Jonathan Edwards With Adolescence on His Hands Too, Part I

A Form of Adolescence found in Early 1700s New England, way before Stanley Hall’s 1905 “Adolescence”

“The social conditions for young people in western New England had become trying. Families were large, five to nine children on average. During the seventeenth century the town of Northampton had distributed open land to sons as they came of age. That practice, plus scattering tracts and maintaining meadows for common cultivation, had provided a strong economic base for the communalism integral to the Puritan cultural ideal. But after 1705, there was no more land available in the township except some distributed in 1730 to encourage a new settlement at Southampton, about eight miles away…

…With no new land available, young people were living with their parents. While that did not necessarily cause economic deprivation—farms might prosper from having extra family laborers—it did change social patterns. Young people were postponing marriage about three years longer than had their parents, so there the average age of marriage was about twenty-eight or twenty-nine for men and twenty-five for women.

Young people from their mid-teens until their late twenties were likely to be in this in-between situation. They lived in villages with communal structures, but they were not as likely to be participating responsibly in the community as their grandparents had at the same age…

…As Edwards’ sermons against frolicking made clear, unmarried sons and daughters were under the authority of their parents, but—not surprisingly—parental rule was hardly working as he would have liked. For many young people, the official expectation that they postpone all sexual activity until marriage and the disparity between that standard and their actual sexual practices helped to create a sense of guilt…” pp. 158-159

From, Jonathan Edwards—A Life by George Marsden, Yale University Press, 2003

G. Mark Sumpter