Teenagers were invented in the late 1950s.
If that’s an exaggeration, it’s not as much of one as you may think. While there had — obviously — been teenagers before, it wasn’t until the leading edge of the baby boom reached that milestone that the word took on its modern meaning. In the heady prosperity of those first years post-war and post-Depression, “teenage” came to be seen as a wholly separate phase of life, a way station between childhood and adulthood.
Where once it had been common for people that age to help support the family or to marry and make families of their own, these new teenagers were more likely to be spared such adult responsibilities. They — the white ones growing up in the new suburbs, at least — were flush with cash, brimming with modern conceits and, initially, indulged by parents captivated by the very newness of them.
Their fashion, politics, music, movies and mores would blow away the old like cobwebs in a wind tunnel. It’s no coincidence that civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental activism and skepticism toward authority all came of age at the same time they did. Unlike any generation before or since, they would be defined by the fact of being new, of being young.
Until they weren’t.
This week, after all, marks the 50th anniversary — 50th anniversary! — of the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, the rain-soaked, mud-splattered three-day rock concert on a farm in upstate New York that many mark as the climactic act of the baby boom years. Which raises a question: When you’ve so long been defined by youth, what do you become when youth is gone?
