Today is the birthday of Marie Antoinette, born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, child number 15 out of 16 born to the Empress Maria Theresa and the Emperor Francis I. To preserve the alliance between Austria and France, Marie was married to the future king of France, Louis the 16th, when she was 14 years old. The world has changed. Today we would most probably have Marie's parents arrested.
The transition between childhood and adulthood is much longer today than it was less than one hundred years ago, when a boy proved himself a man when he could shoulder and share adult hardships, risks, and responsibility working side by side with his father in the fields. By the time he was a seasoned seventeen or eighteen, he was ready to start his own family. A girl became a woman by the time she reached childbearing age; fourteen or fifteen was often considered old enough to marry. The transition from childhood to adulthood was so short that adolescence---at least as the distinct stage of life we now consider it---hardly existed.
Today the traditional determinations of adulthood---the establishment of occupation and family---are routinely postponed until after college. With the period of childhood innocence seeming shorter and shorter, we've created a new ten-or-twelve-or-more-years-long designation, a no-man's land (or no-woman's land) we term adolescence. Over the past fifty-years or so, this new limbo-land life stage has become an extended period of awkward uncertainty.
One thing that has not changed is puberty. When talk concerns abstinence, birth control, abortion we are on the losing side of the discussion. We need to rethink.
Marie Antoinette is one of the most famously misquoted people in history. It was actually an earlier princess, Maria Theresa of Spain, who said, "If there is no bread, let them cake."
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