[LMB] Ages,

[Jelbelser]

>
> If I recall Aristotle's _Politics_, his view was that girls should
> not marry too young; they should be seventeen or eighteen
> or so.  Men should marry at thirty-five.  Weird.

Men married when they had the financial means to support a family.  
That differed with period, place, and social class.  In general, women 
married when they achieved menarche, which correlated with nutrition 
and general health, or when their family had accumulated a dowry.  
Societies that had population pressure tended to have late marriages, 
which helped reduce population growth.  WGW, as a frontier society with 
available farmland and an expanding technology base, would have made it 
easy for men to be able to support a family, and ample nutrition, so 
marriages could commonly occur in the late teens or early twenties.

Janet in TN