Under Age: Redefining Legal Adulthood in 1970S America
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UNDER AGE: REDEFINING LEGAL ADULTHOOD IN 1970S AMERICA A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Timothy J. G. Cole May 2016 Examining Committee Members: Beth Bailey, Advisory Chair, Department of History, Temple University David Farber, Department of History, Temple University Bryant Simon, Department of History, Temple University Daniel Hart, External Member, Department of Psychology and Department of Childhood Studies, Rutgers University-Camden © Copyright 2015 by Timothy J. G. Cole All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, state and federal lawmakers made a number of unprecedented changes to the minimum age laws that define the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood in the United States. By altering the voting age and the legal age of majority during the early 1970s, legislators effectively lowered the legal age of adulthood from twenty-one to eighteen, and launched a broader, more wide-ranging debate over other minimum age laws that would preoccupy legislators for much of the decade that followed. These reforms can be grouped into two distinct stages. Early 1970s reforms to the voting age and age of majority placed a great deal of faith in eighteen- to twenty-year-old Americans’ ability to make mature, responsible decisions for themselves, and marked a significant departure from the traditional practice of treating young people as legal adults at the age of twenty-one. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, a second set of reforms revoked much of the faith that legislators had placed in the nation’s young people, raising some key minimum age limits – such as the drinking age – and expanding adults’ ability to supervise and control teenaged youth. This dissertation analyzes political and public debates over the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood during the 1970s, focusing in particular on reforms to the voting age, the age of majority, the drinking age, and the minimum age laws that regulate teenagers’ sexuality. It seeks to explain how and why American lawmakers chose to alter these minimum age laws during the 1970s, and how they decided which age should be the threshold for granting young people specific adult rights and responsibilities. The dissertation suggests that legislators often had difficulty accessing information and expertise that they could use to make well-informed, authoritative iii decisions on the subject of minimum age laws. Instead, they often based their choices on broader public images and perceptions of the nation’s young people, and on their subjective experiences of interacting with American youth. Throughout the 1970s, a wide range of lawmakers, activists, and interest groups – including many young people – sought to control the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood, both by lobbying lawmakers directly and by trying to alter public images and perceptions of the nation’s youth. During the early 1970s, some young activists, liberal lawmakers, and interest groups met with considerable success in their attempts to grant young people greater adult rights and responsibilities at earlier ages, successfully framing eighteen- to twenty-year-old youth as mature, responsible young people who were quite capable of shouldering adult rights and duties. But these positive perceptions of young people were short-lived. By the mid-1970s, they were being supplanted by much more negative and unsettling images of young people who were thought to be exhibiting “adult” behaviors too soon, and were portrayed as being both in danger and a danger to American society. As a result, lawmakers became increasingly focused on protecting and controlling young people in their late teens and early twenties, and on drawing clear, firm boundaries between childhood and adulthood. These shifts demonstrate that images and perceptions of American youth played a key role in shaping 1970s reforms to the legal boundaries between childhood and adulthood. Rather than the product of a sober, careful evaluation of young Americans’ capacity to make responsible decisions for themselves, these reforms were often the product of adult Americans’ visceral, emotional responses to shifting public perceptions of the nation’s youth. iv For Andrea v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing a dissertation is hard. I knew that when I started, but somehow I did not realize just how difficult it was going to be until the process was well underway. I never would have made it this far without the help and the support of the people who kept me going, kept me happy, and kept me healthy along the way. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my advisor, Professor Beth Bailey, whose encouragement, advice, wisdom and patience has been invaluable throughout this process. Though they may not always have realized it at the time, several of my fellow graduate students at Temple University provided both me and this dissertation with a shot in the arm when it was needed most. In particular, I would like to thank Benjamin Brandenburg, Matt Johnson, Abby Perkiss, Dan Royles, Lindsay Helfman, and Alex Elkins for their friendship and support. My parents, Ron and Carol Cole, my siblings (Andrew, Ethan, and Yolande), Margaret Peyto, David and Linda Peyto, and Dunja and Hrvoje Lukatela have all made sure that I enjoyed life, kept my spirits up, and persevered during the writing process. So, too, did my good friend George Wong. For that, I am eternally grateful to all of them. My wife, Andrea Cole, has about as much invested in this dissertation as I do; her support, faith, understanding and love are what got me this far. This dissertation is dedicated to her. The archivists and librarians whose hard work helped to make this dissertation possible are too numerous to name, but I would like to single out the staff of the Minnesota Historical Society, the California State Archives, the New Jersey State Library and Archives, the Reagan Library, and the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History for special thanks. My research and writing was funded, in part, by a number of grants from the Temple University History Department, Graduate School, and College of vi Liberal Arts, including a University Fellowship from Temple University, the Temple University History Department’s James A. Barnes Award and Okomoto Research Award, and a Temple University Dissertation Completion Grant. Special thanks go to Professors David Farber, Bryant Simon, and Daniel Hart for serving on my dissertation committee. Along with Professor Bailey, they have offered very valuable guidance, encouragement and advice, and I particularly value the comments and queries that they raised at my dissertation defense. While they were less involved with the dissertation itself, I would also like to thank Temple University Professors Andrew Isenberg, Kenneth Kusmer, William Hitchcock, and Arthur Schmidt for their insight and encouragement during the earlier stages of my studies at Temple. I would also like to extend a special thanks to my MA advisor at the University of Calgary, Professor Elizabeth Jameson, who helped me to develop some of the earliest questions and ideas which led me to this dissertation topic, taught me a great deal about academic research and writing, and introduced me to Professor Bailey. As I was researching and writing this dissertation, I found a wonderfully supportive community of scholars in the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth. I have found the society’s conferences, events, and publications to be tremendously interesting and stimulating, and I consider even my briefer conversations with scholars such as Leslie Paris, Rebecca de Schweinitz, Michael Grossberg, Corinne Field, Nicholas Syrett, Susan Eckleman, Rachel Coleman, Katharine Rollwagen, James Trepanier, and Julie Stein to have been very helpful and rewarding. Corinne and Nick deserve special thanks for inviting me to contribute to their wonderful collection of essays on the subject of chronological age in history, Age in America, and for their thoughts and comments on vii my contribution (portions of which are reproduced in chapters eight and nine of this dissertation). Last but not least, I would like to thank my wonderful high school history teacher, Ray Verbeek, without whom I never would have started down the path that brought me here, and my son, Joseph Henry Cole, whose birth and first year of life brought me a tremendous amount of happiness and joy as I was finishing the writing and preparing for my defense. I’m learning that time flies when you’re a parent – it’s my great hope that I will make every moment count. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii DEDICATION .....................................................................................................................v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .........................................................................................................1 2. OLD ENOUGH TO FIGHT, OLD ENOUGH TO VOTE? THE DEBATE OVER YOUNG PEOPLE’S QUALIFICATIONS FOR VOTING.............................48 3. LET US VOTE: THE CAMPAIGN TO LOWER THE VOTING AGE ..................104 4. HALF LEGAL: LOWERING THE LEGAL AGE OF MAJORITY ........................147 5. VANISHING VIRGINITY: THE NEW VISIBILITY