[LMB] Ages,

[Paula Lieberman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jelbelser" <jelbelser at comcast.net>


> >
>> 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

Aristotle was from yet a -different- society. Ancient Athens was one of 
history;s most misogynistic societies, citizens kept their wives and 
daughters locked up, and any woman who wasn't the legitimate daugther of  an 
Athenian citizen and his freeborn daughter of Athenian citizen and his 
legitimate daugher of Athenian citizen and legiitmate daugher of Athenian 
citizen [apply recurision] wife, was ineligible to be a wife of an Athenian 
citizen and the other of his legitimate sons [and begrudgingly one 
daughter--any more than the first generally got -exposed- to be picked up by 
someone else to raise as a slave, with not even th few privileges accorded 
freeborn and raised as legitimate daughter of citizen wives.... ) *

> married when they achieved menarche, which correlated with nutrition
> and general health, or when their family had accumulated a dowry.

It was more complex than that--dowry was the capital incumbent on a bride in 
a culture requiring  a dowry, but the family of the prospective 
husband/prospective husband -also- had to have capital to bestow on a 
betrothing couple.

In the case of ancient Athens,  son was not a full emancipated citizen so 
long as his father was alive, until his father died, he was a minor child, 
no matter what his age was, under the legal control of his father.  As in 
ancient Rome later, the patriarch had absolute control in the family.  Until 
the father died, therefore, the son had no control over his own destiny, and 
had no real funds of his own--if he married, it was at the direction of his 
father....   generally, until a man had established himself with a 
continuing income and/or land that would support a family, he did not have 
social permission along with a financial wherewithal to marry.... for that 
matter, a lot of men were in the status of serving man or servant or 
otherwise attached to a household or estate in which the person who ruled 
the estate or household also held the authority and power over the men on 
the estate regarding granting or refusing them permission to marry...

Bottom line, unless sufficiently established with social permission and 
finances and an authorized position in the society, a man wasn't -allowed- 
to marry... and there were quite a number of people who never achieved 
situation allowing it--Roman Catholic priests and lay brothers were 
prohibited from it, women who took religious orders were brides of Jesus, 
and younger brothers with no lands or income and no wherewithal to establish 
themselves, didn't have the wherewithal.

> 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

* The reasons for all that were various sociocultural things, including the 
requirement for a dowry which went to the family the daughter married 
into--therefore it was highly economically disadvantageous to raise 
daughters... one was necessary, if there weren't any legitimate daughters 
there couldn;'t be a legitimate wife for the son the Athenian father looked 
to to continue the family. Women in Hellenistic Egypt quoted, "Every man, 
even a poor man, will raise a son.  Every man, even a rich man, will expose 
a daughter."   The social status of women  (or lack of, rather...) in Athens 
particularly also contributed to those attitudes...