Colorado historian Nicholas Syret's new book "American Child Bride: A History of Minets and Marriage in the United States" is filled with anecdotes about very young women - as young as 9 years old - getting married many older men.
The book follows the development of the marriage of children from the colonial period to the present and points to poor rural areas in the country, where practice always occurs more often than rich urban areas.
In Colorado, more than 5,000 minor has been married since 2000.In most states, the minimum age of marriage is 18, but many, including Colorado, allow exceptions.
Nicholas Syrett is a history teacher at the University of Noord -Colorado in Greeley.
Read below an excerpt from the introduction of the book.
"American Child Bride," Inleiding
When Susie King Taylor published her memoirs from 1902, reminiscent of my life in the camp, where she tells the story of her escape from slavery and the subsequent service as a nurse during the Civil War, the book only called her marriage from 1862.Susion Baker, whom she was called then, had been fourteen when she married Edward King, a soldier in the device she was occupied by Union Forces on Saint Simon's Island, Georgia.Taylor's age readers must intuike for themselves by reading from the year from the year of her birth, delivered at the start of the book.At a time when many memories of the civil war celebrated and removed the history of slavery (and from the Black Union soldiers).The marriage was random with this story.In total unusual for a newly released girl like Susie Baker, or in fact for many others in the entire country in the mid -nineteenth century.1902.
When Country star Loretta Lynn, on the other hand, published her autobiography, the daughter of Coalminer, in 1976, the story of her marriage on thirteen was one of the central episodes of the book, as it was in the story of her life in Country Music.The marriage was part of what her house characterized in Lynnnn's own words, Butcher Holler, Kentucky, who in 'most of the United States'.Award.At the end of the twentieth century, many Americans saw early marriage as both unusual and backwards, something that happened in Nature in Appalachia long ago, but certainly not elsewhere in the US."Land" if possible.Journalists for Associated Press revealed in 2012 that Lynn had lied about the date of her marriage and therefore her age at the time of this marriage: she had been fifteen, not thirteen.Young, finally), and Lynn may have lied to look younger now (not then), which required a back dating of marriage.A certain place: the poor and rural south.This was not inaccurate, but it wasn't the whole story either.
This book tells two interconnected stories: the first is about people in the United States, most of them much more often than Susie King Taylor and Loretta Lynn, who married as minors, which means less than eighteen years.How and when the marriage of early centuries is suitable or inappropriate.Marriages of children because of their age.In principle, this is a story of child marriages in the United States, a phenomenon that Americans tend to associate with other countries, places that we usually consider behind or 'third world', partly because they allow children to marry.
The marriage of legal children is actually relatively usual via the Vshistory.u.s. the Census Bureau does not connect the age to the marital status before 1880, as a result of which the national numbers were inaccessible before that time.But in that year, 11.7 percent of the fifteen to nineteen -year -old girls were women (the census did not specify the exact age and the bourgeois state until 1910).This number fell in 1890 and then increased step by step to the 1920s to 12.6 percent in 1930. Young people, such as the total wedding percentage, fell during the great depression.Since the early sixties.When is said, people will get married today for eighteen years.9 percent of modern American women are married before they turned eighteen.Many of these women are now older after getting married in the 1950s or 1960s, but they are not women in the distant past;That the chance of getting married in the modern United States at the age of eighteen is 6 percent for women and 2 percent for men.
If the early marriage is part of the daily life of millions of Americans, why did we start thinking about it as a Bisarr exception of the rule?May we see 'childhood' as a phase of life separated from the age of adults, concluded from rights and responsibilities for adults.To its current form only towards the end of the nineteenth century.Eighteenth and in fact, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not know when they were born and they only had vague insights about how old they were.Would be much less remarkable than it would be for us.But former Americans also rained with a different age than we do.Schools), start working or getting married.
