by James Lynne

Created on: September 27, 2008   Last Updated: September 28, 2008

Contrary to urban legend, the concept of marriage as a response to cupid's intervention is a reasonably modern convention. Prior to the Twentieth Century marriages were more often arranged than not. Dating, as we know it did not exist, and families or marriage brokers brought couples together for matrimonial purposes. Women had few rights in society. The one method they had for advancement was by marrying an older gentleman of social and financial status. It was common practice.

There was a time in the United States where it was quite common for women to marry older men. During the Eighteenth Century, when mean life expectancy was only mid-forties, including deaths associated with childbirth, widowers sought younger women as wives to be mothers to their orphaned children. By the Nineteenth Century mean life expectancy had jumped to fifty and by the Twentieth Century it reached sixty-five. Until then, average women lived hard, short, fast lives. Men commonly survived several wives as a result.

Biologically, women and men mature at different paces. Girls hit puberty earlier than boys the same age who lag behind them often by several years. Girls have historically been ready for the rigors of serious life, marriage and family, earlier than males the same age. There appears to be a natural offset to the male, female age connection, leading younger women to seek older, more stable, better established men than men their same age. Girls in their teens regularly were matched to men in their thirties and forties. Girls were not encouraged to have romantic feelings toward younger men. Girls and young women were taught to be prudent, virginal, and sexually chaste. Their role was to be manager of the household. This created a utilitarian role for the woman, more suited to marriage with an established older man, than a romantic, flighty younger one.

Until modern antibiotics and modern birth control techniques were developed in the Twentieth-century, childbirth related deaths were quite common. Widowers were plentiful in society as a result. Older men whose wives died in childbirth needed mothers for their surviving children. Younger women needed the financial security of an older established men. Marriages of this sort were common. They were marriages of convenience, if not love and respect on occasion.

Birth control techniques until the early part of the Twentieth-century were largely folk treatments. Until Congress revised the Comstock Law, in 1936, making it legal to distribute

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