The Moral Hierarchies of Age Standards: The UN Debates a Common Minimum

Marriage Age, 1951–1962

ASHWINI TAMBE

Legal Age Standards Have Always been a shorthand for marking something else, most
frequently thresholds of vulnerability or ability.1 Such standards are challenging enough to
devise at the state or national level, but they are especially fraught at the intergovernmental
level. An intriguing example is a mid-twentieth-century effort by the United Nations to set a
common minimum age for marriage across its member countries. From 1951 to 1962, UN
deliberations over the drafts of two conventions—one focused on slavery, and the other
explicitly on marriage—dramatized national differences in marriage age standards. They
entailed elaborate posturing and coding of racial difference, and became the grounds for
expressing moral hierarchies.2 At a time of rapid decolonization in Africa and Asia, these
differences in age standards took on a special valence as markers of readiness for sovereignty:
they became a proxy for expressing imperial hierarchies of race, maturity, and civilization.

The most vexing challenge in setting minimum age standards in the realm of sexual practices is
the variation in social understandings of sexual maturity. When the UN first began deliberating the
question of marriage age, some delegates held that puberty, or more specifically menarche, was a basic
minimum threshold for girls.

Hal. 451

Yet over the course of the debates, more delegates argued for specific numerical age standards.
Several sought to set an age that was higher than when menarche typically occurred, declaring that
emotional maturation, and not just physiological maturation, was a prerequisite. Apart from illustrating
the changing social expectations for psychological maturity before marriage, the objection to puberty
standing alone as an appropriate threshold also reflected a more technical sensibility about the need for
legal precision. Since puberty was not easy to define with publicly visible markers, there was no
decorous way to establish menarche as evidence; using a numerical age boundary seemed more
congruent with the needs of the law.3

The very use of chronological age markers arose in colonial contexts of imposing modern
governmentality. As Ishita Pande and Corrie Decker explain in their contributions to this roundtable, the
introduction of numerical age markers in colonized countries displaced other, relational, understandings
of age. Colonial dynamics are my focus here as well, but during a later period when chronological age
was more widely held to be a measure of individual capacity. Representatives of formerly colonized
countries did not, for instance, make the argument that significant segments of their citizenry did not
know their ages, even if that might have been true. Most member states accepted that chronological
age appeared to be the best basis on which to regulate early marriage. Indeed, by this point, the use of
chronological age was so normalized in the intergovernmental official imagination that to make such an
argument risked appearing primitive or anti modern. Even though chronological age was not the only
legitimate means of measuring maturity, UN delegates in the 1950s had little choice but to make their
arguments using this shared metric. Agreeing on a common numerical age standard was, however, not
easy: choosing a particular minimum age became a debate about national sovereignty as much as a
disagreement about adolescent development and sexuality.

While The Un Was Still a fledgling organization in the early 1950s, it took on the question of what
an appropriate age for marriage should be across all countries of the world. At first glance, it might
appear odd that an organization committed to preventing war would have taken on the complex
question of marriage age. The genesis of this focus lay, interestingly, in an effort to expand the meanings
of slavery. In 1949, in the aftermath of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN General
Assembly called on its Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to report on the “nature and extent” of
slavery.4 On May 4, 1951, the Ad Hoc Committee on Slavery, which was appointed to examine this topic,
reported that “apart from slavery in its crudest form, a number of institutions or practices analogous to
slavery, or resembling slavery in some of their effects, still existed in various parts of the world,”
including forced marriage and child marriage.5

Hal. 452

ECOSOC declared that the 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention needed to be updated. It
was during the preparations for a supplementary convention that the idea of a common minimum age
for marriage was first floated.

The imperial dynamics that underlay the formulation of this proposal crucially determined its fate.
The body tasked with drafting the 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery, called the Conference of
Plenipotentiaries, consisted of delegates from fifty-one states, including former and current imperial
powers such as Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Belgium. It also
included several former colonies, among them Argentina, Haiti, Guatemala, India, Pakistan, Sudan,
Canada, Australia, and the Philippines. The countries that first proposed and supported redefining
certain marriage practices as slavery were, incidentally, those that had been prime movers in the
transatlantic slave trade, Britain and Portugal.6 The record of negotiations (Travaux Préparatoires)
within the ten-member committee indicates that Britain’s initial drafts became the grounds on which
other delegates formulated their reactions.

