American Child Bride

Nicholas L. Syrett taps into an enormously important but surprisingly overlooked aspect of the history of American marriage: the (gendered) history of marriages to minors. American Child Bride rescues this story, and the result is elegantly written and persuasive. Marriages that would not have turned heads in the late eighteenth century or on the nineteenth-century western frontier became causes for scandal and the impetus for reform in the twentieth century. What defined someone as a minor changed over time and so did perceptions of the risks or rewards of marriage at a young age. Between the eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, Americans lengthened the years of legal childhood and heightened criticism of marriages that involved children. The book traces a long chronological arc. Using court records, newspaper reports, prescriptive literature, and personal papers, Syrett highlights two cohorts of critics in the nineteenth century: those who took a feminist approach and argued that child marriage was bad for women, and others who prioritized the sanctity of marriage and warned that child brides and grooms were far too likely to divorce. The book offers its sharpest analysis in its central chapters, which focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During those decades, two forces intersected—or, perhaps, collided—to shift the ways Americans understood and responded to marriages that involved legal minors. First, Syrett shows a dawning “age consciousness”: more Americans not only knew how old they were but also assigned increasing degrees of importance to their numerical ages (p. 20). Second, modern Americans embraced an ideal of marriage as a partnership between spouses. Marital advice givers began to speak more consistently about mutuality—including mutual sexual gratification—as a key facet of long-term marital stability

Frontier · Minor (academic · Newspaper · Political science · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law

• Introduction to “Sex across the Ages

  Nicholas L Syrett•Historical Reflections/Réflexions…•2020

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