life course into discrete and well-defined units. It followed that adolescence, which was ever more perceived and treated as a period of inner turmoil, came to denote a preparatory life stage to adulthood, now understood as its developmental goal.
Earlier, in preindustrial Europe for example, children took on adult responsibilities at a young age by today's standards. For some sectors of society at least, participation in productive work tended to extend across almost all of the life span. Furthermore, the combination of early family formation, short life expectancy, and high fertility rates meant that parenthood too was a lifelong endeavor for most. As Hareven (1978: 205) puts it, “demographic, social and cultural factors combined to produce only minimal differentiation in the stages of life.” Moreover, the separation of young people from the world of production through universal education, while exclusion from work was also replicated at the other end of the life course, played an important role in the emergence of adulthood as a separately conceived life phase (Pilcher 1995).
Adulthood emerged in public consciousness and entered the cultural vocabulary of everyday life as the achievable (and indeed desirable) end to adolescent immaturity during the Second World War. In the U.S. a fascination with being grown up emerged in popular culture. Reader's Digest, McCall's, and Vital Speeches of the Day were some of the publications with a wide readership that concerned themselves with what it meant to be adult. A 1952 issue of Reader's Digest, for example, invited young readers to complete a quiz in order to find out whether or not they were indeed grown up (Jordan 1978: 197). So, since its entry into the vernacular during the Civil War, adulthood had come to signify something solid to aim for, a life stage that held the promise of fulfilled wishes and achieved aspirations. Accordingly, a number of words, phrases, and practices associated with adulthood as social status began to settle and eventually became taken for granted and commonplace. Directives like “Don't be childish!” and “Grow up!” and turns of phrase such as being “set in your ways” or having “settled down,” are linguistic devices associated with adulthood. They are also figures of speech that enact social asymmetries and put adult “human beings” in a more powerful position vis-à-vis those who, like children, are perceived and treated as “human becomings” (Qvortrup 1994).
“Maturity” acts as a central metaphor encompassing normative achievements and attributes of adulthood. Although the term is most closely associated with biological development, maturity tends to be used to describe individuals' social and psychological competencies and dispositions. While being mature does not necessarily make a person an adult in the eyes of others (a child may be “mature for her age,” just as an adult may be deemed immature), when linked to adulthood, maturity denotes an end state to biological, psychological, and social development. The notion of social maturity adds an extra dimension. It takes as its starting point the premise that adulthood is constituted not so much by the significance individuals attribute to their own attitudes and actions, but by the kinds of social validation these attract. Just as the interpretation of biological and psychological maturity is culturally specific, as Margaret Mead's classic work Coming of Age in Samoa ( 1928) has shown, maturity is subject to socially constructed and acknowledged forms of meaning. Its plural meanings (biological, psychological, and social) are, for example, institutionalized in law. To appropriate the thinking behind James and Prout's (1997) social constructivist stance on childhood: the maturity of adults is a biological fact of life, but the ways in which this maturity is understood and made meaningful is a fact of culture.1
Notions of maturity hold an important place in the self-understanding of entire societies that share the liberal European tradition. The obvious example here is Immanuel Kant's (1724–1804) statement, “Enlightenment is humankind's emergence from self-incurred immaturity” (1975 [1784]). In his critical analysis of this text, Michel Foucault spells out the synonymy between history and individual development. He maintains that Kant defines the historical process “as humanity's passage to its adult status,” to “maturity” (1994: 308–9, 318). Similarly, historian Norman Davies comments, “Europeans reached the ‘age of discretion’…with medieval Christendom seen as the parent and Europe's secular culture as a growing child conceived in the Renaissance” (Davies 1996: 596). Common perspectives of human development from a state of childlike dependence to adult independence parallel our understanding of modernization as a process of emancipation from dogma, tradition, and authority. This direct link between historical process and individual maturation has consequences for the social-scientific appraisal and treatment of young people to this day. The clearest case, again, is Hall's early interpretation of adolescence, where the individual's development was said to recapitulate the historical maturation of the human species as a whole. Along with a new emphasis on personal and social development, certain practices emerged as symbolic and constitutive of adulthood.
Adult Practices
Picture this: a man and a woman in their mid-twenties. The woman holds a baby in her arms; a small child clings to the man's hand. The woman wears an apron, the man his work overalls. A “Sold” sign perches on the fence that surrounds the freshly painted house. A generously sized car sits in the driveway. No one could ever mistake the man and woman in this romanticized picture for adolescents, and few would be tempted to suggest that they were not adults. Many would, as if by reflex, assume the man to be husband to the woman and father to the child. But something about this image jars against the present. Just like the choice of frame for a painting or a photo, so the right time frame too helps integrate representation and reception. With this in mind, I suggest that no period in the history of Western societies has been more conducive to the institutionalization of a particular model of adulthood (of which the above, romanticized image is one possible representation) than the era historian Eric Hobsbawm (1995) has called the “Golden Age,” namely the time between the end of the Second World War and the oil crises of the early 1970s. No period has provided more favorable conditions for this model to become lived experience for a majority; no period has shown a more faultless synthesis of ideal and reality. Following Lee (2001), I call this synthetic construct “standard adulthood.”
After the Second World War the industrialized economies experienced unprecedented affluence and stability. The period from about 1945 to the early 1970s saw a concerted effort by business, government, and unions to prevent a recurrence of the Depression, the harrowing experience of which still haunted decision makers. Although more wealthy nations had their own macroeconomic agenda, public spending, full employment, and universal social security provisions were given priority to ensure internal demand and hence economic expansion. The then-prevailing mode of management and organization, what came to be known as Fordism, has since come to denote more than that: it signifies a once-prevalent “total way of life” that congealed around goals of long-term stability and economic growth (Harvey 1989: 135). Typically, businesses valued employee loyalty, which was generally rewarded with promotions in hierarchically constituted organizations. For employees and families this meant that there were plannable career paths with predictable milestones on the way, and a known destination: retirement on guaranteed government pensions. In the world
