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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| Cynthia Comacchio, The Dominion of Youth: Adolescence and the Making of Modern Canada, 1920 to 1950 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Press 2006)
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| AT FIRST I EXPECTED Cynthia Comacchio's new book on youth to be a welcome and much-needed Canadian version of Kelly Schrum's Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture 1920–1945 (New York 2004). In that important book, Schrum traced the emergence of American female teen culture, arguing that teenaged girls helped to shape an evolving consumer culture and that there was a stage between childhood and adulthood recognized by pundits, marketers, and manufacturers as early as the 1920s. While reaching a similar conclusion about consumer culture on this side of the border, The Dominion of Youth offers much more. One of the most obvious differences between this book and its American counterpart is that it deals with both sexes, and while Schrum's study fails to account for how youth managed to finance their newfound preoccupation with consumerism, Comacchio does not overlook the various forms of paid employment young Canadians took up during their teen years. Indeed, Comacchio goes even further when she ties the emergence of youth culture in Canada to the country's own maturation process. Her chapters cover a wide range of topics including theories about modern youth, intergenerational relations, dating and mating, high school culture, paid work, leisure trends and activities, and youth organizations. |
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To establish that a separate youth culture was emerging, Comacchio pays particular attention to the experience of attending high school which became more important from 1920 to 1950 than ever before. Indeed, the author asserts that school activities "reflected and projected the new social meanings ascribed to adolescence and consequently to the high school as the key formative institution in the lives of young Canadians." (128) Yet, Comacchio points out that the experience was by no means a universal one. Rural youth still did not share equal access to high school, because "attendance often involved considerable expense for the many rural youth who had to board in towns or cities." (110) Overall more youth were attending high school than ever before, but the experience of going to school for a longer period did not automatically translate into actually graduating from high school and Comacchio is careful to differentiate between the two. She cites a 1943 survey that found while 40% of youth wanted to enter the professions, "only 5 to 6 per cent of high school students ... actually went on to the university courses that the professions demanded" – the vast majority were headed for vocational training to enter other kinds of paid employment. (156) |
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After school young Canadians worked. Some worked on a part-time basis during the school years, to pay for the "fads, fashions and fun" that became symbols of their generation. Others left school permanently at the age of 16, to take up full-time paid work in order to contribute to the family economy, or as a personal strategy to facilitate leaving the parental home as soon as possible. Historians of labour will be particularly interested in the chapter "On the Job: Training and Earning," where the point is firmly established that while "the historical trend was an overall lengthening of youth dependency, the end of adolescence was materially designated." Comacchio means that "the family's economic situation ... determined the options available to the young." (144) Unlike youth in the roaring twenties and those who found ample employment opportunities during World War II, the so-called "idle youth" of the Depression years were definitely hard-pressed to find work, and this case highlights the generational differences. Moreover, the author consistently recognizes that class and rural/urban differences were always at play and thus, she avoids generalizations. |
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The book is certainly not "all work and no play," as evidenced in the chapter on "Dating and Mating" where Comacchio asks whether "there was new participation in sexual activity among young Canadians as a result of a new morality." (98) She concedes that while concrete measures and solid evidence about private behaviours are very difficult to find, there was much attention and discussion given over to such questions, both by adult observers and by youth. In the end, Comacchio concludes that "the first small steps toward sexual revolution were taken, but the persistence of such 'traditional' considerations managed to ground enough of the 'flaming' youth and the succeeding generations to hold it off until the 1960s. The new morality that slowly took shape during this earlier period was real, but not so much realized, at least not among most adolescents." (98) |
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Adult concerns about youth also encompassed how young people were spending their leisure time in public, a subject taken up in Chapter 6, "At Play." While commercial entertainments became more widely accepted throughout the period under consideration, there was a lingering concern about delinquency. The various youth organizations that proposed to remedy that threat and to teach citizenship lessons are the subject of Chapter 7, "At the Club." While many youth groups initially emanated from the churches, they increasingly also came from community-minded parents who took the initiative. Closer examination of these community clubs shows that the youth who participated were younger versions of their middle-class adult sponsors, and organized activities did not usually succeed in reaching the target group of so-called "problem youth." |
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Comacchio's title is meant to invoke double meaning. By "dominion," she means to indicate the space and terrain that youth occupied in the years between their childhoods and coming of age as adults. Yet, she also means to explore this in the context of the nation itself. Describing the purpose with which she began her book, she said she wanted "to consider the development of modern adolescence within the context of a nation that was suffering the 'growing pains' of becoming a mature participant in the modern world order." (211) One's teen years are characterized by the struggle to establish selfidentity, and because Canada was making forays onto the world stage in this period, the parallel between the young dominion and her young citizens seems particularly apt. |
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In presenting the convergence between youth's experiences and the country's emerging national identity, Comacchio makes several references to the national surveys of youth conducted in the 1940s by the Canadian Youth Commission. The CYC is a rich source for the history of Canada's youth, but the book is somewhat misleading with regard to the CYC. Although the Commission was in step with the kinds of post-war planning studies that the government was undertaking, the CYC was in fact, an independent commission of inquiry originating with the ymca; it was not initiated by King's government as Comacchio repeatedly asserts. (43, 94, 153, 190, 203) The CYC had a broad base of representation and was not technically a government initiative, which serves to reinforce the fact that concerns over youth welfare, social education, and citizenship initiatives were coming from several sources including, but not limited to, government bodies. |
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This book about the creation and social construction of adolescence in Canada will appeal to historians who are increasingly turning their attention to the second half of the 20th century, where youth experiences and youth culture surface as major themes. As Comacchio clearly demonstrates, the 1950s and 1960s did not mark the emergence of a youth culture in Canada because a separate youth culture predated that period by as much as 30 years. The Dominion of Youth clearly and convincingly establishes that fact and therefore it should become a standard reference on 20th-century youth and popular culture. |
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LINDA M. AMBROSE
Laurentian University |
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