Many of the states that provided data included categories such as “14 and under,” without specifying exactly how much younger some of the bride and groom were. Therefore, the 12-year-olds we found in Alaska, Louisiana, and South Carolina may not have been the youngest child brides in America between 2000 and 2010. In addition, the data we collected did not take into account child brides in purely religious ceremonies or taken abroad to get married, situations we often see at Unchained. Puerto Rico is a territory of the United States and its inhabitants are U.S. citizens. In Puerto Rico, the general age of marriage is 21, as that is the age of majority. The general age of marriage in Puerto Rico is 21 or 18 with parental consent. [35] In Guam, the general age is 18, but 16-year-olds may marry with the consent of at least one parent or guardian. [36] In American Samoa, the age of marriage has been 18 for both sexes since September 2018. Previously, the age of marriage for women was 14.

[37] American Samoa does not allow marriages with minors. In the District of Columbia, the general age is 18, but 16-year-olds may marry with exceptions. [35] In the U.S. Virgin Islands, the age of marriage is 14 for women and 16 for men. [38] In the Northern Mariana Islands, men must be 18 to marry, while women can marry at 16 with parental consent. [39] In contrast, women today have far more opportunities for meaningful autonomy, when women marry early, almost all of these options are cut off. But above all, this is especially true for women who are able to take advantage of these opportunities. Where underage marriage is most common today — among poor and rural Americans — many girls believe that marriage at a certain age is their lot in life, regardless of that.

Overall, a postponement may have little consequence. Marriage itself has undergone a remarkable transformation over the past two hundred years and has become much more egalitarian for many spouses. Because of who marries today as a minor and why they do so, most young women cannot take advantage of this new marital equality or the option of not letting life chances be defined by marriage. Studies show that those who marry as minors today are much more likely to suffer from health problems, including depression, than those who marry as adults (effects that could have been found in child brides in the past if someone had asked for it). What the studies do not show is whether these health risks are related to the early marriage itself or the circumstances that led to it. Regardless, it should be noted that poverty (and its consequences: substandard education, including sex education, and lack of access to contraception) and inequality of opportunity make early marriage a symptom of much larger problems, not the main problem. In many states (but not Massachusetts),[2] the marriage of a minor automatically emancipates him or increases his or her legal rights beyond the minor`s permission to consent to certain medical treatments. Loretta and her husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn had six children and remained married for over fifty years, until his death in 1996.[3] He was a big supporter of his early career. But the marriage was not without problems, Doolittle`s betrayal among them.

Loretta documented numerous marital disputes in her songs, including the classic “You Ain`t Woman Enough (To Take My Man).” Loretta Lynn`s recording career now spans more than five decades and embodies a working-class feminist sensibility that continues to resonate with listeners. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. The word “child” has an outside of law meaning; The fields of medicine and psychology have contributed significantly to this understanding. When I don`t cite sources (who sometimes use the word in other ways), I use the word “child” to refer to those who have not yet reached their youth. I reserve the words “teenager” and “adolescent” for those after twelve years when I write about the twentieth century, when the words themselves were first invented and entered colloquial language (“teenager” in the early 1900s and “teenager” in the mid-twentieth century). Before these moments, I use the words “young” or “young” to refer to similar seniors. At every moment, I tried to determine the age of a young person as accurately as possible. Although I often refer to the average age of first marriage and document statistics that prove marriages of people in certain areas provided by various authorities (e.g., fifteen to nineteen years), at all other times, it is a book about those who married before the age of eighteen. This book tells two interconnected narratives: the first is about people in the United States, most of whom are much more ordinary than Susie King Taylor and Loretta Lynn, who married underage, that is, under the age of eighteen. And the second is Americans` perception of how and when marriage is appropriate or inappropriate at a young age. The latter story also means looking at when some adults have taken the initiative to regulate youth marriages by changing laws to prevent their marriages, reforming families to try to discourage the practice, or trying to annul their children`s marriages because of their age.