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YouTube video transcript:
Hey guys, so the Church’s gospel topics essay on plural marriage in early Utah notes that in those days, many women married at relatively young ages: “16 or 17 or, infrequently, younger.” Sometimes, these teenagers were marrying men 20 (or less often) 30, 40, or even 50+ years older than them. That can be surprising or even upsetting to some people. So, in this video, we’re going to look at some stats, look at some context, and see if we can figure out why this was happening. Let’s do it.
OK, so why were women getting married at such young ages in Pioneer Utah? Author L.P. Hartley wrote, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” We need to be careful not to judge past events by modern standards. Now, I’m not saying that by doing this, everything in history is just going to look hunky-dory and unproblematic. My goal is not to get you to like polygamy or these young marriage ages. But what I do want is for the opinion you form on the matter to be grounded in accurate context and information.
For example, in the United States today, you’re generally considered an adult once you reach 18 years old. That was not the case back in the 1800s. As the non-Latter-day Saint scholar Thomas Hine noted, “Until the twentieth century, adult expectations of young people were determined not by age but by size. If a fourteen-year-old looked big and strong enough to do a man’s work on a farm or in a factory or mine, most people viewed him as a man … For young women, the issue was much the same. To be marriageable was the same as being ready for motherhood, which was determined by physical development, not age.”
One article notes that “The idea of teenagerhood as a distinct stage of life between childhood and adulthood was first popularised in the 1940s.” Our modern perception of “being a teenager” just didn’t exist in the 1800s, or at best, looked vastly different. Things like the modern public high school education experience that we so strongly associate with teenagerhood today didn’t exist in the 1800s. Hine wrote that the modern teenager is a “social invention.”
The age of consent is the age at which someone can legally agree to participate in sexual activity. Today the age of consent is between 16 and 18 years old, depending on the state you live in. In 1885, the age of consent was shockingly between 10 and 12 years old. Now, I don’t know of any women in Utah who married that young — the point is simply that standards were different back then. The social climate and culture were different.
Where you lived was one of the factors that influenced the age at which you were more likely to marry. A 2023 study from Boston University found that “Frontier women were more likely to be married, at earlier ages, and with older men.” If you’ve seen the movie 7 Brides for 7 Brothers, Adam’s frontier proposal to Millie in 1850 Oregon was probably not entirely unrealistic.
This graph, based on 1880 census data, shows that almost 25% of frontier women between the ages of 15 and 19 were married. But when you look at the same age group for frontier men, that percentage approaches zero (indicating that teenage women were marrying men who were at least somewhat older than them). If we go back to 1860, another study shows that in this region of the United States, 16% of 15-19-year-old women were married. In this region, it was 23.8%. And in these regions (which included Utah territory), it was 32.4%. In Manti, Utah, in 1860, over half of the women between the ages of 14 and 20 were married.
Another factor influencing the age of marriage for women was polygamy. One author wrote, “In a polygamous society, the age of marriage will be lower for females than in a monogamous society. With a relative scarcity of possible mates of their own age, men seek wives among women of younger ages … Rather than delaying marriage and childbearing until their twenties or thirties, women marry and have children as teenagers.”
In the words of another group of researchers, “Polygynous marriage increases competition for wives, as married men remain on the marriage market. This increased competition drives down the age of first marriage for females and increases the spousal age gap. The reduced supply of unmarried women … causes men of all ages to pursue younger and younger women.”
In an appendix of polygamists in St. George in 1870, researcher Lowell Bennion found that “In most of the plural families … the latest wife was at least ten to twenty years younger than the first….” Author Julie Jeffrey also noted that some younger women were likely drawn to older men within polygamy because marrying an older, more established man “seemed to offer social and economic status and perhaps emotional security.”
That said, scholar Brittany Nash notes that it is “A common misconception … that many polygamists were elderly men who married young women.” Authors Jessie Embry and Lois Kelley found that “…a husband married his first wife usually when he was in his early twenties and the woman was in her late teens, the same pattern as most monogamous marriages. The second marriage occurred when the groom was in his late twenties to early thirties, and the bride was again in her late teens. For the few men who married a third wife, he was typically in his late thirties, and the wife again was in her late teens.”
Marriages with even larger age gaps did occur, but again, it wasn’t the norm. Sometimes, those relationships worked out surprisingly well. Sometimes, women felt pressured into marriages with older men, and the relationship failed. And some women married older men less for romance and more for economic security. Similar to monogamous marriage, there was a broad spectrum of experience.
Go watch this video while you’re here, and have a great day.