I got married as a result of finding a guy I liked rather a lot, and then deciding after five years of this that I wanted to keep doing it indefinitely. I happened to get married in my 20’s, but I never planned for it-- in fact, I married quite young for my peer group.
If by “most of history” you mean “the Victorian and Edwardian eras in W European and anglophone N American societies”.
No, I mean most of history.
Look into the status of women in, say, Ancient Greece. Pretty much the only two choices open to them were “wife and mother” or “whore”. Rinse and repeat.
:rolleyes:
You don’t think a farmer’s wife did not work extremely hard on things more than just sleeping with her husband and popping out and rasing kids? Or a blacksmiths daughter did not have help around the shop? I mean I can off hand think of about a dozen or so things they might have to do.
You seem to somehow equate mid 19th and early to mid 20th century social structure as being what was the norm for most of history. That was not the case.
For most of human history everybody worked near where they lived. And I mean everybody worked. Read up about the early factories and mines. They used women and children extensively, often whole families. Who lived nearby or on premises.
It was only after the development of cheap mass travel that the workplace fully seperated from the home and the concurrent rise of the middle and professional classes meant that women left the workplace. It was they who established the “traditional” gender roles (not that Gender roles did not exist before, just what we think of as traditional gender roles).
One of the biggest aims of the “progressive” and liberal movements of the 19th century was the removal of women and children from the workplace. Which they largely succeeded by WW1.
I got married when I was 18. I’m 25 now, and going through a divorce. I didn’t know what I was getting into, I didn’t know how to properly function in a relationship, and I had no idea what to look for in a potential partner.
I wish that I’d have waited. I learned a lot, but it wasn’t worth it.
To jump in with some context, this thread was spun off from another thread (I don’t remember exactly which) where a handful of male posters were lamenting that young women were unwittingly being led down a path of heartache and regret because nobody had advised them that they should get married in their 20s, and that it is important to begin imparting this sage advice.
This thread was an attempt to show that this advice is neither new to people, nor particularly helpful.
Sure, everyone pitched in - but the primary duty of a woman was to get married and have kids. The labor women did in pre-modern societies was typically structured so as to allow them to care for children while doing it (hence all those women in the field carrying kids on their backs or in a sling to allow for breastfeeding and other child tending while in said fields).
Women HELPED the blacksmith, there were not (by and large) blacksmiths themselves. I’m sure you can find a few rare exceptions, there are always exceptions, but the vast majority of women had their primary focus their kids and husband. Women did not have professions other than “mother”, “wife”, and “whore” for most of history even if they helped their men with their professions.
Actually no. Child care was always designed around work duties, which could be many, not just field work (one thing women often did less of). Grandparents were
FTR I used Blacksmiths because that was the one medieval guild which was almost always closed to women (unlike others) however the nature of the work meant that it required much more than the Blacksmith himself to work and quite bit of work was done out of necessity by the rest of the family and women were permittd to take over their husbands business if widowed.
However, other trade guilds were open to women.
Textile guilds were often open to women and some of them were female dominated. (An interesting take on themin pre Revolutionary France is here)
The brewer guilds were often female dominated for the longest time, at least until the renaissance, and in fact give rise to a term…Alewife.
Women worked in mines for centuries, it was only in 1842 in the UK with the Mines and Collaries Act 1842, which banned women work in the Coal mines. Women work in copper mines also gave rise to another term; Bal Maiden.
Fishmongers guilds also tended to be heavily female; leading us to another term; Fishwife.
In short, your post is woefully inaccurate.
Beyond that, the kind of intensive one-on-one parenting we see today simply didn’t exist. Once a kid could walk, they were pretty much left to run wild with siblings, grandparents or packs of free roaming neighborhood kids. Well, either that or they were drafted to work the fields, carry water, become household servants or sell small items in town. Kids in all but the richest families were expected to be economically productive- or at least out of the way- pretty much immediately after infancy. The modern idea of a nuclear family centered around women intensively parenting kids is a throughly modern one enabled by modern economic conditions.
That said, for most of history it has been true that a person–male or female–had to be part of a household to survive, and the household, not the individual, was the fundamental economic and social unit. This is why widows and widowers would often remarry quickly. Daily life was simply too labor intensive for any one person to really function: trying to do every little thing yourself was both too inefficient (no economies of scale) and required too much specialized knowledge. Exactly which tasks belonged to which gender vary some by time and place, but their were almost always things women learned to do from their mothers and things men learned to do from their fathers and both sets of knowledge were essential to survival.
So Broomsticks’ essential point, that women pretty much had to get married to remain functional in society, is true, but it was true for men as well.
Crikey, no. I’m sorry I got involved naively with the person I did when I was in my 20s, which ended up as an abusive marriage. Cost me about 6 or 7 years of my professional life, or 14 if you factor in the 7 years I slaved away in adjunct hell, having lost all of my contacts and networking associates during the time I was married.
Only just now catching up.
Which problems?
It would be nice if we had a social structure that encouraged women to have babies in the late teens, early twenties, before they started on their life’s work, but we don’t.
Why would that be nice?
I think we do have a social structure that encourages women to have babies young in life. As long as they are married.
In the US? People will celebrate having babies out of social convention and politeness but on a practical basis having a baby is a gauntlet in the US these days. Could you elaborate what you mean by “encourages”.
We do not have an economic structure that encourages babies at any age.
But socially? As long as a woman is married, everyone and their mama will encourage her (them) to have babies. And mothers, even young ones, command a certain amount of respect from society that their childless counterparts cannot.
I married at 19, so no.
41st anniversary coming up in December. 
Fewer fertility and aging chromosome issues.
I think it would take three generations, really, for it to work.