Quote:
Originally Posted by Blossom
 I'm still baffled. I realize this is a ARC copy so maybe the age is fixed in the final version. Now I relooked on the first page it says she cut 20 years of hair so I bet it's a misprint.  So it would make more sense she is 20 not 26. I knew something was off.
So I guess the question is what age did a woman come of age back then in 1867? |
I was curious and just had to look at a couple of google hits.
I found the below information.
Spoiler:
According to "
Marriage and Divorce, 1867-1906: Summary, laws, foreign statistics" by US Bureau of Census, not all states/territories required or had a law for registration of marriage and, even then, did not always carefully track or record these. It mentions "adult unmarried population" that includes age 15 and over. Most of the writing concerns gathering data on the marriage and divorce rate, stats based on higher or lower amounts due to economic of the area/country, and I even saw trying to gather stats on whether alimony was granted and a separate section for if alimony was even asked for in a divorce.
The Effect of the Civil War on Southern Marriage Patterns - J. David Hacker, Libra Hilde, and James Holland Jones -
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002115/
"Before examining the war’s effect on marriage patterns, it is important to understand the economic, demographic, and cultural context of marriage in the nineteenth-century United States. First of all, before they married, young couples were expected to acquire the economic resources to establish an independent household. The age of marriage, therefore, depended on real wages, inheritance, and the relative cost of purchasing land, farms, farm machinery, and homes. Although studies are few and subject to possible biases, most scholars agree that the ready availability of inexpensive land in colonial America made marriage feasible at an early age. As a result, marriages occurred several years earlier, on average, in colonial America than in Europe, and much higher proportions of the population eventually married. Community-based studies suggest an average age at marriage of about 20 years for women in the early colonial period and about 26 for men. As population densities increased and land prices rose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American couples delayed marriage, and a higher proportion remained permanently unmarried. The published census figures for 1890, which are the earliest that permit estimates of age at marriage, reveal that the mean age at marriage was 23.8 for white women and 27.8 for white men—little different from those ages in England.12 This discussion demonstrates that the Civil War occurred in the midst of a long, gradual increase in the average age at marriage."