Introduction

Abstract

Many historians regard chronological age as a simple fact that can be used to frame other topics worthier of study. Thus, biographers use age to define the passage of life, social historians use age to track populations, and cultural and political historians rely on birth cohorts to define generational shifts. But what if age itself has a history that we need to explain? What if the ages recorded in archival documents are not transparent facts, but rather the traces of a historical process through which people take up artificial categories and impose them upon individual lives or use them to build social structures? We have come to regard gender and race in precisely this way, of course, recognizing that male and female or black and white are not simple facts but complex expressions of power that change over time. For that reason, our title for this roundtable self-consciously nods toward Joan Wallach Scott’s groundbreaking essay on gender as a category of analysis published in the American Historical Review in 1986. Like Scott, we aim to demonstrate the usefulness of chronological age as an analytic tool, as well as showcase existing work that already does so. We also hope to show not only that age and its attendant metaphors are pervasive across societies, but that, far from being an obvious fact based in nature, age-based negotiations are key to how people since at least the seventeenth century in Europe and by the nineteenth century elsewhere became rights-bearing citizens legible to modern governments, navigated the vagaries of capitalism, joined social institutions, consented to sex and marriage, and shaped their own desires.1