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No reason at all. It was generally allowed in the U.S. Age of consent was typically 10 years old until 1885 https://discover-the-truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-co

No reason at all. It was generally allowed in the U.S. Age of consent was typically 10 years old until 1885 https://discover-the-truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-consent-in-european-american-history/ https://discover-the-truth.com/2013/09/09/age-of-consent-in-... "After 1885, age of consent laws changed around the country, reaching 16 in New York in 1889 and 18 in 1895. Prior to these changes the age of consent in most places in the United States was 10 or 12 years." There's a very strong trend to criticize historical figures for not conforming to modern standards, but it's not usually very useful in understanding their character.

twblalock 8y ago
> There's a very strong trend to criticize historical figures for not conforming to modern standards, but it's not usually very useful in understanding their character. Smith was considered an outlier by his contemporaries. This is not simply a case of applying modern standards to a 19th-century person. People alive at the time considered his marriages abnormal.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  The polygamy part. But not necessarily the age part.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    The legal age of consent is the legal age of marriage, but not the normal age of marriage. How many people do you know who married at the age of consent? Most people marry later.
jackcosgrove 8y ago
What we would consider child marriage was normal then, but polygamy was not. Polygamy was one of the charges leveled against Mormons during their various persecutions in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois.
- geowwy 8y ago
  Was child marriage really normal back then? The stats I've seen say 19th Century women were getting married in their early 20s and men in their mid 20s. It went down by a few years in the 1950s and 1960s before going up to what it is now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
xnyan 8y ago
This is a common rationalization taught to educated true-believing mormons. While it is true that the age of consent was lower than today, according to the contemporary census (1890s is what I have records for, Smith's relationships were 1830s-40s) age of marriage was about the same it is now (http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png). Whats more, looking at comparable relationships contemporary or even before Smith's time, let's say Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (15 and 45 respectively) in the late 18th century and you can clearly find plenty of condemnation of the age disparity between the two. I'm sure there were others who were fine with men like Jefferson and Smith preying on teenagers, but it does not mean it was considered ok then.
- kbutler 8y ago
  1890s/1900 was actually a local maximum in women's marriage age that would not be equalled until about 1980. http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggles.pdf http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggle... shows 10% of native-born, white US women were married by age 17 in 1850 (first year of data), and that 10% threshold rose rapidly through the latter half of the century, so it may have been more common to have very young brides earlier in the century. Though at 10% even in 1850, it was not unusual. Add confounding factors like immigration and poverty, and young brides may have been even more common (and vulnerable to be protected or taken advantage of depending on your perspective)
- avar 8y ago
  > This is a common rationalization taught to educated true-believing mormons. FWIW I'm not a Mormon (or an American). So I have no dog in this fight. I just find the historical demographics & statistics interesting. > [...]age of marriage was about the same it is now (http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png). Yes, if you look at the average for the population as a whole. But once you look at percentile breakdowns (such as page 26 of [1]) you see a very different picture. In 1850 the 10th & 25th percentile of marriage age for white women was 17.0 and 18.8, respectively, 16.2 and 17.8 if they were black. It seems very likely that if you were a sustenance farmer on the frontier in a town that had been established just 10-15 years prior (such as Manti, UT being discussed here) it wouldn't be unusual for "normal" locally to be what was the "normal" for the 5th or percentile of the population as a whole, or even lower. Furthermore as the [1] paper notes the marriage age (and childbearing) ages in Western Europe and North America were inflated over the rest of the globe at the time, due to a difference in societal structure. I wouldn't be surprised if isolated communities in North America such as the Mormons or the Amish who were deliberately setting out to do their own thing looked very different demographically. > Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (15 and 45 respectively) in the late 18th century and you can clearly find plenty of condemnation of the age disparity between the two. Yes, that sort of thing is definitely an outlier, and the Mormons with their polygamy practices can rightly be said to be unusual in this regard. But that shouldn't be confused with the question of whether the age of first marriage (or child) should per-se be considered profoundly unusual for the time, or some extreme outlier. As far I can tell it wasn't. 1. http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggles.pdf http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggle... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131894
Tsubasachan 8y ago
Mormons have always been shall we say criticized for their unorthodox sex lives. They didn't up in Utah because they liked the fresh air. In fact Nevada and Utah split because non believers didn't want to share a State with them.

