Both of my grandmothers married very young in rural Pennsylvania in the 1920s.
One was traded at the age of 12 to a 40 year old man for goats and geese; her parents had come here in 1917 from Russia. Her husband died a couple years after her eighth child was born.
The other married at 13; her 16 year old husband had been seeing her and her 15 year old sister and married the one who got pregnant first.
Sure, but part of that could be argued that our society keeps people infantalized for a longer period of time. Most teenagers throughout history wouldn’t be going to school, dependent on mom and dad and treated as children. Even if not married, they’d be considered old enough to do all the work that adults do (farming, working in factories later on, etc.) if it needed to be done. If a society keeps teenagers mentally/psychologically acting like children, it seems likely that the psychological impact of older man/young girl pairing would be more traumatic, on average, than in a society where teenagers are treated as grown.
Are you sure about that? I think any infection has the potential to be lethal.
I know someone who got really sick because a moronic dentist pulled an infected tooth before she’d completed a round of antibiotics, thereby flooding her system with the shit instead of keeping it contained to the tooth. IIRC she had to go on some pretty heavy-duty antibiotics and was laid up for at least a few days–that seems to my non-medical self to be the kind of thing that could potentially kill you without proper treatment.
It’s meant as a joke to some extent, but Shakespeare likely also wanted Romeo and Juliet to be young in order to emphasize their emotional volatility. An Elizabethan-era audience would have been just as likely to think “Kids, sheesh” as one today. Much of the plot is propelled forward by the immaturity and rashness of the star-cross’d lovers, so it works to make them unusually young.
Shakepeare makes sure the audience knows Juliet is sexually mature, by tossing in a joke about her having big boobs.
Not being able to eat properly WILL kill you, though. And an abscessed tooth can make you wish it would kill you, as long as it’s quick. Any infection has the potential to spread throughout the body. There’s also some evidence (I’m not looking it up right now, though) that dental health, or lack of it, is connected to heart disease.
Wiki’s age of consent map. Apparently in some places, there is no specified minimum age of consent.
Didn’t painter Paul Gauguin marry two different 13 year olds?
He seems to have only married once, to 23-year-old Mette Sophie Gad.
