Child Marriages

In recent years, much publicity has been given to the prevalence of infant and child marriages in India. This particular indiscretion of Mother India is, at any rate, not very new. The Law of Manu, which was established perhaps three thousand years ago, provides that a father may marry his eight-year-old daughter to a man of twenty-four and his daughter of twelve to a man of thirty. But, in truth, the usual age of marriage for females has gone down in modern times, though it is now tending to go up somewhat.

It is the general opinion in the Orient that every able-bodied adult should be married, and girls are held to be adult when they have reached the age of puberty. The people of India, especially the Hindus, feel that it is a disgrace for a girl to remain single after she is twelve or thirteen. Of the unmarried females among them, only a very small proportion are over the age of fifteen. A great many Hindu girls become wives before reaching the age of five. While the average marriage age for males is somewhat higher than that for females, it is by no means unusual for infant boys to become husbands.

The marriage of infants is not general everywhere in India, certain regions in the center of the empire bringing up the average for the country as a whole. It is confined almost entirely to the Mohammedans and the Hindus, especially the latter. When we come to consider children, girls over the age of twelve and boys over fifteen, the matter is somewhat different. The Christians and the Animists of India regard them as entirely ripe for matrimony. Child marriage is least common among the Buddhists.

When very young boys and girls are married, they do not ordinarily proceed at once to live together as husband and wife. In this respect, however, usage varies throughout the country, and there is no doubt that cohabitation sometimes occurs before the wife has menstruated.

Obviously, children who are married off long before reaching years of discretion, sometimes before they have learned simple measures of self-control, do not choose their husbands or their wives for themselves. It may be that the desire of the parents to preserve their authority in so important a matter is chiefly responsible for maintaining the custom. There are other factors, some of them historical. India was for many centuries the seat of devastating wars. Now one and now another conqueror came into the land, and attractive virgins made up an important part of the spoils. Married women were less attractive and therefore more secure.

Hypergamy, too, has probably played an important part in the development of extremely early marriage. This requires girls to marry into a higher sub-caste than their own, or at least forbids them to marry into a lower sub-caste. By greatly narrowing the circle of lawful bridegrooms, it stimulates foresight on the part of parents. The fathers and the mothers of female children who disregard the rule are themselves reduced in status. While boys and men are not allowed to marry outside the caste, they may take girls from subdivisions lower than their own without penalty.

It naturally arouses pity in the hearts of Europeans and Americans to see child brides of six or eight put through ceremonies of which they do not understand the import and led into ways of living for which they are evidently far too young. We are told about little girls nearly fainting for lack of air while the wedding guests gather about to have a good look. Still, the accustomed is seldom the horrible, and it is improbable that the women of India resent the custom half so much as the benevolent ladies from abroad do.

To the imperialists who use child marriage as an argument in favor of the maintenance of British rule in India, it may be apposite to point out that the English have themselves practiced it even in what we are wont to think of as modern times. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, it was fairly common in the higher social ranks. In 1564, a three-year-old boy was married to a girl of two. Neither could do much talking, and the witnesses in whose arms they were held during the ceremony made most of the responses for them. In Scotland, it was not until 1600 that the age limit was set at fourteen for males and twelve for females. It is at these points that the law of Great Britain now sets the age of puberty, though a change is impending.

When the diplomacy of Europe was chiefly a matter of negotiation between monarchs, young princes and princesses were often used as pawns. It sometimes happened that children were betrothed at two or three to cement alliances or to consolidate realms. History has carried down to us the tears of at least one young princess whose mother flogged her for declaring that she did not like the man who had been chosen as her husband and that she would not go to him under any consideration.

The age of consent in Great Britain and in most parts of the United States was quite low until the second half of the nineteenth century. This situation encouraged, if not child marriage, the exploitation of girls by unscrupulous parents. Many children were prostitutes or concubines. In the 1850’s, two thousand New York prostitutes were asked, “How old will you be next birthday?” The answers ranged all the way up to 77 years, but the most frequent answer was 20; 268 girls said they were nineteen years old, 258 were or professed to be eighteen, 143 said they were seventeen, 62 gave their age as sixteen, seventeen as fifteen, and two as fourteen. It is highly probable that many of the younger girls added to their actual years. Some decades later, there were brothels in New York in which most of the prostitutes were only ten or eleven. In the year of Our Lord in which I write, a reverend gentleman resident in one of these United States has been sent to the penitentiary for marrying a child of ten though already possessing a wife several times as old.

The average marriage age advances as we move from south to north. It is higher in the city than in the country and among the educated than among those who have little schooling. Puberty generally sets the lower limit, for the marriage of children who have not yet reached it is almost always treated as a mere betrothal. Perhaps we may set up the generalization that the age of marriage tends to vary inversely with the value attached to chastity and the fear that unmarried girls will be unduly tempted. It is said that child marriage became commoner in India after the Dravidians came in, bringing the custom of premarital promiscuity with them. There is another factor, the value attached by religion and current morality to sexual indulgence. The Israelites glorified fecundity, the Mohammedans and the Hindus have attached sanctity to acts that Christian preachers denounce as sinful. During the Middle Ages, a pretty large part of the Christian population was sworn to celibacy, while the men of Islam were marrying early and often. Of course, there were many illegitimate births in western Europe. Who knows, this fact may be responsible for the fact that Christian civilization was not supplanted by the barbarous bathhouses and libraries and laboratories of the dread worshipers of Allah.

