Constructing American Childhood
Age-Based Laws and the Illusion of Protection in the Early United States
Holly N. S. White
subjects:
How definitions of childhood in early America codified social hierarchies and remain with us today
As of 2025, in the United States an eleven-year-old child can be charged with a federal crime while in many states it’s illegal to leave a twelve-year-old home alone. Twenty-six states allow children younger than sixteen to marry while the legal drinking age remains twenty-one. Are these age-based laws really protecting children, and if not, why do they exist? Holly White uncovers the answers to these questions through a history of America’s first age-based laws.
Analyzing trial records, newspapers, personal letters and diaries, as well as legal statutes from the founding era to the Civil War, White shows how restrictive age-based laws were implemented to benefit those who already held power. Over time, these new laws—coming out of child murder and rape trials as well as guardianship and underage marriage disputes—increasingly circumscribed the rights of young Americans in the early republic. As White shows, race, class, status, and gender influenced who came to benefit from the label of “child” in post-revolutionary America. In so doing, Constructing American Childhood explains why Americans continue to be guided by the age-based legal definitions of childhood and adulthood of our past.
Holly White’s Constructing American Childhood makes us rethink much of what we thought we knew about children and the law in the early republic. Based on a compelling and diverse set of sources, White’s book shows us how skeptical we need to be of early American claims to child protection, especially when children’s rights ran up against their parents’ interests. Constructing American Childhood is required reading not just for historians of childhood, but for anyone seeking to understand legal or family history of the early republic.- Nicholas L. Syrett, University of Wisconsin-Madison, author of American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States
- Rebecca Jo Plant, UC San Diego, coauthor of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War EraStudents of US history know how Progressive era reformers fought to transform childhood into a protected stage of development. Far less familiar is the history that Holly N.S. White narrates in Constructing American Childhood, her discerning study of the legal and social meaning of age in the first half of the nineteenth century. Recounting criminal cases involving young defendants charged with murder and rape, as well as civil cases centering on truculent wards and determined minors who wed without parental consent, White illuminates a world in which age-based laws functioned less to protect children than to buttress the control of parents and guardians and reinforce existing hierarchies. Constructing American Childhood explains how youth found their subordination codified and reinforced in an era renowned for its embrace of democratic freedom. But the children at the center of this book—some shockingly cruel, others admirably resourceful—understood that age was less a simple numerical fact than a manipulable social construct and acted accordingly. In this rewarding work, White does justice to their individual stories while offering a critical new perspective on the history of childhood and the law.
Holly N. S. White is an Adjunct Professor in the History Department at William & Mary. She is coeditor for the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth.