twblalock 8y ago

> There's a very strong trend to criticize historical figures for not conforming to modern standards, but it's not usually very useful in understanding their character. Smith was considered an outlier by his contemporaries. This is not simply a case of applying modern standards to a 19th-century person. People alive at the time considered his marriages abnormal.

jjeaff 8y ago
The polygamy part. But not necessarily the age part.
- twblalock 8y ago
  The legal age of consent is the legal age of marriage, but not the normal age of marriage. How many people do you know who married at the age of consent? Most people marry later.

jackcosgrove 8y ago

What we would consider child marriage was normal then, but polygamy was not. Polygamy was one of the charges leveled against Mormons during their various persecutions in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois.

geowwy 8y ago
Was child marriage really normal back then? The stats I've seen say 19th Century women were getting married in their early 20s and men in their mid 20s. It went down by a few years in the 1950s and 1960s before going up to what it is now.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

xnyan 8y ago

This is a common rationalization taught to educated true-believing mormons. While it is true that the age of consent was lower than today, according to the contemporary census (1890s is what I have records for, Smith's relationships were 1830s-40s) age of marriage was about the same it is now (http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png). Whats more, looking at comparable relationships contemporary or even before Smith's time, let's say Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (15 and 45 respectively) in the late 18th century and you can clearly find plenty of condemnation of the age disparity between the two. I'm sure there were others who were fine with men like Jefferson and Smith preying on teenagers, but it does not mean it was considered ok then.

kbutler 8y ago
1890s/1900 was actually a local maximum in women's marriage age that would not be equalled until about 1980. http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggles.pdf http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggle... shows 10% of native-born, white US women were married by age 17 in 1850 (first year of data), and that 10% threshold rose rapidly through the latter half of the century, so it may have been more common to have very young brides earlier in the century. Though at 10% even in 1850, it was not unusual. Add confounding factors like immigration and poverty, and young brides may have been even more common (and vulnerable to be protected or taken advantage of depending on your perspective)
avar 8y ago
> This is a common rationalization taught to educated true-believing mormons. FWIW I'm not a Mormon (or an American). So I have no dog in this fight. I just find the historical demographics & statistics interesting. > [...]age of marriage was about the same it is now (http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png http://i.imgur.com/HnQjG67.png). Yes, if you look at the average for the population as a whole. But once you look at percentile breakdowns (such as page 26 of [1]) you see a very different picture. In 1850 the 10th & 25th percentile of marriage age for white women was 17.0 and 18.8, respectively, 16.2 and 17.8 if they were black. It seems very likely that if you were a sustenance farmer on the frontier in a town that had been established just 10-15 years prior (such as Manti, UT being discussed here) it wouldn't be unusual for "normal" locally to be what was the "normal" for the 5th or percentile of the population as a whole, or even lower. Furthermore as the [1] paper notes the marriage age (and childbearing) ages in Western Europe and North America were inflated over the rest of the globe at the time, due to a difference in societal structure. I wouldn't be surprised if isolated communities in North America such as the Mormons or the Amish who were deliberately setting out to do their own thing looked very different demographically. > Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson (15 and 45 respectively) in the late 18th century and you can clearly find plenty of condemnation of the age disparity between the two. Yes, that sort of thing is definitely an outlier, and the Mormons with their polygamy practices can rightly be said to be unusual in this regard. But that shouldn't be confused with the question of whether the age of first marriage (or child) should per-se be considered profoundly unusual for the time, or some extreme outlier. As far I can tell it wasn't. 1. http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggles.pdf http://users.hist.umn.edu/~ruggles/Articles/Fitch_and_Ruggle... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131894

Tsubasachan 8y ago

Mormons have always been shall we say criticized for their unorthodox sex lives. They didn't up in Utah because they liked the fresh air. In fact Nevada and Utah split because non believers didn't want to share a State with them.