In medieval Europe, the apprentices had to defer marrying. The students too helped to swell the ranks of the unmarried. However, the great bulk of the population consisted of farm laborers, who could provide for their wives about as well at sixteen as at twenty-six. Among the Jews there were many students, but special provision was made for them. It was usual for them to live at the expense of their fathers-in-law for some time after the marriage. This custom was important a generation or two ago, and no doubt it still survives in some Polish communities.

The Industrial Revolution has raised the usual age at which Europeans marry, and also it has increased the proportion of unmarried adults. The average age of men and women marrying for the first time in England and Wales between 1876 and 1885 was respectively 25.9 and 24.4, while for 1906-1910 the averages were 27.2 and 25.6. However, the tendency in Great Britain and in the United States is not toward a constantly upward movement in these figures. Conditions which enable young people to earn good wages bring them down. In the “upper” classes, marriages are usually more retarded than in the “lower” ones. The higher standards of living maintained by the former probably account for part of the difference, although there is a counterbalancing element in hereditary wealth: the rich man’s son seldom needs to worry about how he is to support a wife, at least, if his father is satisfied with his choice. On the other hand, he may wait until he has inherited the family fortune before marrying the woman he wants. It may be that the poor, who are generally accused of being improvident, prove the truth of the charge by getting married while they are quite young.

Schmoller has estimated that, under normal circumstances, about half the population of a country would consist of married people, widows, and widowers. This does not hold true of either Europe or the United States, because many live and die single. Wherever law or custom fixes monogamy as the only form of marriage, it is, indeed, inevitable that there shall be either bachelors or spinsters, for the number of marriageable males is never exactly equal to that of marriageable females. The excess of females amounts, in Europe, to about three per cent. Special conditions such as arise out of a great war make the difference in numbers still greater.

But there are bachelors as well as spinsters in Europe. There are monks as well as nuns, unmarried rakes as well as prostitutes. In short, what some are pleased to consider normal conditions do not exist. According to the figures given by Iwan Bloch, the percentage of people who have reached the age of fifty without marrying is 3 in Hungary, 9 in Germany, 13 in Austria, and 17 in Switzerland. For the period 1886-1890, the official statistics of England and Wales show that 60 out of every 100 inhabitants over the age of fifteen were or had been married. The number in Belgium was 56, the lowest in Europe. It was 61 in Germany, 62 in the United States, 64 in France, 76 in Hungary. Of these, from eight to ten had been widowed. The variations from one country to another point chiefly to economic factors.

Feminism, or, wider than this, a general tendency arising out of the constantly growing freedom and power of women, seems to be advancing the marriage age and adding to the proportion of celibates in almost all the civilized countries of the world. It is this, without much doubt, which will put an end to the infant marriages of India. From one point of view, feminism is a moral movement. More important, it depends upon the economic changes of the last few centuries. The Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant, until quite recently, strove to maintain women in an inferior position. The orthodox Jew still gives thanks to God for making him something better than a woman, while the Jewess meekly praises him for making her what he thought it right that she should be. In the Middle Ages, when these prayers were written and seemed perfectly natural, the position of women among Jews seems to have been considerably higher than it was among Christians and Mohammedans. It was the Renaissance, which was essentially a revolt against medieval other worldliness, that gave women something much better than chivalric glorification, the right to develop freely, to study, to live for themselves.

The Renaissance grew out of the beginnings of the Commercial Revolution. That the time was not altogether ripe for it is shown by the coincident and essentially opposite movement of the Reformation or Protestant Revolution. The Renaissance was choked, but it did not die, and it rose up once more in the Enlightenment. Again there was a development of feminism, frowned upon by the leaders of the religious revival that spread through Europe after the downfall of Napoleon and flickered out as the prudery of the Victorian age.

If marriage for money must be considered a by-product of civilization, it is possible to contend that it belongs only to the upper savage and the barbarous stages. That is to say, it is characteristic neither of the lowest (simplest) peoples nor of the most highly civilized. With both these classes, the position of women is comparatively advantageous.

In early days, however, it is highly probable that the women had no objection to “child marriage.” I put these words within quotation marks for two reasons. First, though most anthropologists have been coming over to Westermarck’s views that primordial man was accustomed to live in families not essentially different from our own, this still remains unproved. Secondly, young people who have reached the age of puberty are considered adults in savage and barbarous communities. They are circumcised or submitted to other initiation rites and then admitted to the full privileges of men and women.

