Er. The usual marriage age for a girl in premodern and early modern western European culture (and many other cultures worldwide) was "the onset of menses," or about 12 to 14 years old. ("Romeo and Juliet" takes place just before Juliet's 14th birthday.) Even in the modern era, the typical marriage age for women was 16 or 17 well into the 20th century in most of the western world.

The reference point of the 1950s to the present is an anomaly because it's weirdly old in western culture, not weirdly young.

(1) You are wrong, at since the middle ages in Europe. See child comment on Western pattern of marriage. I would be interested in your sources besides Romeo and Juliet, where if I remember correctly, they are told they are too young.

(2) The referenced article isn't really about marriage, but about the transition from adolescence to adulthood. There is a difference between a person getting married/ starting to have children versus setting up a household in which a person has an "adult" role; in the recent, Euro-derived West they are one and the same, but not so universally. And in the West, late age for marriage, and lots of non-married is the norm, and that pattern is pretty unique in the world.

If you do a graduate degree in demography, you learn all this. There isn't really any debate about it anymore, though it is very cool and interesting to discuss because it challenges our received knowledge about "normal". Don't get me started on fertility rates for women over 40 and their historical trends....

Among poor people in the US it is fairly common for a girl to have her first baby when she is 17 / 18/ 19 but still live at home; she has hardly left adolescence even if the boyfriend/ husband is also around...

>Don't get me started on fertility rates for women over 40 and their historical trends....

Don't leave this hanging. At least point in the direction you're going.

> The usual marriage age for a girl in premodern western European culture (and many other cultures worldwide) was "the onset of menses," or about 12 to 14 years old.

The wikipedia article [1] doesn't agree with you. It suggests marriage in the mid twenties was most common, although there was regional variation. Noblewomen, such as the fictional Juliet, married younger.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...

That article says, "[in western Europe], about half of all women aged 15 to 50 years of age were married at any given time, while the other half were widows or spinsters" which is entirely consistent with what I wrote: over half of women aged 15 were, or had been, married.

The passage you quote says little or nothing about the distribution of ages of married women within that range and the ages of those women married when they first married. On one hand, the married half of women in the age range could largely be the older half. On the other, the typical age of a newly married woman might be much younger than the typical age of an already married woman.

Correct. As I said, it is "consistent with" what I said -- not that it outright proves what I said is true. It's ambiguous.

I am sorry, but what you said about the age at marriage is wrong, whether or not you can twist the argument about what wikipedia said. Really, you either need to read some books about demography or, umm, leave it to the experts. If you read some books about demographic history, you will be interesting to argue with.

There is a large literature supporting the parent comment, started by Hajnal, not your somewhat sophistic argument. In the Western part of Europe, people married late and there were a lot of spinsters.

The 12-14 age for puberty is kinda modern. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puberty#Historical_shift) It's been happening earlier and earlier. With the 1840 reference point on wikipedia, depending on location it was more like 15-17.

...anomaly for the recent past, not biologically, obviously.

Not so fast, "obviously".

I believe that "neolocal" households are unique, mostly, to post middle age Western Europe. And the 1950s are anomalous within that time scale.

Otherwise we see patri- or matri local multi generational households in which adulthood is not correlated with setting up a new household at all. You would marry someone and the move into their parents house. Sure you would start having children, but there isn't the same leaving adolescence thing.

Why is that time scale interesting to you as opposed to e.g. the last 150k years?

I don't think we can say anything meaningful about peoples behaviors 10k-150k years ago, and even approaching 10k quickly get's sketchy.

Humans have a long period between when it's possible to get pregnant and when it's safest to get pregnant. This may suggest prehistoric females tended to wait around a decade after puberty, or there was huge selective pressure and we still ended up like this.