The Moral Hierarchies of Age Standards: The UN Debates a Common Minimum Marriage Age, 1951–1962

Abstract

Abstract While the UN was still a fledgling organization in the early 1950s, it took on the question of what an appropriate minimum age for marriage should be across all its member countries. Two UN conventions—the 1956 Supplementary Convention on Slavery and the 1962 Convention on Consent to Marriage, Minimum Age for Marriage and Registration of Marriages—involved tense deliberations over a marriage age standard. Drawing on records of UN preparatory meetings, I show that delegates representing Britain and Portugal spearheaded an effort to frame early and forced marriage as forms of slavery, and thereby focused abolitionist attention on formerly colonized countries. The moral worth of newly independent countries came to be signaled by specifying a high chronological age for marriage rather than treating puberty as a threshold. Although there was no tidy polarization between colonizers and colonized in the deliberations, several delegates from former British colonies—especially Nigeria and India, large regional powers with aspirations to lead the budding Non-Aligned Movement—strenuously rejected the tutelary stance of the British delegates. These debates about a common marriage age reveal how, 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.