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To: ansel12; Utah Girl

Nobody ever said 14-16 was the norm, but it was very common, especially in rural areas, perfectly legal, and routinely sanctioned by all mainstream churches.

There’s also a huge gap in the current average age for women’s marriage in the US, and the lowest age that most of us would consider healthy and reasonable. Per the US Census Bureau, the average age at which women married from 2000-2003 was 25 (and in the Northeast it’s nearly 27). But it would obviously be ludicrous for somebody a century from now to claim that this is proof that marrying at 19-20 would have been viewed by most people in our time as inappropriate and evidence of subjugation or abuse. Yet that’s exactly how you’re using the statistics you’re citing for time periods when the average marriage age was 20.

My great-grandmother (not Mormon!) married at 17 in 1899, to a man in his early thirties, after a courtship of over 2 years. Nobody in town saw anything wrong with a man this age openly courting a 15 year old. They were married in a mainstream Protestant church. They were an ordinary family of above-average means, in a midwestern farming and mining town. Her husband went on to become the president of the local bank. If they had been of lesser means, they probably would have married when she was 15, but she was attending a nice private school in town, and he had a comfortable job as a bank teller (i.e. no need for a wife to start helping him build up a farm), and there was no rush.

If the FLDS were running an open society, where members were choosing to stay in the group of their own free will, having plenty of opportunity to learn about alternatives (e.g. as the Amish youth do), and entering into marriages of their own free will, I don’t think most people would have a big issue with it if a lot of their girls were marrying at 14. But given that they are being imprisoned, brainwashed, and forced into marriage, I (and I think most people) wouldn’t be okay with it even if they never had a woman marry before age 25.


112 posted on 05/06/2008 7:07:53 PM PDT by GovernmentShrinker
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To: GovernmentShrinker

“Yet that’s exactly how you’re using the statistics you’re citing for time periods when the average marriage age was 20.”


Which time periods are those when the average marriage age was 20?


123 posted on 05/06/2008 7:55:22 PM PDT by ansel12 (Mormonism, give it a test drive, after all, what do you have to lose?)
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