Aaron Alcorn, Case Western Reserve University

Long before I had given serious thought to my dissertation on boyhood and model airplanes, Carroll mentioned in passing that age might have real potential as a category of analysis alongside race, class, and gender. Although Carroll has had a sustained interested in childhood and gender (from his essay “Toys, Technology, and Sex Roles in America, 1920-1940” to his most recent work on a planned monograph on technology and play), I found this idea about the potential of age intriguing. Taking the cultural construction of boyhood as a point of departure, my paper considers the importance of adult-sanctioned workshop set aside for aspiring young inventors in the early twentieth century. Profiling a small group of hobbyist model airplane builders in and around New York between 1906 and 1914, I demonstrate how workshops formed inside and outside the home fostered boys’ experimentation with technology and their identities as technologists. Space offered boys a sense of independence, but as adults routinely regulated access, these areas served as metaphors for the intermediary position of adolescence as a period of life between the near-total dependency of young children and the imagined freedom of adulthood.