Adolescent Culture in Colonial Massachusetts

Abstract

This article first examines the paradoxes and disagreements of recent research on adolescence under four heads: the recognition of a distinctive age group between puberty and marriage during the early modern period; parent- teenager relationships; adolescent sexuality; and youth culture, hardly investi gated in seventeenth-century New England. Evidence from the Middlesex County Court Records between 1649 and 1699 is then presented and analysed. The 26 in cidents involving companies of young people suggest that there was a youth culture in the county, most evident in Charlestown and Cambridge, but also reported in eight other towns. The records suggest that this distinct culture emerged during the 1660s and that the militia may have provided an institutional framework. Those involved came from all classes and almost equally from elect and nonregenerate families. The study concludes that adolescence was generally recognized as a distinct stage of life, that there was a marked generation gap, that puritan patriarchalism may have been short-lived, that Middlesex youths were fascinated by but uninformed about sex, and that the introversion of the conver sion experience was usually a feature of early married life rather than of adoles cence.