Marriageable age

Ancient times

Historically, the age of consent for a sexual union was determined by tribal custom, or was a matter for families to decide. In most cases, this coincided with signs of puberty: such as menstruation for a girl and pubic hair for a boy.

In Rabbinic Judaism and maybe during Pharisaical Judaism, the expectations of marriageable ages were 13 years old for girls and 14 years old for boys. However, a 9 years old boy was considered marriageable. Minor girls could be given in marriage by their father. Displaying signs of puberty before the age of 12 years meant that the girl was no longer a minor, beginning from the age of 12 years and one day. Such girls attained full adulthood six months afterwards. Failure to show signs of puberty before the expected age (it applied to both men and women) meant the prolongation of underage status until 20 years or 35 years and one day.

In Ancient Rome, it was very common for girls to marry and have children shortly after the onset of puberty. Roman law required brides to be at least 12 years old. In Roman law, first marriages to brides from 12 to 24 required the consent of the bride and her father; by the late antique period, Roman law permitted women over 25 to marry without parental consent. The Catholic canon law followed the Roman law. In the 12th century, the Catholic Church drastically changed legal standards for marital consent by allowing daughters over 12 and sons over 14 to marry without their parents' approval, even if their marriage was made clandestinely. Parish studies have confirmed that late medieval women did sometimes marry without their parents' approval.

In western Europe, the rise of Christianity and manorialism had both created incentives to keep families nuclear, and thus the age of marriage increased; the Western Church instituted marriage laws and practices that undermined large kinship groups. The Church prohibited consanguineous marriages, a marriage pattern that had been a means to maintain clans (and thus their power) throughout history. The church also forbade marriages in which the bride did not clearly agree to the union.

Middle Ages

After the Fall of Rome, manorialism also helped weaken the ties of kinship and thus the power of clans; as early as the 9th century in northwestern France, families that worked on manors were small, consisting of parents and children and occasionally a grandparent. The Church and State had become allies in erasing the solidarity and thus the political power of the clans; the Church sought to replace traditional religion, whose vehicle was the kin group, and substitute the authority of the elders of the kin group with that of a religious elder; at the same time, the king's rule was undermined by revolts by the most powerful kin groups, clans or sections, whose conspiracies and murders threatened the power of the state and also the demands by manorial lords for obedient, compliant workers. As the peasants and serfs lived and worked on farms that they rented from the lord of the manor, they also needed the permission of the lord to marry. Couples therefore had to comply with the lord and wait until a small farm became available before they could marry and thus produce children; those who could and did delay marriage were presumably rewarded by the landlord and those who did not were presumably denied that reward. For example, marriage ages in Medieval England varied depending on economic circumstances, with couples delaying marriage until their early twenties when times were bad, but might marry in their late teens after the Black Death, when there was a severe labour shortage; by appearances, marriage of adolescents was not the norm in England.

In medieval Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the Slavic traditions of patrilocality of early and universal marriage (usually of a bride aged 12–15 years, with menarche occurring on average at 14) lingered; the manorial system had yet to penetrate into eastern Europe and had generally had less effect on clan systems there; and the bans on cross-cousin marriages had not been firmly enforced.

The first recorded age-of-consent law dates back 800 years. In 1275, in England, as part of the rape law, the Statute of Westminster 1275, made it a misdemeanour to "ravish" a "maiden within age", whether with or without her consent. The phrase "within age" was interpreted by jurist Sir Edward Coke as meaning the age of marriage, which at the time was 12 years. In the 12th century, the jurist Gratian, an influential founder of Canon law in medieval Europe, accepted the age of puberty for marriage to be between 12 and 14, but acknowledged consent to be meaningful if the children were older than 7. Some authorities claimed that consent could take place earlier. Marriage would then be valid as long as neither of the two parties annulled the marital agreement before reaching puberty, and the marriage had not already been consummated. Gratian noted that "If one over the age of seven takes a prepubescent wife of less than seven and transfers her to his house, such a contract gives rise to the impediment of public propriety". In spite of this, there are recorded marriages of 2 and 3 year olds.