Now, in such countries as the United States and Great Britain, we feel differently about girls of thirteen. We consider them immature, and we believe that they should play and go to school. Our changed attitude is largely the result of conditions brought about by the machine age. As to the hygienic advantages and disadvantages of marriage or its sexual equivalent for such young girls, I suppose there is room for difference of opinion. We hear that the women grow old quickly in those countries where marriage takes place early, but probably this is because the ripening is naturally advanced in most of them. Other interesting questions arise in this connection. For example, are the children of a fourteen-year-old and of a fifteen-year-old mother inferior mentally and physically to those born of older women? The matter is not easily solved. Even if scientists were more free than they are to experiment with human beings, they could not easily establish the equality of “other things” necessary in bringing about valid results.

In the First Book of Kings, there is revealed one reason for child marriage that has been of some importance. “Now King David,” the story goes, “was old and stricken in years; and he was covered with clothes, but he did not get warm. Therefore his servants said to him, ‘Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin, and let her stand before the king, and let her cherish him, and let her lie in thy bosom, that my lord the king may get heat.’ So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite, and brought her to the king. And the damsel was very fair, and she cherished the king and ministered to him; but the king knew her not.”

This is rather puzzling to the modern reader. Why was it necessary to warm the aged monarch with a virgin, especially since we are told explicitly that there was no sexual intercourse? Why would the ancient equivalent of our modern hot-water bottle not have served the purpose just as well? We have here a magic practice or a bit of superstition. King David’s advisers believed that close propinquity between a young and vigorous person and an old and feeble one would bring about a transfer of energy from the former to the latter. A chaste maiden was held to be particularly desirable as the subject. Late in the eighteenth century, a well-known German physician, J. P. Frank, remarked that there might be something in the old belief. When Henry James wrote The Sacred Fount, he made the flow of beauty and of wisdom between people much exposed to each other an important element in his story.

Belief in the special sacredness of virginity is still widespread. It takes some curious forms, as in parts of Jugoslavia, where the peasants think that venereal disease can be cured by intercourse with a maiden. In primitive communities, when the magical effects supposed to be derived from virgins is sought, very young girls are usually chosen. Ploss-Bartels has called it a regular symptom of simple culture that undeveloped females are married or exploited. This is an exaggeration; but, so far as the statement is true, it largely reflects the King David superstition.

The Guatos of Brazil are said to sell their daughters between the ages of five and eight or nine. A traveler asked one of the Indians how he could treat such a child as his wife, and the answer was, “She only sleeps at my side because she is my property, and I will not cohabit with her until she is twice as large.” However, he later learned that this was not the case. Similar cases have been reported from widely separated parts of the world. In Celebes, it is said that Europeans sometimes conform to the native practice sufficiently to lease girls of twelve or thirteen. In the New Britain Islands, girls of ten or twelve are married to men of twenty-five or thirty.

In some of the islands of the Pacific, it is common for fathers to betroth their unborn children. The Fijians and the Samoans used occasionally to arrange marriages between infant girls and middle-aged or elderly men. More often, the Pacific islanders affiance children to each other. In one region, it is customary for the engaged boy to be taken into the care of his future wife’s family at the same time that his own parents take care of the engaged girl. Elsewhere, the betrothed female child is taken to her future husband’s home even though the rule may be that he is not to have any social intercourse with her whatsoever, as much as a passing word being forbidden.

While the girls (except in the instances where some of them serve as celibate priestesses or as prostitutes) marry young among practically all simple peoples, this is not always the case with the boys. For example, there is a part of Dutch New Guinea where the young men live together in a communal house, their erotic life being homosexual. Wherever it is common for the older and wealthier men to have large seraglios, the younger and poorer ones may be compelled to do without wives.

While most American Indians married young, there were a few tribes in which it was considered proper for men to wait until they were twenty-five or thereabouts. Moreover, many savage and barbarous communities require young men to undergo certain tests before they can join the ranks of the married. They may have to show that they are good fishermen or hunters or that they are skilled in certain handicrafts or that they are courageous and skilled in war.

There are Australian tribes in which men under thirty, if they are determined to marry, must take old women. The young girls go to the elders of the community. It is said that gray hairs in the beard are prerequisite to marriage among the Arunta and the Loritja. There are some simple communities where sexual indulgence is easy outside of marriage, and here there are more likely to be large classes of bachelors over the age of twenty. But it is usually desirable to have a home and children, who support the father in his old age and feed his ghost or pray for the repose of his soul after he dies.

There is a fairly widespread belief among the simpler peoples that chastity is requisite to the fullest exercise of magical and physical powers. Accordingly, the men may have to sleep apart from their wives for a certain period before leaving on an expedition of hunting or war. But if the soldiers of the village or tribe must be constantly on the alert, it is sometimes held necessary for them to remain unmarried. This does not always imply their entire abstinence from sexual relations. However, the soldiers are usually discharged from active service at thirty or thirty-five. For a long period in Roman history, military men were required to remain unmarried. Most of them seem to have had concubines, in some instances the same women who had been their wives before their entrance into the army.