The Marriage Age of Women and the Demographers

Abstract

The age at which women married in the eighteenth century has come to occupy a central role in current historical debate. It is an issue of crucial importance to those demographers who argue that the main cause of the rise in population of the eighteenth century was increased fertility the consequence of earlier marriage extending the years of greatest fertility in women, and changes in the proportion of women remaining celibate. In particular, it has been argued by some that it was the expansion of domestic industry, cutting across the traditional and largely inelastic demand for labour, which led to the breakdown of the restraints on early marriage. This is a thesis that links up two current areas of historical debate that on the causes of the eighteenth century increase in population, and that opened up by the 'Proto-industrialists'. The debate continues. Surprisingly by no means all of it focuses sharply if at all on women, although where fertility is concerned women can hardly be ignored. This article sets out to ask just how firm are the conclusions reached on the mean age of women at marriage and its relation to fertility. It critically examines the basis for the demographers' statistics, and poses the question of how far this focusing on the mean age at marriage conceals more than it reveals about marriage patterns. It looks at the arguments of those who, while in agreement that a fall in the mean age at marriage occurred, fail to agree on what caused it or on how variations in the age at which men and women married can be explained. How valid is the link claimed by some historians between the declining age of marriage of women and protoindustrialisation? Does marriage age relate to real wages, and if it does, to whose real wages the man's, the woman's, or those of both? In recent work on marriage patterns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, several factors other than real wages have been found to influence age of marriage not least changing attitudes to marriage and what marriage involved, to pre-marital pregnancy and illegitimacy. Such factors have been found to vary between communities and to be in turn