The US and the American child bride

Stephanie Coontz’s history of marriage was explored at some length at the beginning of this chapter, and the discussion stopped with the special case of northwestern Europe and its unusually high ages of marriage for women in the early modern period. Parts 2 and 3 of her volume shift terrain to include the US as well as Europe in order to set the stage for what she calls the “love revolution” that led to the collapse of marriage as a universal and lifelong institution. It took over one and half centuries, beginning with the creation of the male breadwinner model in the course of industrialization, for a notion of marriage as a haven from the world of politics and work to chip away at its prior status and centrality in public political and economic life and across different classes. She is quick to show that it first crystallized as a highly unequal conception of love, a sexual contract with a new emphasis on female purity and chastity, through what Carole Pateman has called a modern conception of patriarchy (Pateman 1988). It is important to note that marriage in the nineteenth century took place earlier than before, and the post-war years of the 1950s and ’60s in the US saw most women marry in their late teens or very early twenties in what was considered the perfect model of middle-class suburban happiness. But the 1960s also heralded Betty Friedan’s feminist articulation of the “problem without a name” (Friedan 2001 (1963)). Coontz cautions against laying the reasons for what she calls the falling apart of the institution of marriage at the door of movements such as the new movement of women’s liberation, the parallel sexual revolution, or (I should add) the critiques of heteronormative marriage in gay and lesbian politics. Not all the changes had radical causes, as several developments in women’s increasing access to education, employment and the invention of new reproductive technologies brought about fundamental transformations of their own.

According to Coontz, that marriage happened at later ages from the 1970s in countries like the US was not the only fundamental development. Others were that not everyone got married in the first place since it was possible to have sex and live intimately without it (including in non-hetero-sexual relationships) and that divorce rates soared. She believes that what for so much of Western history had been a universal and enduring institution was in fact no longer an institution at all but rather a “relationship” (Coontz: 238; see also Giddens 1992).

Coontz ends her treatise on a curious note: At the close of the twentieth century in countries like the US, it is successful people - men and women with high levels of education, good health, sound finances, emotional stability, and positive views on gender equality - who have successful marriages (more so than was the norm in the past) and who, according to studies, are happier than people in any other living arrangement. Given her critical stance throughout the book, it was strange that Coontz did not feel the need to problematize such a development not just for its profoundly undemocratic aspects but also for what this implies about her basic thesis regarding the love revolution’s ostensible destruction of the institution of marriage. Instead, she is ready to conclude with the comment “the very things that make marriage so potentially satisfying are for the most part inseparable from the things that make unsatisfying marriage less bearable. The same personal freedoms that allow people to expect more from their married lives also allow them to get more out of staying single and give them more choice than ever before in history about whether or not to remain together” (Coontz: 310).

These developments require a closer look since commentators have been saying somewhat different things about the present conjuncture. There are those like David Popenoe, who mourned the decline of the family, claiming fatal effects on its function in society (Popenoe 1988), especially regarding childbearing, to which others like Judith Stacey responded by saying “good riddance to ‘the family’!” (Stacey 1993). A review of the literature on marriage during the first decade of the twenty-first century examines studies that have highlighted positive and negative processes (such as domestic conflict and violence but also the state-led promotion of “healthy marriage”) and its authors, Frank Fincham and Steve Beach, conclude that much depends on the specific context (Fincham and Beach 2010). A more noteworthy and carefully analysed contribution to the contemporary American situation has been provided by Andrew Cherlin. He is the one to have coined the notion of the “deinstitutionalisation of marriage”, by which he meant “a weakening of the social norms that define people’s behaviour in a social institution such as marriage” (Cherlin 2004: 848). The rise in live-in arrangements and having children outside marriage and the increasing rates of divorce and remarriage, same-sex relationships and so on imply two kinds of de-institutionalization: a greater hesitation to enter marriage and a loosening of marriage (citing Louis Roussel in Cherlin). However, one might miss the most important point in Cherlin’s essay, which is not just that as many as 90% of Americans will eventually marry. He asks, what keeps marriage alive when the older reasons (so well described by Coontz) no longer apply and the newer ones are so shaky and individualist? His answer is clear. In the twenty-first-century’ US, marriage may no longer be dominant but has rather become distinctive and what was once a mark of conformity is now a badge of prestige. Weddings have evolved into status symbols, which the most well placed can achieve with greater assurance, but for those working-class, poorer women and women of colour who seek it, marriage turns into an elusive goal as they wait for that economically stable and emotionally reliable (male) partner who may never materialize. I believe this is a more careful formulation of contemporary US developments than the one provided by Coontz above.