In most of American history there was no distinction between the marriage between two minors or who was older (sometimes important) and one that was younger.Everyone fits that.They suspect him from pedophilia.Not invalid, but they were usually not shared by Americans before the twentieth century who worried that marital sex led to the downfall of girls who could not get married and therefore for life intended for prostitution.People have also not shared our understanding of pedophilia, the sexual condition of some adults for children.Place the early critics of a youthful marriage that it is robbed of girls of girls or that it can lead to divorce.I am not the very real balance of power, which characterizes marriages of large age differences, I also explain in this book why first Americans did not necessarily see this as a problem and offered historical context for how and when Americans came to see the marriage of male girl as sexualsuspect.
The term from the title of this book - "Child Bride" - is useful because it brings together two nouns that according to many must be incompatible.Be an infringement because we reserve the marriage institution for adults, in fact requires adulthood for its fulfillment.First printed performance of the term "Child Bride" in 1843;A search for American newspapers from the nineteenth century reveals its regular use, which only starts in the 1870s and 1880s (the same applies to "child woman" and "Boy Man", two other sentences that once enjoyed popularity).
The term "children's break" also expresses the legal power of the wedding institution, which a child can really transform into something that is mature, such as a bride.Youth.Many Americans thought that marriage could transform a child into a woman who was legally and socially adult because of marriage.
In order for the term "children's break" to generate the reaction that it implicitly requires, we must believe in two things.For young people for what the marriage of them requires, not only sex but also the emotional adulthood to be a husband and mayor.The other belief is that marriage, if not always an association of peers, is at least a partnership between people who can both have been assumed to contribute to his health in similar and complementary ways.Specialty Century.For the eighteenth century, children are as small as eight or nine married in America, and children in their teenage years have since been married in the United States.Of most urban and suburbs that tend to believe that teenage marriage is a remnant of the past.
So why would you concentrate on childrenBrides?institution where women depend on men;Young brides facilitate both ends.This is still the case when most marriages (between parties of every age) hold a man than his bride, even if it is only a few years old.Girls only became critical when some Americans (first only a small minority) started to believe that girls, such as boys, earned the opportunity to grow up and first make the choice of a marital partner after reaching adulthood.Should be an association of peers.Both changes in faith appeared in the nineteenth century.Due to the other beliefs, the girl's marriage is not very critical, especially because it was so strong to the marriage of adult women.That makes us that children see the marriage as disgusting (for girls and for marriage), even a story, a story that I tell in this book.
However, it is also the case that boys have generally had far fewer reasons to marry young people than girls because of American history.Wanted a girl.To work for wages by reaching adulthood (or as a means to prove itself adulthood).A reflection of cultural expectations for girls and boys.from Baan.
The growing rejection in the course of time against the child is also partly a story of the observed American exceptional and a belief in the further March of 'civilization'.Afghanistan, various African countries - or in the United States only of religious sects where more girls are married to an older man against their will.Desse versions of the marriage of children - forced trade unions organized by parents, sometimes the exchange of a dowry, brides under the age of twelve - are actually different from what usually happens in the United States, where marriage has taken the decision to get married.But the character of the child as a strange (national or religious or both), Americans is also able to ignore a youthful marriage in their midst.From the early 19th -century reports of Christian missionaries in India to contemporary scandals of fundamentalist last day Saints in Colorado and Utah, Americans have represented a youthful marriage as something that is only practiced by backward people who live elsewhere or the law drove here if they are herelive.
The truth is that many thousands of girls under the age of eighteen will get married legally in the United States this year.To marry.In 2010, the American congress did not pass on "international protective girls by the law of marriage massion", and the United States remains one of the only two countries (Somalia is the second) from this letter to the United Treaty not to be ratifiedNations regarding the children and one of the seven rights to eliminate the 1979 Convention in eliminating all forms of discrimination of women, of whom a plank explains that the marriage of a child under the age of eighteen has no legal effect.If the marriage of children is.A problem, that is also our problem.
And much of the American resistance to the prohibition of youthful marriage comes entirely from attitudes in relation to sex., especially if they have already had sex.Even when the United States has decriminalized sex outside of marriage (which used to be called Stev) and made the illegal category largely meaningless in marriage, although those who have sexes have teenagers., marriage was seen as transforming.Or from the marriage. “Still for those who believe it, it is exactly what the marriage gives.People must be transformed by marriage to be legitimate in marriage, to make women protected in marriage, one must believe that marriage does these things.'Marriage with legal minor dates this faith, and yet it remains legally valid.They confront the differences between their idea of marriage and it lived the reality of real men and women.
