“Old Enough to Live”
“Old Enough to Live”
Age, Alcohol, and Adulthood in the United States, 1970–1984
This chapter explains how reforms of the 1970s and 1980s redefined eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds as legal adults who can’t legally drink alcohol. In the early 1970s, state and federal governments granted eighteen-year-olds most of the rights of adults. Many states lowered their minimum legal drinking ages as well. While the new age of adulthood had widespread support, Timothy Cole contends that some parents, teachers, and politicians worried that they had lost too much authority over rebellious youth. Seizing on scattered evidence that young people were more likely than their elders to cause drunk driving accidents, legislators and reformers campaigned for a higher drinking age. Cole argues that efforts to raise the drinking age arose not from a concern with drunk driving per se but from a broader effort to control young people’s behavior and shore up parental power. In 1984, Congress approved the National Minimum Drinking Age Act (NMDA), using highway funding as a mechanism to impose a drinking age of twenty-one. As Cole concludes, this reform created a new status for “individuals who were both ‘adults’ and ‘underage.’”
Keywords: eighteen, twenty-one, adults, adulthood, drinking age, drunk driving, parental power, National Minimum Drinking Age Act, underage, alcohol
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