“The stretched-out walk to independence is rooted in social and economic shifts that started in the 1970s, including a change from a manufacturing to a service-based economy that sent many more people to college, and the women’s movement, which opened up educational and professional opportunities.”By Patricia Cohen (June 12, 2010) Long Road to Adulthood Is Growing Even Longer
In this passage, Cohen points out the importance of social and economic shifts that contributes the longer transition from adolescent to adulthood. As the same stated in Insights on Adolescence From a Life Course Perspective Johnson, M. K., Crosnoe, R., & Elder, G. H.(2011), social changes play important role in the change of the definition of adolescence. However, I want to underscore the point that Cohen mentioned, that women’s movement was an especially important factor to transform the definition of adolescence within the full life.
Traditionally, when women were limited to domestic life, people got married and became independent at their late 10s or early 20s. At that time, adolescence almost equated to teenage. Through the three waves movement, women’ position has changed dramatically. We now have the right of suffrage and political equality, have more opportunities access to university education, and have equality access to better job and equal pay. The women’s movement liberates women from domestic life to work place and public territory. Women have longer time and opportunities to self-develop, instead of rushing into marriage at early age. Accordingly, men get marriage later than before as well. Let alone many people choose not to marry these days, the transformation that women has their own life choice has changed the view that “marriage and parenthood once seen as prerequisites for adulthood”. Delay or no marriage and motherhood, extend time of education, establish career plans, women nowadays play significant role in rewriting traditional definition of adolescence and adulthood. I agree that we need to review these definitions through putting them into the whole life period.
I agree to you! Women’s rights have advanced; we are finally closing in on gaps that existed before, and therefore we need to reevaluate our definitions of adulthood to a definition that emphasizes equally the importance of female and male education as well as the lessening of social pressure to enter marriage.