Few Americans today would think of child marriage as an American phenomenon. However, for most of the history of the United States, child marriage—the marriage of legal minors—was a relatively common occurrence. In American Child Bride, Nicholas Syrett tells the surprising story of child marriage in the United States, with a primary focus on civil marriage. Syrett investigates both ordinary Americans “who married as minors,” and “Americans' perceptions of how and when marriage at early ages is appropriate or inappropriate” (2). He focuses on both marriages between minors, and marriages between girls and adults, because, as he points out, until the early twentieth century, Americans did not distinguish between these two types of youthful marriage.
This is an ambitious book, in both temporal and geographic scope: aside from spanning all of American history, it examines marriage laws and marital patterns across all states. Chapters 1–4 respectively probe marriage laws across the United States from the colonial period to the antebellum years, patterns of youthful marriage, struggles over the age of consent laws, and feminist objections to early marriage. In these early chapters, Syrett highlights the role of the English common law in determining minimum ages for marriage; explores the reasons for encouraging the early marriage of girls (mainly containing sex within marriage, and ensuring reproduction); and draws attention to regional differences between Northern and Southern states, as well as between older and newer states. In the next two chapters, Syrett contrasts the critique of child marriage by reformers in the 1920s, with the persistence of the phenomenon in the rural South in the 1930s. The last chapters, on the post-World War II period, challenge the notion of a steady decline of early marriages over time, analyzing the revival of youthful marriage among white urban and suburban teenagers during the 1950s, and the persistence of teen marriage in rural America today.
The book's central thesis is that child marriage in the United States became identified as such only after the development of age consciousness, “the belief that age is an important characteristic of one's identity” (82). In the minds of earlier Americans, age was not an identity marker, and, therefore, they did not conceive of childhood as a distinct stage of life. This began to change in the nineteenth century, in the industrialized Northeast, with the adoption of age-graded schooling and the systematic gathering of vital statistics. In Syrett's account, because of a variety of socioeconomic factors, age consciousness did not spread uniformly across American states, which has led to a North/South divide (or urban/rural divide) in patterns of youthful marriage.
As a result of age consciousness, Americans increasingly came to understand childhood as a stage of life distinct from adulthood. This notion of “childhood,” in Syrett's assessment, was long in the making, emerging only toward the end of the nineteenth century, when many Americans started replacing their “functional” understanding of childhood with a more “chronological” one (4). Concomitantly, Americans' views of marriage began shifting too. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, a growing number of Americans shed the belief that “marriage could transform a child into a wife who was legally and socially an adult because of marriage,” replacing it with the notion that marriage was a relationship based on love (4). In this context, more and more Americans considered children unfit for marriage, which led to campaigns aimed at curbing underage marriage.
Syrett identifies three successive waves of critiques of early marriage: in the 1850s, the 1870s and 1880s, and the 1920s. As he persuasively demonstrates, it was not until the 1920s that this critique started centering primarily around child protection. Turn-of-the-century critiques of youthful marriages were spearheaded by the sensationalist press, as well as by two marriage reform movements (one aiming to eliminate sex outside of marriage; the other seeking to prevent divorce). Notwithstanding their differences, these movements converged in their concern with protecting marriage, rather than children themselves. However, in the 1920s, reformers began to frame their critique of child marriage as child protection, against the backdrop of mass immigration, changing sexual mores, and the growth of the social sciences and social work. In their view, myriad girls had fallen victims to an institution that could no longer protect them. These reformers turned to the law to attain their goals, and were partially successful as “lawmakers in at least twelve states raised their marriage ages” during that era (181).
Syrett's treatment of child marriage throughout American history reflects an impressive feat of archival research conducted in numerous American states, and a mastery of a wide array of both legal and nonlegal sources. An engaging book that successfully combines analysis and storytelling, American Child Bride should convince its readers that the histories of marriage and childhood cannot be understood apart from one another. To those interested in the relationship among law, culture, and society, this monograph should provide many insights into the circumstances that can hasten, or prevent, legislative changes. Furthermore, Syrett's book attests to the ongoing legal power of the institution of marriage in the United States.
For all its accomplishments, the book could have benefited from a more robust treatment of religion and race. Furthermore, although Syrett provides helpful numbers about youthful marriage drawn from reports to legislatures and the census, a methodological discussion about the reliability of such data would have enlightened the reader about what these numbers hide, as well as what they reveal. Despite these criticisms, Syrett has made an important contribution to both the history of childhood, and the history of marriage.
