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“I Was a Teenage Dwarf”: The Social Construction of “Normal” Adolescent Growth and Development in the United States
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
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Heather Munro Prescott “I Was a Teenage Dwarf” The Social Construction of “Normal” Adolescent Growth and Development in the United States In his best-selling novel I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf, Max Shulman describes the woes of adolescent protagonist Dobie Gillis, a young man who strives for success in life and love despite being utterly average in every way. A sequel to Shulman’s The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which inspired the television show of the same name, Dwarf opens by describing thirteen-year-old Dobie’s distress about being shorter than his eighth-grade classmates at John Marshall Junior High School. Although the school nurse, Miss Finsterwald, tries to assure him that, according to the growth chart in her of‹ce, his height of 62.6 inches is exactly average for a boy his age, Dobie does not buy it. “Well, I don’t know who made up this chart,” says Dobie, “but I’ll bet my last nickel that either they were drunk or else they did their research among the pygmies of Central Africa.” If 62.6 inches was the average for thirteenyear -old boys, asks Dobie, then why was every thirteen-year-old boy at John Marshall Junior High taller than him? Worse yet, why was almost every thirteen-year-old girl taller than him? Dobie asks his father why girls his age are so much taller than boys. “Do you think it has something to do with the atomic bomb?” Dobie asks. Dobie’s father blames the phenomenon of tall women on a “series of catastrophes beginning with universal suffrage” that has turned modern American society into a “matriarchy.” Back in the old days, says Pa, “when women looked up to their men, they had to be short.” Now that women were in charge, claims Pa, they have the size to match it. “That, my son, is why girls are growing so tall.” Dobie’s mother, however, simply tells him not to worry. Dobie exclaims, “I will soon have my fourteenth birthday and Ma says Dr. Gesell, who knows everything, says that fourteen is the year of greatest growth for boys.” Dobie remains on the short side of 153 average, only reaching ‹ve foot six, but by the end of the novel, at age thirty, he comes to accept that “runts can be happy.” Nevertheless, Dobie marries Chloe, “a small weak girl who is exactly the kind of girl I require since I am a small weak man.”1 The passage just described aptly represents some of the major themes surrounding discussions about what constituted “normal” adolescent growth and development in the mid-twentieth century. For several decades, scientists in the ‹eld of child development had been trying to establish developmental norms for children and adolescents and to disseminate this information to a popular audience through parent education groups, advice manuals, and columns in newspapers and magazines .2 As the humorous banter between Dobie and Pa Gillis implies, scienti‹c interest in the bodies of adolescents was shaped by larger cultural imperatives. Throughout history adults have used discussions about youth and their problems as a trope for larger anxieties about social change. The historian Paula Fass convincingly demonstrates in her history of youth in the 1920s that adults have often “used youth at once to denounce change and adapt to it.”3 This chapter shows that adults projected their fears about the shifting social order onto the bodies of young people and that consequently these concerns had a profound effect on child study from the early twentieth century onward.4 At the same time, the growing professional authority of medicine ensured that deviance from accepted social and physical norms would be regarded as illness that could be treated only by trained experts in the medical and behavioral sciences. As the power and prestige of the medical profession grew during the ‹rst half of the twentieth century, medical language and explanations seeped into wider areas of human society in a process that some medical historians and sociologists have referred to as the medicalization of American life. Since the early twentieth century, these scholars argue, various forms of deviance—such as alcoholism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, and child abuse— have gradually been transformed from “bad behaviors” that were regulated by the church, the family, and the criminal justice system into “sicknesses” that necessitated medical intervention.5 Keith Wailoo demonstrates that new diagnostic technologies such as HIV testing have contributed to medicalization. Wailoo argues that these new...