Twenty and Counting

A few weeks ago, something strange happened to me—I turned 20 years old. Yes, I know it’s one of those boring birthdays between 18 and 21 (I’m still legal but still not legal enough to drink!), but it seems like two decades of life should mean something. After all, I’m no longer a teen, so I guess my angst-ridden days are far behind me. I used to think that coming to college was supposed to mark my transition into adulthood, but in many ways, it feels like this college has caused my transformation to inch along at an interminable pace.

When do girls finally become women and boys finally become men? As a child, I used to think of the teenage years as being the magic bridge to the land of “grown-ups.” Cultural coming-of-age rites, such Bar and Bat Mitzvah and quinceñera celebrations, occur at ages 13 and 15 respectively, and all the Disney princesses appear to get picked up by charming princes and whisked off to a castle by the time they hit 16.

In formal terminology, the distinction seems pretty clear. In high school, there were boys’ and girls’ sports teams and in college, they become men’s and women’s teams. Journalistic standards dictate that individuals over the age of 18 are always referred to as men and women. Harvard’s fight song is even called “10,000 Men of Harvard.”

Yet when I look around me in the dining hall, I definitely don’t see too many “men” present, and when I walk past the Women’s Center, I’m not sure the label is referring to me. For my male peers, there is the convenient label of “guy,” a term that is delightfully versatile enough to span the gap between boy and man and yet narrow enough to distinguish final club members from say, a tenured professor. There doesn’t seem to be a truly equivalent term for females—people are going to throw you odd looks if you constantly refer them as “gals.” Feminists in the 70s fought for the right to be called “women” instead of “girls” in acknowledgement of their status as independent, confident adults. But now the term “woman” is so loaded with age connotations that when a friend recently told me he was “seeing a woman,” I thought he meant he was having an affair with someone at least 10 years older, maybe even married.

As this labeling confusion indicates, the question of when adulthood begins is unsettled across culture. Plenty of writers today have waxed eloquent about the trend of twenty-somethings that spend years in a sheltered limbo between adolescence and adulthood—a 2005 Times article called them “twixters.” People are settling down later, having children later, and it seems we can wait as long as we want to grow up. We are the product of society in which, perhaps more than ever before, age is really just a number. Independence and responsibility, the things that American society tends to associate with adulthood, are embraced by different people at different times.

And in choosing to attend Harvard, we have all implicitly made that decision to put adult life on hold. Most of my high school classmates at other universities now live in apartments and pay their own bills. Explaining my own living situation comes off a little humorous at times; well, I live in a House—no, not like a sorority house—like, um, the Houses in Harry Potter. Without having to worry about grocery shopping or dividing up rent, Harvard students are able to devote almost all their energy to their academics and extracurriculars. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but the ability to incorporate Hegel and Foucault references into cocktail conversations and juggle 10 activities at a time doesn’t make you any more mature than your were in high school. Elite liberal arts colleges like this one produce intellectually sophisticated and highly accomplished individuals, but many of us won’t be able to consider ourselves full adults until well after graduation.

Maybe one day I will wake, look myself in the mirror, and finally be able to call myself a “woman” without laughing about it. But until then, here’s to being a 20-year-old girl.

Adrienne Y. Lee ’12, a Crimson associate editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House.