Modern times

The policy of the Roman Catholic Church, and later various protestant churches, of considering clandestine marriages and marriages made without parental consent to be valid was controversial, and in the 16th century both the French monarchy and the Lutheran Church sought to end these practices, with limited success. Before 1929, Scots law followed Roman law in allowing a girl to marry at twelve years of age and a boy at fourteen, without any requirement for parental consent. However, marriage in Scotland at such young ages was in practice almost unknown. In England and Wales, the Marriage Act 1753 required a marriage to be covered by a licence (requiring parental consent for those under 21) or the publication of banns (which parents of those under 21 could forbid).

In most of Northwestern Europe, marriage at very early ages was rare. One thousand marriage certificates from 1619 to 1660 in the Archdiocese of Canterbury show that only one bride was 13 years old, four were 15, twelve were 16, and seventeen were 17 years old; while the other 966 brides were at least 19 years old. Additionally, the Church dictated that both the bride and groom must be at least 21 years of age to marry without the consent of their families; in the certificates, the most common age for the brides is 22 years. For the grooms 24 years was the most common age, with average ages of 24 years for the brides and 27 for the grooms. While European noblewomen often married early, they were a small minority of the population, and the marriage certificates from Canterbury Muddy Mullins show that even among nobility it was very rare to marry women off at very early ages.

The American colonies followed the English tradition, but the law was more of a guide. For example, Mary Hathaway (Virginia, 1689) was only 9 when she was married to William Williams. Sir Edward Coke (England, 17th century) made it clear that "the marriage of girls under 12 was normal, and the age at which a girl who was a wife was eligible for a dower from her husband's estate was 9 even though her husband be only four years old". Reliable data for when people would actually marry are very difficult to find. In England, for example, the only reliable data on age at marriage in the early modern period come from records relating only to those who left property after their death. Not only were the records relatively rare, but not all bothered to record the participants' ages, and it seems that the more complete the records are, the more likely they are to reveal young marriages, giving a biased sample. Additionally, 20th- and 21st-century historians have sometimes shown reluctance to accept data regarding a young age of marriage, and would instead explain the data away as a misreading by a later copier of the records.

In France, until the French Revolution, the marriageable age was 12 years for girls and 14 for boys. Revolutionary legislation in 1792 increased the age to 13 years for girls and 15 for boys. Under the Napoleonic Code in 1804, the marriageable age was set at 15 years for girls and 18 for boys. In 2006, the marriageable age for women was increased to 18, the same as for men.

In jurisdictions where the ages are not the same, the marriageable age for girls is more commonly two or three years lower than that for boys.

Marriageable age as a right vs exceptions

In the majority of countries the marriageable age as a right is 18. However, most of these countries have exceptions for minors, usually requiring parental or judicial authorization. These exceptions vary considerably by country. The United Nations Population Fund stated the following:

In 2010, 158 countries reported that 18 years was the minimum legal age for marriage for women without parental consent or approval by a pertinent authority. However, in 146 countries, state or customary law allows girls younger than 18 to marry with the consent of parents or other authorities; in 52 countries, girls under age 15 can marry with parental consent. In contrast, 18 is the legal age for marriage without consent among males in 180 countries. Additionally, in 105 countries, boys can marry with the consent of a parent or a pertinent authority, and in 23 countries, boys under age 15 can marry with parental consent.

In Western countries, marriages of teenagers have become rare in recent years, with their frequency having rapidly declined during the past few decades. For instance, in Finland, where underage youth can obtain a special judicial authorization to marry, there are only 30–40 such marriages per year in the early 21st century (with most of the spouses being aged 17), while in the early 1990s, more than 100 underage marriages were registered each year.

Europe

The marriageable age as a right is 18 in all European countries, with the exception of Andorra and Scotland where it is 16 (for both sexes). Existing exceptions to this general rule (usually requiring special judicial or parental consent) are discussed below. In both the European Union and the Council of Europe the marriageable age falls within the jurisdiction of individual member states. The Istanbul convention, the first legally binding instrument in Europe in the field of violence against women and domestic violence, only requires countries which ratify it to prohibit forced marriage (Article 37) and to ensure that forced marriages can be easily voided without further victimization (Article 32), but does not make any reference to a minimum age of marriage.