Abstract
Adolescence is a period when, as Granville Stanley Hall described, there is a moratorium on adulthood and young people are permitted to enjoy a ‘freedom that leans a little toward licence’ while retaining an element of ‘shelter and protection’ provided by parents or teachers.1 This chapter sets out to determine when adolescence came to be an experience enjoyed by a majority of young Irish men and women. The focus is on socio-economic aspects, such as work, schooling, contribution to the family, and dependence and subjection to the needs and dictates of the birth family. Psychology, sexuality and the private lives of adolescents do not come within the remit of this study. The central argument that the chapter will develop is that the demographic and socio-economic conditions of Ireland in the late-nineteenth and the early- and even mid-twentieth centuries — especially though not exclusively in rural Ireland — meant that a significant proportion of Irish men and women either found themselves taking on the premature responsibilities of adulthood — by having to support their family or survive independently as an emigrant — whereas for others a quasi-childhood type of dependency persisted into middle age and sometimes even longer.
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Notes
Dorothy Ross, G. Stanley Hall: The psychologist as prophet (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 327–8.
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘Stony grey soil’, idem, Collected poems (London: Martin Brian and O’Keefe, 1972), 82.
In 1926 over 20 per cent of those at work in Ireland worked within the family (the definition of those at work excluded all wives in family businesses), compared with 12 per cent in France and 6.6 per cent in Denmark. Peter Flora, State, economy and society in Western Europe, 1815–1975: A data handbook, ii, The growth of industrial societies, (Frankfurt and London: Campus and Macmillan Press, 1983) Section ix, ‘Labour force, sectors and status’. The proportion of young people working within the family would have been significantly higher.
Robert E. Kennedy, Jr, The Irish: Emigration, marriage and fertility (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1973);
Timothy Guinnane, The vanishing Irish: Households, migration, and the rural economy in Ireland, 1950–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Conrad M. Arensberg and Solon T. Kimball, Family and community in Ireland (2nd ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 170–2.
A. J. Humphreys, ‘Migration to Dublin: Its social effects’, Christus Rex, 9: 3 (1955), 192–9.
A. J. Humphreys, New Dubliners: Urbanization and the Irish family (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 22–3.
Mary E. Daly, The slow failure: Population decline and independent Ireland, 1920–1973 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 164 –72.
John R. Gillis, Youth and history: Tradition and change in European age relations 1770–present (New York and London: Academic Press, 1974), 1–35;
Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, (eds), Household and family in past time (London: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
Daly, Slow failure, 21–74. Maurice Curtis, The splendid cause: The Catholic Action movement in Ireland in the twentieth century (Dublin: Original Writing Ltd., 2008), 72; Rev. Dr. C Lucey, ‘Minority Report’, Commission on Emigration and Other Population Problems, 1948–54, reports, 335–63.
Tony Fahey, ‘State, family and compulsory schooling in Ireland’, Economic and Social Review, 23: 4 (1992), 375–8.
Mary E. Daly, Industrial development and Irish national identity, 1922–39 (Syracuse, NY and Dublin: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 122 –7.
A. E. C. W. Spencer, Arrangements for the integration of Irish immigrants in England and Wales (ed. Mary E. Daly) (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2012), 15.
Henri Mendras, The vanishing peasant: Innovation and change in French agriculture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), 76.
Jeremiah Newman (ed.), The Limerick rural survey, 1958–64 (Tipperary: Muintir na Tire, 1964), 213–14;
Robert Cresswell, Une communauté rurale de l’Irlande (Paris: Institut d’Ethnologie, 1969), 527.
Department of Education, Investment in education: Report of the survey team appointed by the Minister for Education in October, 1962 (Dublin: Stationery Office, 1965), table 1.5, 20
John Walsh, The politics of expansion: The transformation of educational policy in the Republic of Ireland, 1957–72 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Brian Callanan, Ireland’s Shannon story: Leaders, visions and networks: A case study of local and regional development (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), 97.
Damien Hannan, Rural exodus: A study of the forces influencing large-scale migration of Irish rural youth (London: G. Chapman, 1970), 253.
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Daly, M.E. (2015). The Emergence of an Irish Adolescence: 1920s to 1970s. In: Cox, C., Riordan, S. (eds) Adolescence in Modern Irish History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374911_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374911_10
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