2 ms·
16? Must be a spinster.
by irrational 5y ago
16? Must be a spinster.
- mlyle 5y agoThis longstanding claim that age-of-marriage was historically that low is silly. Typical pattern in Western Europe was women married at 19-22 in the 1500s. You can find outliers like Tuscany in the 1400s where it looks like that number is 17-21. Typical ancient Roman marriage patterns were for women to wed at 20-25, it seems. There's outliers, of course. Especially with elites: where political and other concerns often created pressures for early marriage. Looking at the outliers in today's world, you can find e.g. in Sub-Saharan Africa about 35-40% of women wedding before age 18. So there's really only tiny pockets of the world in space and time where it seems that the average marriage would be under age 18.
- irrational 5y agoPerhaps this came from the age of consent rather than the age of marriage. I just did a quick search and found that for women the age of consent in the USA in the 1800s was typically down to 10 years old, except for Delaware where it was 7 (yes! 7!) years old.