Musings on demographic history

Clio: So, darling, are you going to respond to Agnostic's challenge or not?

CM: You mean when he asked me to link to some statistics about marriage patterns in history, in order to dispel the popular misconception that it was once common for girls to marry in their teens? Well, I'm thinking about it, but I'm not quite certain how to approach the business. Agnostic was especially concerned by bloggers who are making this comment in order to lend their support to Sarah Palin and her daughter, who is expecting a child at age seventeen. The thing is, I haven't been able to find any such bloggers online, and so I don't know exactly what their arguments are or what sort of shark-pool I'd be jumping into if I comment on them. Plus, I'm wavering again on the idea of writing a post on so political a subject. Not my country, not my election, not my issue.

Clio: Apollo save us! You have something there right now, do you not, that summarizes the basic information for you? I mean, you don't even have to think about it. Just paste it in and forget about what's-her-name for the moment. Anyway, haven't you been itching to correct young Roissy and his angry hordes on this very subject - early marriage - for months?

CM: Oh, all right. When you put it that way it seems silly to hold back. It's not as if I'm invading anyone's privacy or anything. The following summary is from an online article quoting respectable academic sources. Here goes:

Fertility Control through Late Marriage
Daniel Scott Smith has summarized the findings of thirty-eight family reconstitution studies (twenty-seven of which described French villages from the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as follows: "A woman who married at age 20 exactly, and survived to age 45 with her husband would bear nine children" (p. 22). Thus the potential maximum fertility was only about half of Leridon's biological maximum. And what is more, Smith's potential maximum fertility is an overstatement for two reasons: first, the average age at first marriage for northwestern European women was not twenty and second about one-third of all marriages were broken by the death of one partner before age forty-five, which Smith is using as a shorthand measurement for the onset of menopause. In Smith's sample of thirty-eight villages, for example, the average age at first marriage for women was 25.7 years old; their husbands were 28.0 years old.

Basing his conclusions on fifty-four published studies describing age-specific marital fertility rates for women in early modern northwestern Europe, Michael Flinn agrees with Smith, describing an average age at first marriage for women that fluctuated around twenty-five. Flinn does not provide us with measurements to assess the spread of the distribution around this midpoint, but other studies have determined the standard deviation to be about six years, meaning that about two-thirds of all northwestern European women married for the first time between twenty-two and twenty-eight. A few teenaged brides were counterbalanced, as it were, by a similar number of women who married in their thirties. Perhaps one woman in ten never married. In the demographer's jargon, that tenth woman was permanently celibate.

So in answering our question concerning the relative lowness of high birth rates, the first point we have to keep in view is that, uniquely, northwestern Europeans married late. Or, to be more precise, the link between PUBERTY and marriage was dramatically more attenuated in early modern northwestern Europe than elsewhere. Modern demographic studies have shown that in eastern and southern Europe this puberty-marriage gap was about half as long, while in most African and Asian countries puberty and marriage roughly coincided as a girl entered womanhood (and adult status) with the onset of menstruation. Arranged marriages followed almost immediately thereafter.

The identification of this austere Malthusian regime has been the greatest achievement of early modern historical demography. These statistics provide us with a single measure that distinguishes the creation of new families in northwestern Europe from other societies. This unique marriage strategy was vitally important for two reasons: first, it provided a safety valve, or margin for error, in the ongoing adjustment between population and resources that characterized the reproduction of generations and social formations; and second it meant that the role of women was less dependent and vulnerable insofar as they were marrying as young adults, not older children. Arranged marriages were normal among the propertied Europeans, as they were in almost every other part of the world; most of these marriages were arranged while the girl was still a child and they were formalized after puberty.

CM: Notice that, dear readers. Various studies indicate that the average age at marriage in northwestern Europe was about 25 for women and 28 for men, long after puberty for both sexes. That average was lower in eastern and southern Europe, but still not as early as puberty. Only the daughters of the well-to-do married that early, and they were never a large proportion of the population. Notice, also, that this is regarded by demographic historians as a "unique" marriage pattern. No other regional population on earth followed such an "austere regime", as the author of this piece puts it. And finally, of course, there's the fact that the supposed female preference for alpha males had no part in these marriage patterns. Rich or poor, parents tended to make the choice of mate for the young. Perhaps alpha male fathers chose alpha mates for their daughters, but who knows? It doesn't seem likely. Money and propinquity (though not kinship, as in other societies) were more important to parents. And building the family's status up over time, if possible, through careful marriage.

Clio: I wonder why those evolutionary biologists, and IQ theorists, and so on, aren't more attentive to this issue.

CM: I don't know. But you'd certainly expect that people so interested in the unique particularities of ethnic groups and populations would be fascinated by this information, that it would be a cornerstone of their thinking on the subject of racial and ethnic differences. Of course, they'd almost certainly insist that the reasons for this unique pattern of sexual continence were purely genetic. A very dull explanation, and in this case almost certainly not the truth, or not the greater part of the truth.

Clio: Why do you say that, my sweet?

CM: Because the limited sources available suggest, if I am remembering correctly, that before the arrival of Christianity in Europe, its various ethnic and tribal groups married their children off young. The Romans and Greeks married their daughters at puberty, though not usually their sons, who had to wait a longer time. They resorted to exposure and infanticide to control fertility, but that was forbidden by Christianity, as was abortion, so families had to find some other way to ensure that they could feed their children. The article I linked to suggests that infanticide was the usual approach to the problem of too many children in China and Japan as well.

Clio: There you are now. You've written a fair bit here, and not one word of it could be interpreted as a political diatribe.

CM: Ah, that's your influence there, Clio. You keep my mind on Parnassus, and away from the passing excitements of everyday life among mortals.