In the course of Coontz’s concluding thoughts, she also mentions that while the average age at marriage has been rising since the 1970s, it is “now a product of some very early ones, some very late ones, and several variations in between” (Coontz: 276). This sounds quite innocuous. However, a scattered but growing literature has made visible what a recent book-length study has quite decidedly called “the American child bride” (Syrett 2016). As Jeremy Uecker and Charles E. Stokes argue,

it is important to focus not only on why people are avoiding marriage during young adulthood but also on why a significant minority of young adults continue to marry early at a time when cohabitation and premarital sex are increasingly normative and socially acceptable.

(Uecker and Stokes 2008: 835)

In their study of statistical trends in the US from 1850 to 1998, Catherine A. Fitch and Steven Ruggles have graphs which show that 10% of native-born white women have been marrying below the age of 18 years from the time when statistics were available (i.e., 1850) and this 10% turns 18 only after 1990. As much as 25% of the white female population was marrying at 19 years from 1850, dropping to 18 years in 1960 and then rising slowly to 20 years by 1998 (Fitch and Ruggles 2000). Among the Black population, 10% Black women were marrying at ages around 16 years and 25% at 18 years from 1850, which rises sharply to above 21 years around 1990. If these are surprising statistics, readers might be shocked to hear that over the course of the nineteenth century, when different states in America were ratifying their constitutions, American women were widely considered to be minors, never independents (Field 2001).

What then is this remarkable history of the American child bride, so successfully hidden from view? The burden of the first book-length study of child wives in the US from the eighteenth century to the present - by Nicholas Syrett (2016) - is to argue that for most of this history the “woman child” was not a contradiction in terms. Age for girls mattered little, early marriage was a norm, and when the first stirrings against such marriages were made, they had little to do with a concern over her age. There was far greater repugnance against, for instance, much older men for marrying young girls than the youth of the girl. It was parental control or the lack of it (especially if property was involved) that was often the source of dispute in such marriages; in any event, girls were supposed to marry at younger ages than boys. Syrett tracks changes in the laws of the different US states over time, many of which began with having Blackstone’s common-law ages of 12 for girls and 14 for boys in their statute books as a direct legacy of their prior colonial status. A frequent legal feature was a double age structure for marriage - the minimum age at which parental consent was required and a somewhat higher age above which girls and boys were free to choose. Overall ages were lower in several southern US states, the very states where significantly larger proportions were marrying at younger ages. However, girls found ways to circumvent parental consent when they married below statutory ages, and judges rarely annulled such marriages, even if parents took the matter to court. Marriage became a way to escape childhood in relation to both parents and the state. A child marriage reform movement, in which feminists were prominent, became more articulate in the early decades of the twentieth century, although it suffered from many ambivalences around what was the right young age and for whom (since opposition was greater to newly immigrant and non-white populations than to whites). As Syrett demonstrated, it was characterized by mixed motives - there was as much worry over what very young marriages by 14-or 15-year-olds were doing to the sanctity of the institution of marriage as, say, over the roots of child marriage in poverty, the dangers of sexual exploitation or abandonment as mothers.

One of Syrett’s chapters focussed on an international sensation in 1937 following news that a nine-year-old girl Eunice Winstead had married her 22-year-old neighbour Charlie Johns in a remote mountainous region of the state of Tennessee. (Though initially upset because the girl was far too young, the mothers of the couple [themselves married as teenagers] became reconciled when they realized that the two were not having sex and would grow into their marriage since Charles was a “good boy”.) The news was picked up locally and then quickly went global. Certainly, the age of nine was a rarity. But once noticed, America’s child marriages became the subject of further discussion and investigation. Comparisons were made with “dark” and “heathen” India, and even Katherine Mayo, the author of Mother India a decade earlier, explained in a front-page story for the Washington Post that “child marriage is an offense against society, cruel to the child, and physically and mentally debasing to any race that practiced it” (cited in Syrett 2016: 114). However, she was quick to distance these remarks from her civilizational attack on India by adding that in America “it is a rarity, not a habit, resulting only from ignorance” (cited in Syrett 2016: 114). The welfare of the children of rural white America thus received some small share of public attention, however limited.

