The word “teenage” is intimately wrapped up with the designation “teenager,” and when asked to think of historical precedents, our thoughts turn to 1950s Americana, James Dean, etc. For Jon Savage, however, this same period marked the culmination of a long struggle, as parents, educators, psychologists and government officials attempted to wrestle with the 13 to 19 age group. Teenager was merely the newest and, in hindsight, best-fitting term for this group. Savage comes by his fascination with youth culture honestly, having worked as a researcher at Granada Television with Tony Wilson, who later formed Factory Records, and many of his preliminary notes were made preparing for a miniseries on the history of youth cultures. It prepared Savage for his next book, the critically acclaimed look at the birth of British punk, England’s Dreaming, as well as providing much of the research needed for his new book, Teenage.
            Savage begins his look at the teen years at the end of the 19th century with the work of American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who coined the term “adolescence” to cover the age range of 13 to 25, during which youths are in a state of only “semi-dependence” on their parents. Like many writers and burgeoning psychologists of the day who were concerned with youth, Hall focused on adolescence primarily as a biological state, but one that required intensive socialization. Many of the debates over how to treat youth centred how best to socialize them.
            The emerging modern industrial economy that began to flourish in the 20th century was intimately tied to adolescents. The movement of workers out of the home and into the factories allowed working class children an almost unprecedented range of freedom from parental supervision. Rapid urbanization, coupled with massive European immigration in the 1890s, saw American juvenile delinquency rates skyrocket. Unwilling to subject American youths to the same rehabilitation institutions as hardened adult criminals, government officials began to look at different measures involving social programs tailored to the delicate psyches of their new wards. At the other end of the social spectrum, the schooling required to function in the increasingly complex economy led to the creation of the high school as an institution for everyone. Hundreds of thousands of middle-class children were delayed their direct entry into the workforce.
            Similar events were occurring across the Atlantic in Britain, France and Germany, where the young were subsumed as part of growing national military movements. Everyone has heard the stories of entire classrooms enlisting at the outbreak of the First World War, and Savage documents this era well. However, the war proved to be a breaking point of sorts — in Europe, it destroyed the optimism of youth and the romantic notions of war they had been raised on. For those who were too young to enlist, their recruitment into part-time work in war industries gave them increased disposable income that they often spent on the emerging markets for music, clothes and makeup. Afterwards, in the United States, the post-war era saw an explosion of college enrollment that, during the heyday of the roaring ’20s, saw college students become the target of many advertisers, as these youths tended to have even more money than their working counterparts. In time, advertisers began to zero in on high school students as well.
            Thus, Savage positions the teenager as caught between two poles. At the one end exists government policies designed to educate and indoctrinate, as the inter-war period saw a tremendous number of youth programs throughout the western world. From the all-encompassing Nazi Youth, to the more limited ends of New Deal legislation, governments grew to fear the tumultuous desire of youths for change. At the other, the freedom of full adult responsibility meant that young people held more disposable income than their parents, and the desired market for wide sections of rapidly expanding consumer society. Resistance to these two extremes, Savage is quick to point out and happy to document, is almost inevitable. Every section seems to hold the stories of the wild youths that refused to be tamed, from the famous Swing Kids and the Zazous of Vichy France, to the hobo youths of Depression-era America, or the fabulously decadent Bright Young Things of 1920s Britain.
            In the years leading up to the Second World War, western youth seemed brimming with discontent at either being too tightly controlled by their respective governments, or else unable to participate fully in the consumer dreams fed to them during the 1920s. Market researchers and advertisers, though, had been taking it all in. By the time the war ended, they had developed a complete strategy for attracting this audience, even going so far as to develop a whole new label for the section of society they felt would be integral to post-war success: the teenager.