Marriage Comes Early in the Mountains

Using the 1937 Appalachian marriage of nine-year-old Eunice Winstead and twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns, and the subsequent international attention it received as a prism, this chapter focuses on the persistence of very youthful marriage in the rural southern United States. During the Great Depression, when rates of marriage were down and the age of first marriage increased, minors continued to marry at very high numbers in rural southern states. This chapter argues that isolation, poverty, child labor, poor schooling, and the lack of age consciouness that was its consequence, account for this trend. In communities where calendar age had far less meaning than it did among the middle class and urban residents, white, black and Latino Americans in rural America continued to countenance child marriage in part because they did not see it as noteworthy. Urbanites voiced their horror for the practice in newspapers, magazines, and in film using a language of civilization to condemn those they perceived as backwards barbarians.

My Little Girl Wife

By the later nineteenth century, ideas about childhood and about marriage had undergone significant transformations in the United States, especially among the middle class. Children were now seen as innocents in need of protection and marriage was meant to be a complementary (if still unequal) union of two companionate souls. Both of these trends meant that child marriage increasingly came into disfavor. Focusing on depictions of child marriage in newspapers, debates about statutory rape laws, and marriage and divorce reform leagues, this chapter documents succesful efforts to raise the age of consent to marriage. It also shows the ways that working-class parents, generally those least likely to identify age as a meaningful category of identity, used these new laws to prevent their minor children from marrying.

The Child Was to Be His Wife

Using the marriage of Abel Stearns and Arcadia Bandini as a prism, this chapter demonstrates that youthful marriage was remarkably common in antebellum America, though more so in the South and the West than in the industrializing Northeast, which was more influenced by new ideas of age consciousness. In the South, slaves and wealthy whites both married at young ages, the former because they also worked as children. In the West demographc patterns meant that men outnumbered women in a variety of locations, leading to youthful ages of first marriage for Indian girls, Californianas and New Mexicanas, travelers on the Overland Trail, and girls who chose polygamous Mormon marriages in the new territory of Utah. In all cases youthful marriage was rarely seen as strange and most who entered such marriages probably did so for reasons unrelated to the age of one of the spouses.

Epilogue

While most Americans oppose child marriage internationally, few realize that it is still legal to marry below the age of eighteen in all states in the U.S. There are three reasons to oppose the practice: (1) because of the health risks for those who marry as minors; (2) because it plays into the gendered dominance of an older husband and younger wife that has characterized so much of marriage history; (3) and because allowing for minor marriage buys into the fantasy that marriage itself is really capable of “solving” the problems of teenage sex and pregnancy.

Wholly Unfit for the Marriage Condition

This chapter revisits the laws documented in the first chapter and demonstrates that even though they prohibited marriage below certain ages, many children continued to marry, often extralegally. When parents objected to these marriages, as in the case of Susan Hervey to the marriage of her daughter Sarah to Thomas Parton, they may have done so not because their children were too young for marriage (reflecting the growth of age consciousness), but because such a marriage would deprive parents of the labor of their children. When judges decided the cases brought by aggrieved parents, they almost always upheld the marriages so as not to create single, non-virginal girls, some of whom might be pregnant. They also wanted to hold men to the promises they had made to the state regarding the permanence of marriage.

Introduction

The introduction argues that the marriage of minors has always been relatively common in the United States, though explanations for its prevalence vary over time. In earlier eras children married because childhood was not strictly demarcated from adulthood; in later eras, Americans’ discomfort with adolescent sexuality has allowed many to countenance youthful marriage. While there are real instances of exploitation to be found in minors’ marriages, paradoxically many youth also found marriage one of the few ways to achieve adulthood prematurely, emancipating themselves from their parents and legally protecting sex with older spouses. The introduction also explains terminology, methods, and sources.

Are They Marrying Too Young?

Following World War II, the age of first marriage dipped to an all-century low. Numbers of teen brides and grooms soared through the early 1960s, and then quickly dissipated. While early marriage fit right into a United States bent on fighting the Cold War with domestic stability at home, experts, journalists, and academics also bemoaned the large numbers of high school students who married in these decades. This chapter argues that the uptick in early marriage, especially among white urban and suburban dwellers, was caused by conflicting messages about sex, which resulted in premarital pregnancies and shotgun weddings; a nationwide emphasis on domesticity; and by cravings by teenagers for adulthood, symbolized through marriage. While rates of early marriage for rural and nonwhite residents remained steady, the real change here was a white middle-class early marriage surge, which is what resulted in all the expert hand-wringing.

I Did and I Don’t Regret It

As reformers and lawmakers raised the age of consent to marriage and made it more difficult for minors to become husbands and wives, young people reacted by marrying extralegally. From the late nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth, the rates of minor marriage increased, in part, this chapter argues, because marriage became one way of legaly claiming freedom and independence from parents. Marriage emancipated children, it let them escape from abusive homes, keep their wages or inheritances, and have sex without being prosecuted under newly passed statutory rape laws. It allowed them to contest their status as children, itself newly enshrined in the law in a whole host of Progressive Era reforms targeting childhod and adolescence. At the same time the legal device of marriage could also trap girls in abusive and exploitative relationships where they had little recourse to legal protection.

The Great Life-Long Mistake

Focusing on the writings of antebellum women’s rights activist Elizabeth Oakes Smith, this chapter demonstrates that many objected to early marriage for girls, but for a variety of reasons. Some believed that it was physiologically unsound, others that it would be detrimental to “the race,” and others like Smith believed that early marriage curtailed girls’ chances for a meaningful girldhood. Smith and other activists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton also pointed out that legally early marriage was flawed because girls were permitted to contract marriage—which itself was disadvantageous for all women because of coverture—when they were not yet legally adults. While Smith and her contemporaries were astute in all these critiques, they rarely paused to consider the ways that early marriage was mostly detrimental for middle-class girls who really did have the opportunity of a protected childhood, unlike working-class children, who were laboring from early ages.

Any Maid or Woman Child

This chapter explains the English common law and colonial legal antecedents to early national marriage law in the extant states. It argues that the common law marriage ages of twelve (for girls) and fourteen (for boys) are based on presumptions about puberty and intellectual capacity, and that when North American colonial legislatures raised these ages, they did so largely to protect parental interest in their children’s labor and possible fortunes, not as a means to protect youthful people. It also argues that the differential ages of marriage and of majority (in western and midwestern states, where girls’ majority was lowered to eighteen) all had the effect of denying girls the protection of girlhood in the realm of marriage that were being offered to their brothers and to children more generally in legal revisions of the ealry modern period.