Why Illinois had different drinking ages for different genders
Until quite recently, drinking in
America has been strongly associated with maleness. According to one study, as
late as 1990 only 80 percent of Americans thought it was acceptable for a woman
to be drinking at a bar with friends, compared with 85 percent who thought it
was fine for a man to do so.
We can thank
many things for the change in social norms: The increase in college attendance
among women, feminism, and of course, Sex and the City and its river of cosmopolitans.
But some
places were ahead of their time. I recently came across this map, which shows that until 1961
in Illinois, the drinking age was lower for women than it was for men.
It was the only state where women could knock one back at 18, but men had to
wait until 21.
To find out
why, I reached out to Joy Getnick, a State University of New York at Geneseo
who has studied drinking ages. It
turns out the Illinois provision was tied to the age of majority—when someone
is considered an adult—which was lower for women.
“The premise behind the old laws had
been that women matured faster than men, and perhaps married younger than men,”
Getnick said in an email. “By 1961 those views had changed. Women matured (or
didn't) similarly to men, and there were growing concerns about younger women
buying older (but still not yet legal) men drinks, and all of the social (and
legal) problems that went with that.
Some
considered the law an outrage, however, long before then—mostly because it
cramped men’s style. A 1948
editorial in the Chicago
Tribune called it one
of the “silliest laws” on the books:
A married
man under 21, alone or accompanied by his wife or others, may not be served
intoxicating beverages ... A law that tells girls they can start their public
liquor drinking at 18, and tells boys they must wait three years, places boys
in the embarrassing position of trying to persuade their girl friends not to
frequent taverns until they (the boys) are old enough to accompany them.
In 1961,
Illinois Governor Otto Kerner signed
a law making the drinking age 21
for both genders. Shortly after, a 19-year-old woman named Virginia Wantrobafiled
suit, saying the new restriction infringed on her right to have the occasional
frothy afternoon cocktail. (Her boss, it’s worth noting, was the attorney for the state’s Beverage Dealer’s
Association.) You’ve got to fight, as they say, for your
