In the US turning 18 is arguably the most important age in our lives, both culturally
and legally.
But have you ever wondered: why is 18 considered an adult?
So around the world 18 is a momentous age and the US is no exception.
At 18 US teenagers can vote, enlist in the army, work full time, sign contracts, buy
tobacco, and move out of their parents’ house.
But even though we think of 18 as the magic number when kids suddenly grow up,
how did we settle on this age as opposed to others?
You might think it’s because of some sort of physiological explanation.
Well kinda, but not really.
While most people are done with puberty by 18, many people are not.
Plus recent studies have found that people’s brains are still growing and maturing
until age 25.
And let’s face it: people who can’t rent a car don’t always make the most adult decisions.
Another easy explanation could be that 18 is considered an “adult” because of long
standing tradition.
But that’s also not really true.
In fact 18 as the legal, nationwide voting age wasn’t enshrined in the US constitution
until 1971.
And until World War 2, the draft age was 21.
Additionally, outside of the US coming of age ceremonies vary pretty considerably on
the official age of adulthood.
So how did we arrive at 18?
Well to answer the question of how and when we started thinking of people as “adults”
we actually need to reverse our thinking and ask: how did the concept of a “childhood” emerge?
And shift from a mere fact of life to a whole category of people that need special rules?
At the beginning of the 16th century, kids as young as 7 were expected to work and were
often being prepared for adult labor.
However, most of this work took place either within the home, as agricultural labor, or
during apprenticeships were kids learned a ` trade.
The shift of kids to a protected class really kicks off during the industrial revolution.
It wasn’t that children were necessarily working in greater numbers, but rather that
the rapid spread of industrialization altered the quality, duration, and danger of child labor.
In the 18th century and going into the 19th century, poor children were working
in factories outside of their home and without parental supervision.
They were also working for more hours without the seasonal breaks that were sometimes a
part of farm labor.
Plus they were working in overcrowded factories that had poor living conditions, unsafe practices,
and very low wages.
Yeah, so not great to be a kid.
By the early to mid-19th century we see more activists across Europe and the US increase
their efforts to protect and “save children” from the horrors of abuse and poverty.
This is mirrored the rise in novels about scrappy young orphans with soot-covered faces
like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations and Les Miserables.
And, shoutout to the surprisingly accurate American Girl Doll Samantha.
In the 18th and 19th century we see an increase in the spread of education for young boys,
not just the wealthy.
And by the early 20th century we start to get laws in Europe and the US making schooling
mandatory up to certain ages like 16 or, you guessed it, 18.
In 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the minimum work age at 16
during the school year, 14 for after school jobs, and 18 for dangerous jobs.
So the 19th and 20th centuries were big turning points for the concept of kids just being kids.
But it’s important to note these 19th century evolutions weren’t extended to all children.
Scholar Robin Bernstein notes in her work Racial Innocence that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin presents us with two child characters
Eva and Topsy.
White Eva is represented as having the pure hearted innocence of childhood, while black
Topsy is represented as an out of control child who has been corrupted into bad behavior
because of the evils of slavery.
So it’s Topsy’s link to the forced labor and the attendant ills of slavery that ‘corrupts’
her in Stowe’s abolitionist novel, requiring that she be “saved” and educated both
formally and through her proximity to Eva.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin is also contemporary with 19th century debates on child labor for European
and white American children.
Yet false arguments that represented minority groups as “perpetual children” were often
utilized as a justification for enslavement and forced labor.
So childhood as a category of protection from work was often in flux.
So that leaves us with our final question: how did 18 become the legal crossroads between
kids and adults?
Well, part of the problem with defining an “adult” in modern Western society is the
lack of formal initiation rights.
Many societies throughout history have had a very well defined rituals like the Hamar
Cow Jumping, Apache Sunrise Ceremony or Japanese See Gin No Hi that conferred adult status
and responsibilities on those who went through them.
