@JLeslie Here is the discussion from a gaming forum that I was thinking about when I made my previous post. Most especially, post #15:
“The age of consent has steadily increased in industrial societies in so small part due to the social effects of the indistrial revolution. The need for more education combined with more labor saving devices resulted in people spending more and more time in school. It began as an artifical social construct called ‘childhood’, which justified mandatory government provided schooling. As educational requirement increased newer age classess were invinted so that this mandatory schooling could be extended. Now, with college education being almost necessary for survival a 22 year old is considered a child in some respects.”
…and #16:
“In the 19th century it was legal to marry children as young as 10 in the United States. Now that puberty is earlier (girls in the US have their first blood at age 8 with some regularity thanks to good nutrition and exposure to estrogen analogues in endemic pollutants), the age of consent is later.
“I would say that after the “purity movements” of the arly 20th century it has become basically unthinkable in the US to seriously entertain the idea of having sex with 10 year olds whether they have regular periods or not. Scroll the clock back a hundred and fifty years, and the general thinking was that it was laudable to start children into a monogomous sexual relationship before conception was even possible to make extra certain that the next generation was within wedlock.”
While no discussion about the age of majority (“adulthood”) is complete without a long discussion about sex, just think about that last statement from a strictly “What is adult?” perspective for a moment. Think about how societal norms have changed, and legislation has followed suit over the years.