Jo Croft
Chapter 4
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Timeline
16 Leave school
Sex legal in UK except Northern Ireland Drive a moped
Buy cigarettes
Marry with parents’ consent
17 Drive a car
Sex legal in Northen Ireland
18 Buy alcohol
Watch an 18-certificate film Marry without parents’ consent Vote
26 Average marriage age: women
28 Average marriage age: men Average age of childbearing
37 Average age for remarriage after divorce: women
41 Average age for remarriage after divorce: men
60 Women can retire
65 Men can retire
73 Life expectancy: male
78 Life expectancy: female
W
H E N W E A T T E M P T T O describe somebody else, or when we are required to describe ourselves (on an official form, for example), age almost always seems to be a crucial component of such descriptions.Age shapes and sets limits upon the way we live our lives in a way that we take for granted. As the timeline shows, age dictates such things as when we can leave school, when we can legally have sex (either homosexual or heterosexual), when we can drive, when we can marry, when we can join the army, when we can drink alcohol, when we can retire, and when we can vote. In an obvious sense, age is a ‘fact’ we cannot alter because it literally describes how long we have been alive: however much advertising cam-paigns for beauty products, vitamins, or health foods might try to convince us otherwise, it is something which fixes our position in society as much as, and often more than, other factors such as race, gender, or class.
Nevertheless, once we begin to consider the different ways in which age underpins the identity of any given individual, it emerges as a category which is far from being simply a biological given. The social effects of age have implications far beyond the explicit classification of how old someone is. Age, consequently, is an aspect of identity which powerfully reflects the particular character of life in any national culture, and we can learn a lot about a nation’s values and cultural practices by paying attention to the significance it attaches to certain life stages. It is worth noting, for example, that – unlike the United States and many European countries – Britain has no specific legislation governing ‘age discrimination’.
As the timeline demonstrates, the official landmarks of age in Britain seem to become fewer and further apart once you reach the age of eighteen, though there is a slight reversal of this trend during old age (driving licences, for instance, have to be reapplied for when you reach the age of seventy). In any case, the period between the ages of eleven and twenty-one is a time when life is most punctuated by changes in status – when the rules about what you can do and where you can go are shifting most dramatically. Therefore, in terms of understanding British cultural identities, the age-groups that fall broadly within the category of ‘youth’ offer some of the most interesting insights – not least because British institutions seem to subject young people to such close scrutiny. It is almost as if young people in Britain are –
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consciously or unconsciously – regarded as not just guarantors of the nation’s future but its soul: for, whenever anxieties surface about moral or social decline, the first target for concern is youth.
Britain is a nation which seems to attach particular importance to
‘tradition’. ‘Britishness’ in both the upper class and the working class tends to be characterised by an adherence to ‘old values’, and it could be argued that the British see themselves, and are perhaps viewed by the rest of the world, as having an ‘old’ (established, traditional, or even ancient) culture.
In consequence, it might also be claimed that, precisely because of this British conservatism, young people are regarded as both threatening and vulnerable. One of the issues which will be explored in this chapter is the extent to which British notions of social stability are explicitly associated with the stability of relationships between generations. A claim, after all, might be made that the massive changes in people’s lifestyles in postwar Britain have been felt most acutely in terms of ‘age relations’. ‘The gener-ation gap’, juvenile delinquency, loss of community, the fragmentgener-ation of the nuclear family and disappearance of the extended family: all these much-debated social phenomena seem in one way or another to be associ-ated with a perceived deterioration in relationships between different age-groups.
Along with the rest of Europe, Britain will soon have to cope with some drastic changes in the age distribution of its population. Over the next thirty years, the average age will increase considerably. By the year 2025 the number of pensioners is predicted by a European Commission report to rise by 43 per cent. Meanwhile the working population is set to decline by nearly 3 per cent. The number of young people under twenty will also fall, by 8 per cent. Additionally, along with that in many other European countries (France, the Netherlands, Denmark), Britain’s fertility rate has fallen over the past twenty-five years, so that now it is not suffi-cient to maintain the current level of population (in the EU as a whole immigration of seven million people a year will be necessary to retain current levels).
The changes expressed in these figures will have profound implica-tions. At the simplest level, when a declining workforce has to support more people it can easily lead to inter-generational tensions. Also, as the propor-tion of people in retirement grows, the strain on state social and health services grows. The effect of these additional expenses will be to lower people’s spending power, which will in turn threaten industries which produce or sell goods. The decline in the numbers of young people may also significantly disrupt the housing market which depends on new entrants at the bottom to enable others to move up. Such changes and their likely implications will probably add to the importance attached to youth and its conduct.
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It could perhaps be argued that in earlier epochs of British history less emphasis was placed upon youth as a time of crisis because there was less legislation governed by age, and hence fewer official turning points or transitions in a person’s life. Age, in other words, is a component of identity which is very much tied to cultural factors such as the education system, health, or marriage practices. This is probably most acutely exem-plified by British attitudes towards children in the nineteenth century: the Victorian era was a time of great sentimentality and also great cruelty towards children, when the infant mortality rate was much higher than now, and when mass poverty meant that children had to ‘earn their keep’
in working-class families.
In this chapter, while other aspects of age in Britain will be touched upon, the focus will be on late childhood, adolescence, and youth culture, because it is in these fast-changing periods of life that British people absorb and challenge accepted cultural identities. It is also here that the direction of present and future British identities can be apprehended, as a range of new ideas and beliefs are added to those associated with the traditional social values attaching to work, class, and the family: the staple ingredi-ents sustaining cultural identity for older British citizens.