Listmates -- My understanding from reading Jim Mosher's paper quite a
while ago (reference below) is that age restrictions on drinking are
mostly a post-Repeal phenomenon in the U.S. -- long after the temperance
movement had turned its attention to youth education on alcohol, for
instance.  My undersatanding (until corrected) is that the
prohibitionist movement would have had very little interest in
prohibition just for those under some specified age.  

James F. Mosher, The history of youthful drinking laws: implications for
current policy, pp. 11-38 in: Henry Wechsler, ed., Minimum-drinking-age
Laws.  Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1980.

        I did some research in Ontario on present-day attitudes to the
"social clock", as it has been called in the sociological literature --
the answer to the question, at what age is it OK to [fill in the blank]
(regardless of what the law says)?  We asked Ontario adults this
question about 15 different behaviours, including getting a fulltime
job, driving a car by oneself, going on a date, having sex, living
together with a boy/girlfriend, buying a lottery ticket, smoking a
cigarette, drinking a beer, buying a six-pack of beer, trying marijuana,
etc.  Respondents could volunteer "it's never OK", and percentages doing
this ranged from 0 to about 45% for trying marijuana.  Among those
giving an age, the mean age for all but one behaviour was jammed in the
2½ years from 17.4 (buying a lottery ticket) to 20.1 (moving in with a
partner).  ("Go on a date" was 16.2).  Not big differences between
attitudes concerning boys and girls. 
        We asked the same question of Ontario teenagers themselves for
cigarettes, marijuana, beer, and buying a six-pack of beer.  The
16-year-olds gave a lower age on average (about their own age, from 16
for cigarette and marijuana to 17.6 for buying a six-pack) than the 12-
or 14-year-olds.  But the age the 16-year-olds gave was only a little
older than the age given by adults.
        Meanwhile:  legal age in Ontario for cigarettes 18, for beer 19.
        Mean actual age of first using cigarettes and beer: 12; of first
using marjuana 14.
        Canadian teenagers by and large share with adults a normative
clock about when particular behaviours are OK.  But they mostly start
using well below that normative time -- although the use is furtive, and
that structures the patterns (sporadic, consume whatever supplies are at
hand).
        It would be wonderful to extend this kind of analysis back in
time and cross-culturally.  The European Union recently tried to reach
agreement on a minimum age for drinking. They decided that this was a
culturally specific matter, but I think that there should indeed be a
minimum age.  Even relaxed Denmark adopted (for the first time) a
minimum age of 15 for sales for off-premises consumption, after a furor
there about "alcopops".
        Ontario adult paper: Angela Paglia & Robin Room, How unthinable
and at what age?: adult opinions about the 'social clock' for contested
behaviour by teenagers, Journal of Youth Studies 1:295-314, 1998.
        Ontario youth paper: I just gave it at a meeting -- e-mail me if
you want an e-copy.  Robin
 
     
-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Tlusty [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, 1 May 2001 4:26 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: youth and alcoholic beverages


As an expansion of Rod's comments on alcohol and youth before the 19th
century, here are some observations from the 16th-17th centuries...
It's
certainly true that throughout this period, most official advice was
based
on physical beliefs about the heat in alcohol and the youthful body
(those
over 40, as long as they were men, were advised to be quite liberal in
their drinking habits...!).  But there were social considerations in
pre-modern European society regarding age as well as gender - while
virtually everyone, including small children, was given some alcohol to
drink (a little wine mixed with water functioned as Kool-Aid for early
modern Germans), the right to drink socially and publically, or
generally
engage in drinking bouts, was a right of adult men only.  I don't doubt
that young boys did it from time to time, and there are occasional
reports
of a group of "boys" drinking (a term which in modern German could be
either Knappe or Knabe), but without specific ages - this implies that
they
were apprentices, which normally would be quite young, but in some
cases,
weavers for example, they could easily be over 20.  But where age is
mentioned, I can honestly say that in all of the hundreds of cases I've
read of people being drunk or being involved in tavern drinking bouts in
early modern Germany, I've never seen anyone report their age as less
than
16.  Granted, they weren't always very precise about their age ("says
he's
about 16 or 17"). But there does seem to have been some sort of
generally
accepted social restraint at work.  So where "age" as a specific
chronological boundary may not have been important, there were definite
boundaries between age-related identities (apprentice vs. journeymen,
boy
vs. man).  Whether this can be defined as a moral issue, or whether is
was
related to physical notions, or whether it is simply a status issue
(boys
didn't have enough money to buy their own drinks), I'm not sure.  This
is
also just an impression and not something I've been able to do targeted
research on - but I'll keep looking!
cheers
Ann Tlusty

