Puberty isn't coming dramatically earlier.

In his article, "Teaching Humanities in New Ways--And Teaching New Humanities" (May/June 2005), Mark Wagner made a somewhat misleading statement. He probably isn't to blame for stating that the age of maturity has dropped three to four months per decade since 1890. This is based on a booklet issued by Planned Parenthood in the 1970s that relied on misinterpreted data.

Since Roman times in the West, the age of puberty (i.e. the onset of the menses) has been set at between twelve and fourteen. In English common law it was sometimes regarded as ten. If a child was married before twelve (with the parent's consent), the marriage could be annulled if it wasn't consummated by age twelve. A significant number of American girls in the nineteenth century had their first child at fourteen or fifteen (and a lesser proportion still do). In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is only thirteen and her mother (at the age of twenty-six) speaks of her as long ready for marriage.

It is also misleading to speak of students entering "high school" in 1860. While there were private schools, the modern concept of high school began at the end of the nineteenth century and the age at which children left school in most states remained at eighth grade long after. The concept of junior high school or middle school as developed in the twentieth century also coincided with the onset of puberty.

Since the menarche is also based, among other things, on body weight--and children, at least in the United States, are better nourished than before--there has been some drop in its onset, but not as much as Wagner implies. In the case of the bar mitzvah and bas mitzvah, which take place when the child is thirteen, the continuation of this old Jewish tradition indicates just how historical the age of puberty has been. Obviously, the bas mitzvah is a recent development but the tradition of female puberty isn't.

I have written on this before, but for an overall view, see Helmut Graupner and Vern L. Bullough, Adolescence, Sexuality, and the Criminal Law (New York: Haworth Press, 2005). Age becomes a critical element in discussing adolescence because, to put puberty much later in earlier historical periods seems to imply that we now face unique sexual problems about adolescence. We do not, although our solutions might be different.

Vern L. Bullough

Westlake Village, California