(Thanks to Katie Cannon, assistant curator of education at the DAR Museum in Washington, DC, for tackling this myth. I’m sorry I couldn’t reproduce her two charts, but I’ve transposed the information they contained.)
There is a phrase that I always find myself repeating whenever a general statement is made about the past: “It’s more complicated than that.” This is one of those myths that is sort of true… in some times and places… but tends to get overgeneralized. Yes, some women were married as teenagers in early America. However, this was not always true everywhere… or even most of the time!
There are many factors you must consider when talking about typical ages at marriage:
Geographic Location & Economic Situation. Not all times and places are the same. In the early years of New England, 1650-1750, most women married and most around the age of 20-22, with men four or five years older. By contrast, at the same time in Europe (where many of those women or their parents came from) about 10% of the population did not marry at all.(1) In his book From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, Alan Kulikoff makes the argument that marriage age in 18th-century America was directly tied to land availability. The more land is available to start working and providing for a family, the sooner a person (male or female) can marry. Here is what he found: The English and their colonists assumed that men could not marry until they could support a household. This was easier in America where land was plentiful than in England where it was not. Benjamin Franklin observed that “Land being thus plenty in America, and so cheap as that a labouring Man, that understands Husbandry, can in a short time save money enough to purchase a Piece of new land sufficient for a Plantation, whereon he may subsist a Family.”(2)
Even in America, marriage age fluctuated with availability and cheapness of land, which varied between regions and decades. Here is a chart summarizing Kulikoff’s findings. The numbers indicate average age at first marriage.(3)
England, 1700s; Women: 25-26; Men: 30
New England, early 1600s; Women: Teens; Men: 26
New England, late 1600s; Women: 20; Men: 25
Pennsylvania Quakers, 1600s; Women: 22; Men: 26
Pennsylvania Quakers, 1700s; Women: 23; Men: 26
Rural South Carolina, 1700s; Women: 19; Men: 22
For comparison, here is the U.S. census data showing the median age of marriage for selected years in the more recent past:(4)
1900 Women: 21.9; Men: 25.9
1950 Women: 20.3; Men: 22.8
1975 Women: 21.1; Men: 23.5
2000 Women: 25.1; Men: 26.8
As you can see, the age at first marriage in the 20th century is not that different from the 17th or 18th, depending on exactly where and when you are talking about. While there is a variety, they are all within the same general range rather than the drastic difference many imagine.
Widows & Widowers: Sadly, disease was much more prevalent and you could do less about it than today. Second marriages and stepchildren were rather common, because both men and women regularly took ill and died before reaching old age. If we look for example at the first ten presidents and their wives, four of the wives had been married previously and one of the presidents married again when his wife died. So, the marriage ages often get skewed when an older person who has lost a spouse remarries. To illustrate this, consider President John Tyler, who married Letitia when they were both 23. When Letita died, John remarried, this time to Julia who was 24… although by that time he was 54. You might look at that second marriage and be delightfully scandalized that a man married a woman who was 30 years younger. But remember, in his first marriage, he and his wife were exactly the same age.
Personal Circumstance People still get married as teenagers in America. And some wait until their 40s… or never. It was the same in early America: not everybody fit into a tidy generalization.
1 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in Northern New England 1650-1750, published 1983, page 6.
2 Quoted in Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, published 2000, page 228.
3 Allan Kulikoff, From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers, published 2000, pages 227-229.
4 http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/tabMS-2.pdf
History Myths Debunked 
The average marriage is always an interesting topic. I pulled the average of colonial graves in Northern Virginia and it was 19 for woman. Especially among the wealthy. If I counted the same woman with three spouses, the average was in the 20’s. One case was Catherine Alexander. Her husbands family gave name to Alexandria, Virginia. They married when she was only 17 while so many were worried about Smallpox. Catherine died at the age of 21. My father was Chief of Procurement for the US Department of Commerce and helped to straighten out Census in Suitland, Maryland before her retired. Like John Quincy Adams, he was frustrated that the colonial records were too few to draw conclusions for almost anything. The averages seem to change like the wind. What is for certain ate the letters reflecting a push to get a daughter married off before they get too old ( 23 or 24). All the best…
very interesting. thank you for clarifying this.
It depends on where in the “olden days” one looks. For a few thousand years, right up to late medieval times, people, particularly the gentry and the nobility, were often married off quite young. It’s generally thought that the marriages contracted by the parents of young children weren’t usually consummated until both members of the couple were at least sixteen, but that was by no means an ironclad rule: Margaret Beaufort, the mother of Tudor usurper Henry VII, had him when she was thirteen years old.
Note also that in the novels of late 18th and early 19th century England, novels that depicted with a fair degree of accuracy the social mores of the times, women of the gentry who haven’t married by age twenty are often considered to be doomed to spinsterhood.
You’re right of course (about different customs in different time periods), and also different customs among the various social classes. A European princess might get married off very young while peasant girls could wait until late teens. And different cultures and religions . . .
My 13 year old cousin was married in the fifties to an 16 year old- They are still married to this day- and of course we all know about Jerry Lee Lewis marrying a 12 year old in the sixties?? So it still goes on in modern times…These things were VERY common in Kentucky and Tennessee many years ago- In some places- 12 was the age of consent….
I know . . . my father’s cousin from Mississippi married at 15. Not as bad as 12, but still . . . It happened. Generalizing is always tricky.
Actually, that isn’t true either. Typical age of marriage for women in Ancient and Medieval times was late teens and early twenties. It was possible for someone to be married at a younger age than that but it was uncommon. Keep in mind that most people back then were malnourished and this caused a significantly later age for hitting puberty than today.
[…] came across this interesting blog post that examines the myth about whether people really did get married very young in the old […]
Well it was a lot easier in those days for both men and women since the times were completely different than today.
Times were certainly completely different–but I’d say that it was a lot harder in those days.
http://twentysomethingmarriage.org
See above for the latest in average age at first marriage in U.S. This most recent study shows it at 27 for women, 29 for men.
The data does not support the claim. My father retired from Census in Suitland, Md. And disappointed in the records covered less than a couple percentage points off the population. The facts require a much deeper search in the grave records and family diaries etc.
Life expectancy also played a role in marriage ages throughout history, particularly if we go back farther than colonial times, but even then. As stated above disease was rampant and caused many relatively young deaths, this lead to people being married and having children earlier to avoid the chance of dying childless. Also what constitutes adulthood has changed over the years, there are arguments made for many ages, from 16-21 and sometimes higher for different reasons. In ages where it was younger, people were married younger, in more modern times it’s more common to see marriages starting later in life.