And for every person like Havelock Ellis who doubted the forces of marriage, there were many more who hoped to rehabilitate it.At least as invested in "protecting" the marriage institution when they were in promoting the matter of women or savings of suspected injury.Reformers from Cleveland who claimed to be concerned about children who put it in 1926, the children would get married and weaken the marriage institution and cheaper.Child wedding in the United States a lot about our investment in marriage as an institution of which we believe the marriage of the same sex may very well be less sad about what married hom*osexuals actually get through the marriage (tax cuts, etc.) as what their married status symbolically gives them: Respect assigned to adult citizens about the marriage of children that the marriage always has about the privileges of adulthood, the ways are demonstrated by symbolic marriage marriage to be a tool for discrimination against thoseWho cannot, or choose not to get in.
The story of this book could be read as a triumphal march ahead of a moment when children married because no appreciated youth and adult women were treated as children for one of the time we do not allow children to get married because we are themProtect, and we understand the marriage institution differently than the early Americans..
The first and most obvious fact that such a story is hidden is that a large number of American girls are married before they turn eighteen in the 21st century.Story of child protection, which started with the early modern legal recognition that children could not and should not be protected against decisions and responsibilities of adults, the marriage remained a huge exception to the rule.Being able to accept the only contract that is supposed to last the majority of its history.Girls have surpassed the youth.
Secful to return.It is not a slow and steady decline of the colonial era to the present.In fact, it saw one of his major revitalisations in the 1950s. Who defies our expectations.So not only are those who speak for the triumphal story of marital progress, partly incorrect, even those who embrace a story of marital decline: it is simply not the case that the marriage ever existed in just one form that has now falsified by feminism and interracialand marriage of the same sex.
In the end, although readers have a hard time considering a youthful marriage as anything but exploitation, so many children in the past was real benefits in the institution.State laws and most judges in these states discovered that it has legally released them from their parents.For legal rape.), but from the perspective of children, marriage can offer various benefits.
Absent specific evidence against the opposite (and I detailed cases of coercion), I have taken children to their words when they have agreed to get married.Time, the history of the children was written for a long time in a way that reduced the choices - good, bad and otherwise fourteen can really "choose" to get married.Why they did that - often rewrite in the light of pressure and coercion and opportunities - help us understand the story of American youth and ways in which children were central to debates about marriage, sexuality and regulatory principle.
In the earlier era, marriage with girls was also less problematic than today, because waiting for getting married, most girls would have expanded in an important way.These are trends that rose during the nineteenth and the twentieth century, but stopped and uneven.Did not run early on the life of a bride noticeably other than her comrades who later married.
There is an exception to this argument and it has to do with the physical obligations of marriage and the physiological injury they can cause girls., and the children they would wear before they had reached physical maturity.But because they were rarely the focus of early marriage critics, I have hardly found any evidence of young women from the past who wrote about the sexual burdens with which they were confronted.
If the early marriage in the past, at least within the law, looked largely in a world by feminism, at least within the law, this is no longer the case.are admitted (relatively) egalitarian marriages of supporting men (or women).The house before they feel or that's what they want from life.Definition, limited women's options, regardless of their age.And it was an option that was generally available for a minority of women.
On the other hand, when women have many more opportunities for meaningful autonomy, with early cutbacks, almost all these opportunities marries.But crucial is mainly true for women who can benefit from these opportunities.Minor -year -old continues to appear today - among poor and rural areas - many girls believe that marriage is their party at some age, regardless of.Transformation in the past two hundred years and becomes much more egalitary for many spouses.Let the marriage determine someone's life chances.had asked).What the studies do not demonstrate are whether these health risks are associated with the very early marriage or the circ*mstances that led to it.Lack of access to contraception) and unequal opportunities make early marriage a symptom of much greater problems instead of the primary demand.
