Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazyasciiart | Hacker News Reader

I don't think that claim is about Joseph Smith and marriages while he was alive, because polygamy wasn't official church doctrine then.

I haven't found a good dataset, but this book has this comment: "Latter-day Saints were surprisingly obedient to the counsel to marry, and in 1860 Manti, only 1.6 percent of women over the age of 16 had never been to the altar." I believe 14 was the minimum legal age of marriage for at least part of that time, so that would mean almost all women were married between 14-16. Depending how many of them re-married after being widowed or divorced, or how many older women migrated in for marriage, I'm not sure what the overall stats of 'age at marriage' would look.

View on HN

That's a rather horrifying statistic, especially as nowadays we would not class 14-16 year olds as "women". It beggars belief that 98.4% of Mormon girls would have fallen in love by age 16, especially with older men who already have a harem of wives, so we have to assume a shocking degree of social pressure, amounting essentially to arranged marriages.

I've always wondered at the historical accuracy of "A Study In Scarlet", but its depiction of the social climate regarding marriage among the LDS would appear to be spot-on...

FWIW Manti in 1860 probably had a population of a few hundred, so the population of females aged 16-25 (or whatever upper age you think is reasonable) could have been quite small.

If only 2% of women over age 16 as also under age 18, that statistic is not so shocking. I don't agree that this statistic alone demonstrates that "almost all women were married between 14-16."

"A study in scarlet" is not historically accurate. IIRC, Conan Doyle said so himself.

Didn't realize I forgot the actual book link, not sure which one it was now. The population was about 1000.

The historical norm for girl v.s. woman is drawn at puberty. The mormons might have been an outlier in the US at the time, but until industrialization, most women were having their first child in their mid to late teenage years.

Even today, the median age for a woman having her first child in some poorer countries such as Niger, Bangladesh etc. is 18 years[1]. That means a lot of them are younger than that. If you get a group of ten 15 year old girls from Bangladesh, statistically one of them will be nursing their first child.

So let's be careful to judge history by the standards of today. Sure, some of this was mormon practices, but other parts of it was just because these people were doing the same thing most poor peasants on the rest of the planet were doing and considered normal.

1. https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/People/Mothe...

2. http://www.hips.hacettepe.edu.tr/nbd_cilt35/nahar_zahangir.p...

We’re most women in the United States marrying that young? I think I saw somewhere that the average age of marriage wasn’t too far from today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com