There’s also the rather disturbing trend of parents treating their children, to a greater or lesser degree, like pets. This is a relatively modern development, since the point that children were no longer required to work from a young age. Pets having sex is, at best, eye-rolling.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
I tend to prefer this kind of explanation because “what would build the kind of society we want when the children grow up” seems too sophisticated and neat to be an accurate description of what’s going on. I suspect that dynamic comes into play only sporadically, with moralizing (what’s proper, what’s presentable or impressive, what doesn’t discomfort me) taking centre stage most of the time.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice.
Oh wait.
(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
In Asia, as Malthus knew, the norm for women was early and nearly universal marriage. Recent studies of family lineages and local population registers suggest that first marriage for Chinese women around 1800 took place on average at age 19. A full 99 percent of women in the general population married.9 Men also married young, first marriage occurring on average at 21. But the share of men marrying was much lower, perhaps as low as 84 percent. Chinese males were no more likely to marry than their northwestern European counterparts. This was because female infanticide created a surplus of males, and men were more likely than women to remarry after the death of a spouse.10
Egypt:
The one even earlier society for which we have demographic data is Roman Egypt in the first three centuries AD. As in preindustrial China and Japan female marriage was early and universal. The estimated mean age at first marriage for Egyptian women was even lower, at 17.5.15 Marital fertility rates, however, were lower than in northwestern Europe, but higher than in China and Japan: about two-thirds the Hutterite standard. This early and universal marriage, and relatively high fertility rates within marriage, would seem to imply high overall fertility rates. After all, at these rates Egyptian women married from 17.5 until 50 would give birth to 8 or more children. But in fact birth rates were 40–44 per thousand, implying a life expectancy at birth of 23–25 years. In comparison French birth rates in 1750 were about 40 per thousand. So Roman Egypt, despite early marriage, had fertility levels only slightly higher than those in eighteenth-century France.16 The intervening factor that kept Egyptian birth rates lower than we would expect was again social custom. In northwestern Europe younger widows commonly remarried, but not in Roman Egypt. Furthermore, divorce was possible in Egypt. But while divorced husbands commonly remarried younger women, divorced women typically did not remarry. Thus while in Egypt almost all the women got married, the proportion still married fell steadily from age 20. Consequently women surviving to age 50 typically gave birth to only 6 children rather than 8.
Europe:
Yet despite the apparent absence of contraceptive practices, the birth rate in most preindustrial western European populations was low, at only thirty to
forty births per thousand, because of the other features of the European marriage pattern. These were as follows:
A late average age of first marriage for women: typically 24–26.
A decision by many women to never marry: typically 10–25 percent.
And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation.
Men in Ancient Greece and Rome were usually 30ish at the time of marriage, while women were actually girls—they were between twelve and fifteen at the time of their first marriage. They would usually have several marriages, as their husbands died, but after the first they were firmly “mothers.” They would still usually be younger than their husband by a significant amount, even in their later marriages—by the time they surpassed the age of the pool of potential suitors, their sons or sons-in-law would have taken up their care.
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
On the other-hand the taboo against children having sex isn’t a modern development.
Rather, questions of propriety and morality refer to memes that were presumably selected by memetic evolution for some combination of the children’s individual and collective benefit.
It’s not? Damn, that 12-year-old girl in feudal England must be so happy that there’s a social taboo against children having sex. That way she doesn’t have to worry about being done stuff she doesn’t even understand when she gets married next moon to some 19-year-old page boy she’s only ever met twice. Oh wait.(TL;DR: [citation needed]) Edit: (gwern wins some more internets—by actually providing citations! I stand corrected.)
I’m not an expert on developmental sexuality in preindustrial Europe, but for most of the feudal era child marriage was a lot rarer than pop culture would have us believe and almost exclusively an upper-class phenomenon. It also didn’t necessarily imply immediate consummation; most of the feudal women we know about that did marry at thirteen or fourteen didn’t bear children until a few years later. Women from the peasant and mercantile classes (the vast majority of the population) often wouldn’t marry until their early twenties, for a variety of basically economic reasons.
Upper-class feudal women did marry young by our standards, but usually that would have meant sixteen to eighteen, not twelve.
From Farewell to Alms; Asia:
Egypt:
Europe:
To put these averages in perspective; from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
I’ve seen claims that ancient Greece & Rome may have been very different from the later medieval patterns; from http://community.feministing.com/2010/02/14/misogyny-and-relationship-inequality/comment-page-1/
(Quotes extracted from searching my Evernotes: http://www.evernote.com/pub/gwern/gwern )
Thanks! This makes a strong enough case to upturn the history book I read (in high school, and of typical epistemic quality for high school history books).
I’d say it’s more that ‘it’s complicated and dependent on region’. After all, there is a specific claim there that in Grecoroman society the stereotype that girls got married the moment they started bleeding was true. And no doubt anthropologists could list societies fitting every marriage age bracket from before conception to ‘never’. (But it does mean that we can’t pride ourselves on how civilized we are compared to our barbaric ancestors as of, say, 5 centuries ago.)
Or feel ashamed at how much more sexually repressed we are as savageorange was doing above.
More materials: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/sexology/GESUND/ARCHIV/GUS/HISTORYCHHS.HTM http://womenofhistory.blogspot.com/2007/08/medieval-marriage-childbirth.html