In order for this anti-slavery document to clarify what free, rather than forced, marriage meant, it
was important to establish an age at which consent to marriage was possible. For this reason, Article 2
of the resolution recommended that states adopt a minimum age for marriage. The draft proposed by
the British delegate to the ten-member committee in 1954 initially specified a minimum age of sixteen
for boys and fourteen for girls. Significantly, representatives from Burma, Pakistan, and Ceylon, each a
former British colony, objected to various aspects of this proposal. The Burmese delegate pointed out
that Burma’s own laws actually set a higher age of consent than fourteen for girls and sixteen for boys.7
The Ceylonese delegate stated that under Ceylon’s Muslim Marriage and Divorce Act, girls below
puberty could get married with the approval of a qazi (judge).8 The Syrian and Indian representatives
were concerned that the UN seemed to require “marriage officers,” who potentially would supplant
religious authorities in governing marriage practices.9 The delegate from Korea also expressed
misgivings about the language of the draft, stressing that the free consent of both parties seemed to
“abrogate the practice of parental consent to [a child’s] marriage.”10

The fear implicit in such comments was that marriage on an Anglo-American model, including a
chronologically determined minimum legal age, was being set up as the universal norm. Delegates of
British origin, including those representing non-governmental organizations, adopted a tutelary stance
vis-à-vis former colonies where many of the problematic practices were found: child marriage and
dowry were prevalent in countries in South Asia, and bride-price was common in parts of West Africa
and sub-Saharan Africa.

Hal. 453

Considerable attention was focused on areas of the world where puberty, rather than age, served
as a threshold, and where it was possible for third parties to give consent on behalf of minors—most
often, areas governed by Muslim personal laws.11 In response, the delegates from Sudan and Pakistan,
both former British colonies, went to great lengths to explain the practices that were prohibited by
Islamic marriage law.12

The turn to focusing on the deficiencies of newly independent states was in step with Britain’s
imperial history and its orientation in UN settings.13 Critical theorists of global governance have pointed
out how British colonialism, and notions of its civilizing mission, heavily influenced the early years of the
twentieth-century intergovernmental organizations.14 British claims to moral authority on the issue of
marriage age were, however, disingenuous, since the legal age of marriage in the country had been
twelve until 1929, and was lower than in several other European countries; child betrothals also had a
long history among the aristocracy in England.15 Nevertheless, insisting on an expanded definition of
slavery that relied on fixed age standards for marriage performed important ideological work in this
postwar moment of rapid decolonization. Most crucially, it deflected attention away from the European
states that were the principal perpetrators of the transatlantic slave trade. The focus now shifted to
many former colonies and newly independent states that were presented as contemporary sites
perpetuating slavery. In displacing abolitionist energies onto former colonies and how their states
regulated marriage, this move rehearsed the notion of the moral inadequacy of colonized and formerly
colonized peoples.16 Marriage age became framed as a measure of the moral worth of newly
independent countries entering this intergovernmental arena. Delegates from these countries were, in
turn, unable to refuse such terms, because to do so would undercut their own claims to modernity.
 After its initial salvo of proposing a specific common minimum legal age for marriage, Britain
retreated over the course of deliberations to adopt looser phrasing calling on member states “to
prescribe, where appropriate, suitable minimum ages of marriage.”

Hal, 454

In 1956, however, the Portuguese representative introduced stronger wording via an amendment
calling for a minimum age “preferably of not less than fourteen years.”17 The Canadian, French, and
Pakistani delegates urged caution in response, worrying that it would reduce support for the
amendment.18 When this phrasing of “fourteen years” was put to the vote, it was adopted by a vote of
twenty to one, with a strikingly high number of delegates—twenty—abstaining from voting.19 The final
version of the Supplementary Convention did not include mention of the age fourteen. Member states
were not yet ready to agree on using chronological age as a standard, much less on a particular age.

The 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery was ultimately not adopted with enthusiasm.
Only thirty countries became party to it, a lower number than the forty-six signatories for the original
1926 Slavery Convention—and at a time when the number of independent countries (and potential
signatories) in the world was much higher than in the 1920s.20 The debates about setting a minimum
marriageable age had rendered it too controversial.

Following the lukewarm adoption of this convention, Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN secretary-
general, in 1956 proposed a separate effort to study the variation in marriage practices around the globe
and arrive at an international convention to prevent early and forced marriage. The first step that
Hammarskjöld proposed was a fact-finding mission. A three-page multiple-choice questionnaire was
sent to all member countries asking for fine-grained detail about forms of marriage: what the minimum
age was below which a marriage was considered invalid; whether consent had to be granted by the wife,
by the husband, by both, or by the parents; and whether marriages were registered.21 The very task of
responding to the questionnaire pushed states to consider whether and what legal marriage age was
specified in their countries and how well it was enforced.

