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Journal of Women's History 12.4 (2001) 6-10



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Editor's Note


The intellectual seeds for this special issue were first sown during the 1996 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As I paged through the voluminous conference program that year, trying to choose among the plethora of offerings, I was struck by what seemed to me an unprecedented number of papers and panels devoted specifically to the history and experiences of women of particular age groups. Without difficulty I could have spent the entire conference listening exclusively to scholars presenting research on girls, female adolescents, young women, middle-aged women, or older women. I do not know whether this was a deliberate decision on the part of the program committee. Given the conference theme, "Complicating Categories: Women, Gender, and Difference," that would have been appropriate. However, I certainly left the conference with a new appreciation of the difference that age makes in a woman's life and a new awareness of the significance of age as a marker of difference among women.

Since my own work has focused on young women, these insights should probably not have been new to me. Yet many of us who conduct research on age-specific groups of women, gender and generations, or issues related to the female life course, do not often think about age as a category of analysis or the meanings of age as such. We tend, for example, to situate studies of young working women within the framework of labor history rather than the history of girlhood and female youth. Similarly, most studies of mothers and mothering do not take into account how those experiences change as children grow up and mothers grow old. As part of the on-going effort to complicate and enrich our collective scholarship, this special issue is therefore designed to explore how systematic attention to age as a biological reality, a social construct, and a category of difference might alter our understanding of women's history.

Encouraging us to think broadly and comparatively about these questions, Mary Jo Maynes and Ann Waltner offer an introductory essay in which they examine the female life course in two strikingly different contexts, namely Europe and China. In both regions, marriage, motherhood, and domestic labor dominated the adult lives of most women between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, while almost all Chinese girls became brides during their teen years, European women typically did not marry until their mid-twenties, if at all. For Chinese girls, this resulted in a relatively brief period between childhood and marriage, during which they generally stayed in their parental home. In contrast, [End Page 6] European girls experienced a longer hiatus between the onset of puberty and entry into marriage, and during these years they frequently took on paid labor outside the home. As Maynes and Waltner suggest, these different life course patterns may help explain the different economic developments in the two regions. Moreover, if we, like Maynes and Waltner, understand "youth" as a particular stage in life, a period of postpubescent semiautonomy from parental households, we must also conclude that while all women experience being young, not all encounter youth as a part of their life course.

Echoing this argument, Fiona Stoertz's article focuses on the lives of elite women in medieval England and France, for whom betrothal and marriage, which often took place even before girls reached puberty, eclipsed the gradual transition from childhood to adulthood. Yet, as Stoertz points out, the historical sources suggest that even though powerful families were eager to establish and maintain alliances through arranged marriages involving very young girls, they still perceived pre- or early-pubescent girls as too young to shoulder all the rights and responsibilities associated with marriage, including sexual activity. In spite of cultural practices that might suggest otherwise, at least some elite parents apparently understood not only physical maturity but also possibly emotional maturity as prerequisites for leading a fully adult life.

Like the two previous contributions, Leslie Paris's work also focuses on the early years of...

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