Marriageability and Adulthood Belong Together
An alternative perspective on minimum marriage age law
Last week I had the opportunity to edit an article by our own Rebecca Lemke on why raising the minimum age for marriage to 18 from 16 is bad law. Since my own parents were married when my mom was 17 and my dad was 19, and to this day enjoy a happy, committed marriage, I found that many things about Rebecca’s arguments rang true.
Lemke argued that although there are certainly many 16 and 17-year-olds who are not ready for marriage, maturity does not advance at the same rate for everyone, and many teens who marry before 18 go on to have happy marriages. Lemke also pointed out the troubling reality that the same 16-year-old who, under the proposed legislation, cannot marry even with a guardian’s blessing, would still be legally capable of consenting to sex, or obtaining an abortion, without the knowledge of a parent or legal guardian. As Lemke puts it,
You can consent to the emotional and mental risks — far higher for young women than for young men, if young women’s health is really the concern here — of unwed sex at 16, but you cannot consent to the stability of sex within marriage.
These are good points and good questions, but in interacting with Lemke’s article, I found myself asking other questions, which eventually led me to take a different view of the legal issue, as much as we may agree on certain elements of her argument.
Her discussion led me to ask two questions.
Should the law intervene at any age if someone wants to marry?
While there may well be 16-year-olds out there who are as ready for marriage as your average 18-year-old, what about 14? 13? Or what about 11, like Florida “bride” Sherry Johnson who was married to her 20-year-old rapist, at the suggestion of her parents? I hardly need belabor the point that exploitative situations such as the above are at least made possible by the state’s choice not to set any kind of minimum age for marriage, as long as the under-age participant has their legal guardian(s’) permission. Without yet speaking to what specific age the law should set, I propose that the law has an obligation to step in at some point on behalf of vulnerable minors.
If we establish that the law has a responsibility to intervene at some point, it becomes necessary to set that point.
The law, however, has no way to quantify maturity on its own. It has no way to determine that 16-year-old Jane Doe is more generally mature than 18-year-old Jane Smith.
If the law should set some age, then, based on what criteria?
In my mind, there are basically two possibilities:
The first is biological sexual development. At what point is a person’s body biologically ready to be in a relationship that is, by definition, sexual? Even this question will result in vastly different answers. How do you determine when someone is ready to be sexually active? Sexual feelings? That can begin before a child is even out of single digits. Menses? That would put us generally between 12–15, but could also include girls as young as 8 (8 is the low end for the onset of menses but still considered in range). The ability to become pregnant, or to carry a pregnancy to term? There have been cases recorded of girls giving birth to healthy babies as young as 12. Full development of the body? Again, this varies considerably by child and is not correlated with intellectual or emotional maturity.
If we look to physical sexual development as a criteria for where to set the minimum age for marriage, we are forced to confront numbers that not only varied but also are so low that they rightly unsettle us. I reject the notion that any of the above should be considered a signal of marriage readiness.
This brings us to the second possible set of criteria: the culturally-accepted age of general maturity.
Different cultures recognize the transition to adulthood, which is often marked by some sort of coming of age ceremony, at different times of a person’s life, depending on a number of variables such as life expectancy, economic opportunities, and social organization. Although there are certainly exceptions, broadly speaking, coming of age has historically been associated with marriageability, and vice versa — especially for women.
For instance, the “coming out” parties for teenage girls of the Regency and Victorian eras not only signaled their socially-recognized transition from childhood to adulthood, but also transferred them from the ineligibility of girlhood into the eligibility of womanhood. A ball in their honor introduced them not only as a young woman, but a potential bride for would-be suitors. The time of “coming out” might vary (typically it occurred between 16 and 18) according to the parents’ discretion and whether she still had unmarried, older sisters, but there was a clear delineation between being an adult and being “out” and being a child, and therefore “not out.” It was generally understood that before a girl’s coming out, she was not to be approached with romantic overtures or offers of marriage.
It is not really a matter of a specific age where one magically becomes intellectually and emotionally eligible for marriage, but that society generally confers whatever rights and privileges that a person will be afforded as an adult in conjunction with the recognition that the person is eligible for marriage.
There is good reason for this. Marriage not only formally recognizes two people’s sexual commitment to one another, it also entails the establishment of a household and the potential for children. This means that to recognize someone’s marriage also recognizes their fitness to make other major life decisions on behalf of themselves as a couple and, most likely, their eventual dependents. These roles belong to the world of adulthood, not childhood.
For better or for worse, our society acknowledges the coming of age at one’s 18th birthday. American society not only recognizes 18 as the beginning of adulthood in the social sphere, we have formalized it as the beginning of adulthood in our civil law. This means that no matter how mature a 17-year-old is, the law is going to deal with them as a child in most regards. This matters a great deal when we come to the question of whether that person should be allowed to enter into the legal contract of marriage.
A person married before 18 faces a society that in many concrete, meaningful ways does not see them as an adult. Although society may recognize their marriage, it does not recognize their right to vote on behalf of their family’s interests, sign a legal contract, buy a home, or take out a loan. A person who is capable of being a spouse ought not to be someone who is constantly confronted with “you must be 18 or older in order to . . .” It is utterly unfair to treat a person as an adult in that the law formally recognizes their married state, but in all other ways treats them as a minor. This creates a disjointed scenario where a person stands with one foot in adulthood as a spouse and perhaps a parent, but the other foot planted firmly in legal childhood until they reach their 18th birthday.
This arrangement is unfair to married minors, and it is also, I believe, a bad precedent to set in terms of blurring the line in the public consciousness between mutual sexual unions between adults, and the sexual exploitation of minors. Protecting children from sexual exploitation requires that we have a universally-accepted standard of what constitutes childhood and adulthood. Under-age marriage creates a schizophrenic situation which causes us to see “minor” and “marriage candidate” in the same sentence. We cannot help but confuse the definition of sexual maturity when we separate it from general maturity.
Eighteen is not a magic number at which someone turns into a mature adult who is ready for marriage, but it happens to be the age at which our society confers (most of) the rights and privileges of adulthood. These rights and privileges should not be separated from the ability to enter into marriage, because marriage, including all the things that belong to it, is a fundamentally adult endeavor. As long as the legal age of adulthood is 18, the minimum age for marriage should be, too.
