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]
----------------------------------------------------------------------