A person’s chronological or “civil” age—that is, their age as calculated from the date of birth on their birth certificate—is a quantitative datum that has been fundamental to the discipline of demography ever since the first demographers established a link between mortality and age over three centuries ago.
The use of this key variable in probing all demographic phenomena might suggest that chronological age determines all the implicated behaviors. But though the notion of a relation between time elapsed since a person’s birth and the particular phenomenon under study is a familiar one today, it should not conceal the different realities covered by that notion, which vary by place, period, and who is speaking.
Social age, meanwhile, reflects the place an individual occupies at a given moment within the society they are part of. This type of age, which grants rights and assigns duties to the individual in question, varies with actors’ perceptions of continuities and discontinuities in their own lives and with the social group’s perception of the consecutive stages of the life cycle, as shown by Tamara Haraven’s studies. For example, the age of one’s majority is a key social age that varies from one society to another. According to Roman law, girls reached their civil majority (the age at which a person is considered legally capable and responsible for their actions) and marital majority (the age at which parents’ consent to marry is no longer required) at the age of 12 and boys at the age of 14—ages close to puberty. In the sixteenth century in France, an edict of King Henry III established “marriageable age” as 25 for women and 30 for men, while chronological or civil majority was fixed at 25 (rules that held until the French Revolution of 1789).
an article by Isabelle Seguy, Daniel Courgeau and Henri Caussinus, in "The Conversation" on Auguste the 17th 2023
