Saturday, August 24, 2019

Age of majority

In the English-speaking world at least, ages of majority are weird.  It tends to be 18, 19 or 21.  But never 20.  Why are they avoiding the only round number in the general range?

I know the age of majority of 21 originally comes from England centuries ago - it was the age of majority for the purposes of marriage without a parent's consent in Jane Austen - but it's not easy (and certainly not readily googleable) to find how they landed on that particular age.

People's instinctive answer is going to be "because that's when you stop being teenage-like and start being adult-like," but I wonder about the actual cause and effect there. It's a lot easier to actually be adult-like when you are legally and socially permitted to! Fifteen-year-olds may well be sufficiently adult-like within a social structure that allows them adult roles, and doesn't require them to be in child roles (e.g. in school) by default and/or to achieve long-term success.

The other interesting thing about 21 as an age of majority (at least in historical England) is people under the age of 21 could easily fulfill adult roles in a society where formal education was far from the norm and there were no other obligations specific to teenagers. A 20-year-old, or a 17-year-old, or probably even a 13-year-old, would have been doing work that is comparable to their parents' work. I wonder why societal structures kept them legally dependent for what seems like an awfully long time?

As someone who was a legal adult for years before I was an adult economic actor (I was a full-time student until the age of 22, but a legal adult at 18) I wonder what it would have been like to be an adult economic actor but not a legal adult?

I'm going to have to find a book on this or something - there's a lot of interesting stuff in here, and I'm sure some of it has been documented as history and/or sociology.

And I still wonder why the age of majority is so rarely the nice round number of 20?

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