In the US the closest approximation we have to formally granting adult status is the ability
to vote, which technically makes you a full citizen.
And up until the 26th amendment, the voting age was a state by state decision.
But the idea of a national voting age at 18 really begins with our good friend
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
During WW2 FDR lowered the draft age from 21 to 18.
But the voting age for national elections remained 21 in every state.
This outraged young men sent off to war, popularizing the slogan “Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."
And some states agreed.
Georgia was the first state to lower the voting age to 18, in 1943.
But many kept the voting age at 21.
This WW2 slogan and debate flared up again during the draft in the Vietnam War, because
Baby Boomers weren’t too crazy about being sent into danger if they couldn’t have a
say in the elected officials shipping them there.
But it was a fight to get it to 18.
In 1969, 60 resolutions to lower the voting age were put up and rejected by congress.
Fortunately in 1970 an amendment was added the Voting Rights act of 1965 that established
18 as the voting age.
But even that was challenged in the Supreme Court Case (Oregon vs. Mitchell).
Which gave the wonky result of the Federal voting age being 18, but states still having
the power to make their local elections 21.
Fortunately, it was finally resolved when the 26th amendment was passed in 1971, which
lowered the voting age in all elections to 18.
Although it’s not always framed this way, the fight surrounding the voting age and the
age of majority also somewhat mirrors other civil rights discussions of the 20th century.
Debates about the voting age were also occurring alongside other debates like the Voting Rights
Act of 1965, which extended voting protections to African Americans and underserved communities,
and the increased exposure in the press of movements such as the gay liberation movement
and women’s rights.
All of these centered on the key question of not only how old you had to be to be considered
an adult, but who would be recognized as a full citizen under the law.
So how does it all add up?
18 may the age we’ve settled on as adult, but it isn’t for entirely natural reasons.
It seems that 18 has more to do with the combination of the industrial revolution and the development
of labor laws, FDR lowering the draft age during World War II, and the corresponding
fight for full citizenship.
So: do you think 18 is the right age for an “adult”?
Any theories with evidence about why adulting has such a varied history in the US?
Let us know in the comments and we’ll see you next week!
Hey guys.
So we got some really great questions about our episode on the Origin of US Healthcare.
Our first shout out goes to Joshua Cooley on YouTube who mentioned that he ended up
reading the rest of President Truman’s 1945 speech to congress after watching the video.
For all of our viewers we put the works cited list down in the video description of every
episode.
Feel free to scroll through them so we can expand our conversations!
Also on YouTube firewordsparkler asked “You mentioned that employers don’t cover other
kinds of insurance--like property insurance--could you talk about where that came from?”
So that's a really great question.
Employers use all sorts of incentives to hire new workers on a case by case basis and those
policies vary by workplace and position.
(I even worked somewhere once that paid for employees' dry cleaning!)
While these types of incentives are usually seen as perks of a job, health insurance is
taken for granted as a necessary part of any job package and many Americans evaluate positions
based on whether they are offered health insurance or not.
So for this episode I wanted to know why we assume healthcare is normal for employers
to pay for.
In doing research I found that the motivation was less that employers think health insurance
is more important than other types of coverage, but because tax breaks were offered to companies
that provided health insurance specifically, which spread the growth of an employer based
system in the US.
If you're interested in longer readings on that topic you can check out the articles
written by Professor Melissa Thomasson at the University of Miami (who has a lot of
expertise in this area) and some other shorter articles we flagged in the works cited page.
Some of you were interested in the story we gave about incubators and Coney Island freak
shows (for perhaps obvious reasons) so we’d like to give a brief run down on that off
beat medical history.
Dr. Martin Couney ran the exhibit from 1903 until 1943.
Dr. Couney first saw the life saving device at the 1876 Berlin Exposition. He kept it free
of cost for patients by turning it into a freak show. And charging audience members 25 cents a head.
And Couney’s own daughter was one of the babies featured in the exhibit.
So actually, he was a pretty great guy with a really odd idea.