This book stems chronologically from the establishment of the United States at the end of the eighteenth century through the very recent past, every chapter that takes on a different subject or question with regard to small marriages.Children of getting married or the way in which the courts interpreted these laws;Others document the reform of practice to limit practice;Young people married, as well as the ways, such as adults (who did the laws) tried to regulate practice.Four chapters are devoted to the Voorbellum period, two to the nineteenth swing to the twentieth century and four to the twentieth century.
To tell this story, I have to explain some terminology.Some marriages who did not exist as a matter of civil law, but were treated as a marriage everywhere around them: Indian marriage, slave marriages and polygam marriages.Sometimes this story is - priests who allow marriages fulfill them;Religious officials carried out marriages, they did it "by the power that" by the State ", and all the great religious denominations of the church performed within the limits set by the State (the exception was polygame mormones that usually married according tothe laws of their state).
The use of the word "child" is more complicated, partly because it has different definitions within the law, medicines and culture, and of course these definitions have changed over time.In Alabama and Nebraska, where the age of the majority is nineteen, and Mississippi, where it is 21).as legally dependent on their parents.Although they have traditionally been subject to certain tasks or are eligible for certain privileges that precede the legal majority (such as the habits to serve in the army, for example or the right to get married), the full legal personality.Of the majority for most of American history.Process is of course historic;Codification of eighteen years of right has led us to believe that they are children.The law is integrated in this process.
The word "child" has other meanings than those in the law;Word "Child" to talk about those who have not yet reached their teenagers.linguist ("youth" in the early 1900s and "teenagers" in the mid-century century).tried to be as specific as possible about the age of a young person.This is a book about those who have been married for eighteen years.
It is also useful to acknowledge that the word "child" has two meanings in the English language: a person under a certain age and offspring of another.In Spanish there are two separate words for these two meanings (Niño/A and Hijo/A), which makes it possible to fade a specificity that sometimes fades in English.Or because she is still legally under the control of parents who may not want them to leave their house?The answer depends on the context and the special law.), Children also have tasks and obligations because they are his children, not only children by definition of age.The nineteenth century, the state was more often to regulate the child as a person who belongs to his or her parents.On behalf of themselves, but they were also increasingly regulated as a class of people based on this status.Come to itself completely.
I have called this book American Child Bride, although nowadays we would describe the most brides that we will meet on these pages as teenagers or young.Bride, for example, although Priscilla married definition, "children."This book is a story about how and when this discomfort developed and how practice continued.
A final warning: this is actually a book about marriage.Ceremonies (at least until recently) for the continuation of marriages that are solemn years.who can leave a marriage and why).
That said, each chapter starts and ends with a marriage that I is somehow representative of the question or era mentioned in this chapter;Readers learn at the end of the chapter what happened with the couple they met in the beginning.From this pre-and-after approach, and before we meet our next couple, let me tell me that Susie and Edward King remained married to Edward's early death just four years after they were in the past, just before Susie was a son.Travel to the south in the 1890s to feed her dying son, where she witnessed was given a memoir in classrooms throughout the country.
Loretta and her husband, Oliver "Doolittle" Lynn, had six children and stayed married for more than 50 years, until his death in 1996. He was a huge supporter of her early career.Them.Loretta documented very marital controversy in her songs, including the classic "You are not woman enough (to take my husband)."Resonating with listeners.
The stories of Taylor and Lynn were much more celebrated than most marriages concluded by young people. The history is a marriage to minors who usually occur much more often.And it is by no means the past.From girls, and more than a handful of boys who were married in the 21st century, largely thanks to exceptions in the wedding legislation of the State that enable the judges to accept such marriages, as well as parents who force or force their children to marry.Shock that this phenomenon continues today, however, has everything to do with the changed ideals of childhood and marriage, making it like to be a child's bride, the past must be.It is that past, that we are playing now.
From American Child Bride: a story of minors and marriage in the US.Copyright © 2016 by Nicholas L. Syrett.www.uncpress.unc.edu
