I tried searching Cecil’s archive’s and found nothing.
What is the origin behind the ages 18 and 21 as “legal” age?
Why 18? Why 21? What made whomever persons or party arrive at these specific numbers as being legal?
(you can even toss in 15 if you want to include driver’s & work permits)
Why did they pick those magical numbers? Well you’ve got to draw a line somewhere, and those ages probably sounded about right at the time and in that place. The relevant ages vary in the different American jurisdictions, of course. Except for the 21-year drinking age, for which you can thank that virtuous defender of state’s rights, Ronald Reagan, who signed into law 23 U.S.C. 158.
Other ages are sometimes used.
Before the universal 21 drinking age, Idaho used to have a drinking age of 19, which I thought made a lot of sense - two major “buffer zones” into adulthood in this country are college and the military. You should be able to start doing the things adults do when you enter those zones, often at age 18 or so, following high school. 21 is too high an age. On the other hand, you really do not want high school students to be of drinking age, and too many high school kids will hit 18 before they graduate. 19 is a good compromise.
I’ve been wondering that for a long time also. It does seem rather arbitrary.
When, exactly, do you become an adult? Is it 18? If so, how can you be considered an adult, have the right to vote, right to smoke, right to buy pornography, but you can’t buy alcohol? That makes no sense.
WAG:
Eighteen is the age when most people have graduated high school. If they don’t go to college and they do leave their parents house, then they need the rights of an adult to survive.
Twenty-one is tougher. Perhaps TPTB didn’t like the thought of teens (technically people up to 19 years old) having access to alcohol. Twenty would have done it, but then maybe they thought a buffer year between teenagehood and drinking adulthood was needed. Hence 21. Also on a numerogical standpoint, 21 is a charmed number. It’s the product of 2 numbers - 3 and 7 - that have held mystical signifigance for millennia.
A WAG regarding why 21 was traditionally chosen.
(At least I’m assuming that this was the “traditional” milestone, because I seem to remember a great deal of controversy in the 70s when Ontario lowered the age to 18, and then a couple years later raised it to 19. For drinking, at least. You can still vote at 18.)
This milestone is referred to as the “age of majority”. Was 21 more or less the median age at the time when this milestone was chosen, and thus it was chosen because it defined the older half of the population?
Of course, this would be going back a ways, but might be the reason.