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Some more notes on the reason and way the age of majority in the US changed in the 1970s.
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.
–Under Age: Redefining Legal Adulthood in 1970s America (abstract)
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