This renewed effort to imagine a common marriage age provoked defensive responses, again
most prominently from delegates representing formerly colonized countries. Many of those who
expressed opposition to a convention on marriage, such as India and Nigeria, saw themselves as leading
voices in the newly coalesced NonAligned Movement. This was an era of intense struggles for
decolonization, particularly on the African continent, where Britain, Portugal, and France were facing
significant resistance to imperial rule.22 In this light, it is significant that Britain and Portugal
spearheaded UN efforts to focus on marriage practices. The deliberations over this convention became a
staging ground for wider hostilities.

Hal. 455

The controversial nature of age standards is evident from a simple detail: the first draft of the UN
Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages,
submitted in 1959, did not even name an actual minimum age; it left a space blank where a number
should have appeared.23 Even proposing an age in this draft could have incited opposition. Age
standards had been framed by some as an infringement on national cultural sovereignty, and especially
so in the context of heightened anticolonial politics.

The very meanings of marriage itself also varied starkly: the act of marriage conferred a status
that was a crucial identity marker for girls, and in ways that were not strictly commensurable with age-
based logics of adulthood. As Ishita Pande and Corrie Decker explain in their contributions to this
roundtable, individual female subjects did not have uncontested legal entitlement to give consent in
India and Kenya; marriage contracts in those countries could be determined by parents who arranged
betrothals of girls before they reached puberty. Setting a fixed numerical common age standard, which
implicitly undermined the role of guardians, could have doomed the UN marriage treaty’s prospects.

Some of the opposition to age standards made in the name of national cultural sovereignty
reflected the views of mostly male elites.24 Feminist scholars of human rights have long observed this
worrisome tendency, and some theorists have rejected the nationalist patriarchal logics used to define
“cultural differences.”25 At the same time, those entities that advocated on behalf of women treated all
women as an undifferentiated category, and in unstated ethnocentric terms that did not account for
important differences in the meanings of age and marriage. Throughout the debates on both the 1956
Supplementary Convention on Slavery and the 1962 UN Convention on Consent to Marriage, the loudest
voices for raising the minimum age for marriage were representatives of women’s non-governmental
organizations, known collectively as the Liaison Committee of Women’s Organizations. Some member
groups, such as the International Alliance of Women and St. Joan’s International Social and Political
Alliance, emerged out of early-twentiethcentury social purity campaigns and struggles for suffrage in
their home countries, the United States and United Kingdom, while other groups, such as the
International Council of Social Democratic Women, relied on networks of internationalist socialist
agitation.26 Their reformist perspectives were, however, marred by a significantly imperialist
paternalism that viewed the globe through a hierarchical lens in which Anglo-U.S. perspectives
inevitably led the way. The representative of St. Joan’s International Social and Political Alliance, a
Catholic UK-based suffrage organization with UN consultative status, for example, declared that “it was
idle to expect the early cessation in backward areas of such customs as child marriage and other
primitive practices affecting women.”27

Hal. 456

The Anti-Slavery Society for the Protection of Human Rights, another British NGO, presumed that
Britain was the moral touchstone on matters related to marriage practices when it lamented: “the
concept of the husband as the head of the family persists even in societies such as the British where
women’s social equality of status is substantially accepted.”28 Despite positioning themselves as NGOs
speaking for all women, these organizations frequently reverted to their national allegiances in treating
British practices as the norm against which other parts of the world were measured.

Many of these non-governmental organizations played an important role in advocating for a

specific numerical marriage age that exceeded the typical age of menarche. The International Alliance of
Women, a non-governmental group founded by U.S. suffragists in 1902, submitted a statement to
ECOSOC in 1961 supporting sixteen years as the minimum age for marriage. It expressed the new
psychological reasoning about adolescence: “the age of sixteen should allow for some settlement of
normal emotional disturbances that aris[e] from puberty.”29 The delegate from the Catholic
International Union for Social Service also declared the importance of a universal UN convention that
repudiated puberty as a criterion:

The argument that the fixing of the minimum age should be a matter exclusively for the national
authorities was false and appeared to be based on the physiological fact that nubility varied from
region to region. If nubility was the only factor to be taken into account, it might perhaps be
undesirable to fix the minimum age for marriage in an international instrument. But as it was a
universal principle that a person under fourteen years of age was psychologically incapable of
consenting freely to his marriage owing to his lack of judgment, the argument in question fell to
the ground, since whatever the region under consideration, consent when given by a person
fourteen years of age was meaningless.30