A couple of decades later, in 1963, Betty Friedan gave her American audience (and the wider world) her extended analysis of “the problem with no name”. This was the feminine mystique at the heart of suburban white America, whereby college-educated competent women were being reduced to housewives, kept in a permanent state of “immaturity”, doing work that was more befitting the “mentally retarded” or perhaps “eight year old children” (Friedan 2001 (1963)). Here was yet another rendition of the childwoman, in this instance from America at a historic moment that was about to be revolutionized through “women’s liberation”. This sweeping attack included a kernel on early marriage and the “sex seekers” of the 1950s and 1960s.

The million married before the age of nineteen, in earlier and earlier travesty of sex-seeking, betray an increased immaturity, emotional dependence, and passivity on the part of the newest victims of the feminine mystique. ... What kind of sons and daughters are raised by girls who became mothers before they have ever faced [complex modern] reality, or sever their links to it by becoming mothers?

(Friedan 2001 (1963): 300)

Nicholas Syrett makes the excellent point that during these years of unprecedented economic boom, attention came to be focussed on the teenage marriages of the white urban middle classes (including from feminist critics like Friedan). This could be put down to the fact that it was amongst this unlikely group that there was a sudden increase in such marriages during the 1950s and ’60s, even though much higher rates persisted amongst the white rural poor, and more so among African-American and Latinx girls, all of whom were ignored. Once average ages of marriage for privileged white women rose from the 1970s onwards, public concern (including from feminists) waned. Syrett ends his long study with the following contradictory conclusions: On the one hand, he emphasizes that in the twenty-first-century US early marriages are overwhelmingly confined to specific groups such as poor rural white youth and Latinx people, who might be more religious, such that having sex or being pregnant more often leads to the desire to legitimize the relationship, and who simply have few other choices. Lack of age consciousness is no longer the issue as in the past. Unwed motherhood is now most common among African-Americans.

On the other hand, Syrett believes that early marriage must be questioned - it leads to depression and ill health and perpetuates poverty. Second, it is girls much more than boys who marry young and suffer the consequences. Third, the very belief that such marriages could be transformative and solve the problems that led to it (such as the desire to legitimize sex or pregnancy) is doomed to failure. He also connects conservative negative attitudes to early marriage with the opposition to same-sex marriages in the US today.

In an empathetic vein, Uecker and Stokes call for more understanding of such early marriages given the fact that they are, when located in their respective contexts, not insignificant: “The typical early married person is a White, rural southerner from a low-socio-economic family with a relatively low educational trajectory. This is not the disadvantaged American typically addressed in sociological and demographic research, but these persons are nevertheless a significant minority of the United States population” (Uecker and Stokes 2008: 845).

Beyond empathy there is the further need to place the very institution of marriage itself in perspective. Recall the diagnosis of Andrew Cherlin above, whereby contemporary US society has turned marriage into a status symbol of prestige and success, even as its achievability outside the affluent and well educated has become increasingly elusive. I would suggest, therefore, that the persistence of early marriage among certain US minorities and poor rural whites not only should be seen as a vestige from the past but should be recognized as part of a larger evolving and remarkably complex socioeconomic and symbolic structure. It is not enough to proclaim, as Stephanie Coontz seems prepared to do, the end of the institution of marriage, when success today is being redefined by a well-endowed and trend-setting elite precisely in terms of this very institution, replete with big fat weddings, while others (mainly girls) at the low end of the social spectrum hope for happiness by marrying too young. It is such a structure that would be of considerable comparative value in contemporary India rather than ultimately misleading accounts of “how love conquered marriage”.

Since 2016, there has been sporadic news of how child marriage in the US has indeed resurfaced as a public issue. What has come as a shock to most is the fact that many US states to this very day do not even have a minimum age of marriage on their statute books. Though without the benefit of statistical data regarding the actual number of such marriages, a campaign is now afoot to make 18 years the minimum age of marriage for girls in the form of a no-exception law, including removing provisions of parental consent at younger ages. Interestingly, there are a range of positions being taken - many state legislatures remain resistant to raising the age to 18, and some are ready for the age of 16 years. While there are young campaigners fighting for a no-exception law (so far, only two states have passed it: New Hampshire and New Jersey), others have questioned this unilateral move and not only from conservative or religious perspectives. These include some civil liberties groups as well as those who argue that in certain circumstances (such as in difficult family or oppressive foster situations) marriage at the age of 16 or 17 can be a step forward to a better life. No less than the BBC, in a podcast on America’s child brides in September 2019, has sought to give this controversial subject greater international publicity.

If the recent history of the US must give pause, what of the Asian giant China that until the nineteenth century was associated with the worst patriarchal practices, including early marriages without choice?