At 04:04 PM 4/30/01 -0400, you wrote:
>You raise a lot of central questions here, David, and I hope you've set
>off a very interesting thread.
>
>One of the key questions is the way cultures construct ages and
>generations.  It's a commonplace, I suppose, that the chronological age
of
>most individuals was not terribly important until quite recently.
Until
>minimum ages for drinking, driving, voting, retirement, and so on were
>regulated, who cared how old anyone was?  True, there might be
significant
>ages related minority and majority and the legal capacity to marry

>without parental consent or to inherit property. But they probably
>affected relatively few people in western societies until the
>eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
>
>One survey I did years ago of people in late eighteenth-century France
>compared the ages they gave and their ages as determined by birth
>records.  Only 68% got their age right. A higher degree of accuracy in
>knowing ages is surely a necessary underpinning for any age-based
>restriction on drinking.
>
>Of course, for millennia there has been advice on the relationship of
age
>and alcohol. (I give some in my history of wine.) Much of it was based
on
>characterizations of the youthful body as hot and thereful vulnerable
to
>combustion if "hot" beverages like alcohol were consumed).
>
>What's notable about the 19th and 20th centuries, when age restrictions
>began to appear consistently in all jurisdictions, is that it was based
>more clearly on moral rather than physical arguments: that children
were
>innocent, vulnerable, and that alcohol was inappropriate for them. Of
>course, this also coincided with the rise of temperance arguments and
>of the wider availability of alternative beverages.
>
>Shifts in concepts of childhood and youth are clearly central to the
>history of alcohol regulation, but it's difficult to separate them
(even
>for analytical purposes) from other social, econimic and cultural
changes.
>
>I'll follow this thread with interest. I'm currently completing a
history
>of alcohol (for the University of North Carolina Press) and I'm sure to
>learn something that will help me on this.
>
>Rod Phillips
>
>
>David Fahey writes:
>>
>> The more I study alcohol history the more that I begin to realize the
>> extent of my ignorance.  Perhaps ATHG subscribers can help me in
regards
>> youth and alcoholic beverages.  I assume that a large part of the
problem
>> is how a society defines childhood.  For instance, in recent years in
the
>> USA, childhood has been both enlarged chronologically (university
students
>> are not expected to be as responsible for their actions as had people
of
>> the same age a hundred years previously) and also narrowed (adult
rights in
>> voting and sexuality for teenagers).  I assume too that the varying
role of
>> formal law in different societies is relevant, as is the kind of
alcoholic
>> beverages (for instance, wine or whiskey, low-alcohol beer or regular
beer,
>> etc.).  And, of course, minimum legal ages for drinking seldom
coincide
>> with practice.  There are all sorts of other considerations, as for
>> example, religion (notably, Islam) and the role alcohol plays in
social

>> rituals, etc.  Any suggestions?
>>
>> David M. Fahey Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA
<[log in to unmask]>
>>
>
>
>
>Roderick Phillips
>Editor, Journal of Family History/
>Professor, Department of History
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Carleton University
>1125 Colonel By Drive
>Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1S 5B6
>Tel: (613) 520-2600 ext 2824; fax: (613) 520-2819
>Email address: [log in to unmask]
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>