The reference to “physiological” differences in this comment is an oblique reference to the idea that
girls matured early in tropical countries, necessitating a correspondingly low marriage age; I have
analyzed the roots of this climatological reasoning elsewhere.31 St. Joan’s Alliance took a strong stance
against such reasoning, observing that “the very countries whose climate was used as an excuse for
being content with a lower marriage age are now in the forefront of progress.” It noted that in Brazil,
Ethiopia, Jordan, and Tonga (countries where the climate was relatively warm), the marriageable age for
girls was over sixteen.32

Hal. 457

Members of this NGO observed that there remained “ninety-four countries where the marriage age is
under fifteen,” and that these were “not primarily tropical or semi-tropical countries, but include three
of the States of Australia, Ireland, Newfoundland, Quebec, Spain, and four States of the United States of
America.”33 Such examples powerfully countered the narrative that tropical countries required a lower
age for marriage.34

Although British and Portuguese national and non-governmental delegates’ early interventions in
these debates allowed them to signal their virtue and in turn provoked defensive reactions from several
delegates of former colonies, it is important to note that not all newly independent countries expressed
opposition to the convention. Delegates from several African countries, including Guinea, Congo, Liberia,
Togo, and Ethiopia, were vocal in calling for a change in marriage practices.35 There was no tidy
polarization between colonizers and formerly colonized, but delegates who offered strong objections to
aspects of the convention, such as those from Nigeria and India, represented large regional powers with
aspirations to lead the Non-Aligned Movement. The role played by the Soviet Union is also telling in this
regard. Despite its own history of setting a highwater mark for marriage age standards—the
marriageable age there had been raised to eighteen for both girls and boys in 1926—the USSR did not
play a forceful role in pushing for a higher minimum age. Instead, the Soviet representative on the
Commission on the Status of Women, Zoya Vasil’evna Mironova, voiced a caution: “It would not be
advisable to enter into too much detail, for it would then be necessary to take the circumstances and
hence the laws of every country into account and that would lead the Commission into a long discussion
which it was better to avoid.”36 Recognizing the anti-imperial hostilities that seemed to undergird the
deliberations around marriage age, the USSR, as part of its own Cold War strategy, opted for neutrality.

In the end, it was U Thant of Burma, the UN’s secretary-general from 1962 to 1971, who specified
the age of fifteen in the text of the final convention. When the General Assembly approved the
Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages on
November 7, 1962, and opened it for signature and ratification, the document specified that all states
signing the convention “shall take legislative action to specify a minimum age for marriage” and seek to
“eliminate completely child marriages and the betrothal of young girls before the age of puberty.”37 In
January 1963, soon after taking over as secretary-general, U Thant issued a memo to the Commission on
the Status of Women asking them to consider drafting new text specifying the age of fifteen as a
minimum standard.38 The final version of the convention, which entered into force in 1964, stated that
marriage of girls under the age of puberty should be abolished, and that countries should stipulate a
minimum age for marriage, with a non-binding recommendation (added in 1965) that the marriageable
age be no less than fifteen years, “except where a competent authority has granted a dispensation as to
age, for serious reasons, in the interest of the intending spouses.”39

Hal. 458

Ultimately, then, the specification of fifteen as a common minimum age for marriage occurred by
fiat at the hands of a progress-driven modernist secretary-general from the Global South.40 The
Convention on Consent to Marriage had 16 original signatories and was subsequently ratified by 55
countries; today more than 120 countries are party to it.

This project of setting a universal minimum marriage age demonstrates that age standards can be
freighted with meanings at various scales. At the conceptual level, the dilemma in UN debates about
whether to name a chronological age standard, versus using puberty alone as a threshold, underscored
how understandings of sexual maturity were in flux. At the political level, the very raising of this topic for
intergovernmental debate advanced an imperial logic. While the adoption of this convention was
ultimately a salutary development, the process compelled assimilation in problematic ways. Ultimately,
it demonstrates that even in a setting where countries were in formal relationships of equivalence, as
enshrined in UN ideals, seemingly neutral age categories conveyed tacit moral hierarchies between
countries. In this foundational moment of liberal internationalism, relationships of equivalence between
countries were undercut by efforts to mark differences between imperial powers and newly
independent countries.

The ratification of the UN Convention on Consent to Marriage also demonstrates how widespread
the use of age standards had become by the middle of the twentieth century. In both national and
international contexts, claims to citizenship, rights, and protections could not be effectively made
without reference to age standards and age documentation. As the UN debates over setting a minimum
age for marriage reveal, using age standards had become so compelling a norm that member states
could not but follow along. On display in this intergovernmental exchange was the extent to which age
as a category connoted more than simply life stages; age standards indexed the moral foundation of an
emerging geopolitical order.

Hal. 459