How has the average age of marriage changed over the course of history? I know we are getting married later and later now-a-days. There is a decent amount of information I have found in regards to the last 100 years but what about back 2000 years ago? When the religious writers said “Wait 'til marriage” was that easier because they got married much younger or was it roughly the same age as you see young couples getting married in present times?
Despite the idea that people were marrying very early during the middle ages, actually, they did so much later than the 13-15 often mentionned.
A study of marriage in France during the late middle-ages showed that men married on average in their mid-20s, and women a little earlier, maybe around 20.
That’s the only thing I know about the history of the age of marriage.
As far as I can tell it’s varied so widely across cultures and times that generalizations are nearly impossible. Ancient Greek girls seem to have gotten married pretty young to older men who planned to train them to be good housewives. Victorian English people of the lower classes had to wait until they could afford to marry, so they tended to be in their early to mid-20’s for women and about 30 for men.
I’ll generalize that wealthy people tended to marry their girls off younger than most others in the same culture, in order to make alliances and transfer property around.
You might like to read a history of marriage; it’s too large a topic to summarize.
IIRC the age of marriage dropped precipitiously after WWII.
It is far too large a topic to summarize. A popular history of the topic is Marriage: A History, which is readily available at most booksellers.
A more specific question might be more easily answered.
More specific? Ok…well, I guess since my wondering stems from uber Christian people saying that the Bible says to wait til marriage, I guess I would narrow it to Biblical times around the area The Book was written.
The sources I’ve seen tend to assume that Mary (you know, THE Mary) was probably 15-16 at the time of her engagement/betrothal to Joseph, based on that being a common age for the culture and time. However, it was also typical for the engagement to last two or three years so that actual marriage would have been 17-19.
There doesn’t seem to be any consensus on Joseph’s age. Somewhere between 20 and 60 (partly based on speculation over whether he’d had a previous marriage). I seem to recall that the average for a man’s first marriage was just a few years older than a woman’s.
But I suspect that you’d find significant variation even if you’re only looking at Hebrew culture over the thousand or so years focused on in the Bible.
In fact, “The European Marriage Pattern” is an expression in medieval history. Basically, it means that people married late, and married people they had already had a child with (just to burst that particular bubble). I’m refering chiefly to Scandinavia and northern Europe here.
The reason for this (on of them anyway - this is a very sweeping generalization) was that people generally did not marry until they could support themselves, which meant either when they inherited* land, or earned enough money to buy it (rare) or achieved some sort of position with a permanent income (rarer). This meant that males could be as old as thirty and females a few years younger. In some cases, a piece of land “to marry on” was the reward from a lord to a loyal servant, although this custom was by no means universal.
The child bit (a study of church-books reveals that as many as one in four children were either illegitimate or concieved outside of marriage during a great deal of the high and late middle ages) was because you really did not want to risk marrying someone you were not fertile with - so couple took each other for a test spin, so to speak.
This pattern of late marriages was in many areas not broken until the industrial age, and in moderns times we seem to have reverted to it.
*Not neccesarily because someone died, you could be “given your inheritance” by a living parent or relative.
Another reason that wealthy people married their girls off early was to increase the chances of the bride being a virgin. An old maid was an asset that lost value each passing year, and eventually became a burden. A Victorian upperclass male, who might or might not deserve the title of gentleman, wanted a virgin girl for his bride. He didn’t want to take chances of getting an STD, he didn’t want to raise another man’s child, and quite possibly he didn’t want his bride to know what a lousy lover he was. I’ve recently been reading that the Victorian upperclass were really quite swinging, but I don’t know how much of this is true.
Remember, too, that girls attained menarche later in earlier times than they do today. I’ve read a great many theories about this, too, but again I don’t know how true this is.
In American history, wealthier women tended to marry younger than less wealthy women. Since families were large few parents owned enough land or had enough money to provide for all of their children when they were gone, so sons who weren’t going to inherit/daughters who wouldn’t get much of a dowery to speak of had to first get a farm of their own, and while land could be cheap it was rarely free and always very hard work to clear. As a result, women on the frontier and in the 19th century in general didn’t tend to marry as young as one would think: while 15 year old brides weren’t unheard of they were very rare- there were a LOT more 20 year old brides, and contrary to Beverly Hillbillies jokes, 25 year old women weren’t necessarily looked upon as old maids.
As for the Classical Greeks, I don’t know of any scholarly study, but Hesiod and Aristotle recommended that girls marry at 18, while Xenophon in his Economics describes the ideal wife as not yet 14. Aristotle also felt that men ought to marry at 37, after their passions had cooled enough that they would make steady husbands.
As you seem interested in what the ancient Hebrews considered an appropriate age for marriage, I looked at Jewish Marriage in Antiquity by Michael Satlow (2001). Tannaitic (approx 70-200 CE) sources promote marriage between teenagers: males should be in their late teens and females in their early teens. A Babylonian source states that a man who is unmarried at 20 spends his days thinking of sin. Tannaitic sources also permit a man to betroth his daughter when she is still a minor (ie, under the age of 12). Palestinian and Babylonian sources, however, prefer that a girl not be married until she is mature.