Graph by Gregory L. Smith. Used with permission.
It used to be that sectarian criticism against the LDS Church dominated the anti-Mormon scene. That class of criticism has been continually recycled over the years, so the apologist’s job was fairly easy. Merely pointing to previously formed answers was generally sufficient. The new wave of secular criticisms have brought forth new challenges and the allegation that Joseph Smith and his polygamous followers were statutory rapists is one such. More research will be required to properly address this criticism which appears to have been popularized by Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven and further permeated American society by media coverage of Warren Jeff’s trial and HBO’s Big Love, which O’Donnell plays a role in.
Shortly after Romney’s JFK speech, O’Donnell levied the charge that Joseph Smith was a rapist in three different forums, the last of which shows that he was thinking in anachronistic terms of statutory rape and extending his criticism to 19th century Mormon polygamists in general.
Dec. 7 (McLaughlin Group): “Look, Romney comes from a religion founded by a criminal who was anti-American, pro-slavery, and a rapist.”
Dec. 11 (Hugh Hewitt Radio Show ): “There’s no one in your audience who isn’t a Mormon who believes that a single Divine revelation has ever occurred to any Mormon, least of all Joseph Smith, the criminal, adulterous, rapist founder of the religion.”
Dec. 13 (The Huffington Post) “Critics also use the Church’s 70 year delight in polygamy and sex with very young girls, which also happens to be true. Critics of Mormonism have plenty to work with without inventing anything.”
Let me note four valuable resources that have addressed this accusation from a faithful Mormon perspective so far. Kaimi Wenger introduced the topic to the Bloggernacle in his Brides among the Beehives at Times and Seasons back in June. One commenter introduced the IPUMS census database from which marital ages in 1850 could be estimated. This has lead to further number crunching to compare the marriage demographics between 1850 and modern United States, Mormons before and after the effectual introduction of polygamy, and Joseph Smith’s plural wives. Other FAIR members have participated in the statistical analysis and the result has been incremental improvements to the FAIR wiki’s coverage of Joseph Smith’s marriages to young women article. The big pay off will be when FAIR affiliated author Dr. Gregory L. Smith (see Prevarication, Prophets, and Polygamy ) publishes his forthcoming book on polygamy. Dr. Smith has been so gracious to provide a rough draft of his chapter Age of wives which is definitely worth checking out. Finally, perhaps the most valuable resource is a Farms Review of Krakauer’s book. In Doing Violence to Journalistic Integrity, Craig L. Foster surveyed scholarly literature addressing young brides. He writes (I have taken the liberty of removing footnotes):
[M]arriages of younger girls were not uncommon in the past. Peter Laslett, the noted social historian, published an interesting essay concerning the age at menarche in Europe since the eighteenth century. Laslett noted that while girls in Britain and Western Europe reached menarche at a later age, girls in America and Eastern Europe started menstruating at a younger age. Indeed, according to Laslett’s research, in eighteenth-century Belgrade, Serbia, girls as young as eleven and twelve were not only marrying, but having children. In fact, at one point, eighty-seven percent of all women between the ages of fifteen and nineteen were married. On the American side of the Atlantic, between 1634 and 1662 about 220 marriageable girls were brought to Quebec to marry. These girls were called les Filles du Roi, or the king’s daughters. While most of the girls were sixteen to twenty years old and the second largest group were between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, at least seventy-six (the fourth largest grouping statistically) were between the years of twelve and fifteen. Thus it was not surprising to have women marrying and bearing children at a younger age. Indeed, it was common in newer regions of settlement and farming in both the United States and Canada for women to marry at a younger age.
Here is some additional information I put together on age heterogamy in the form of a FAQ.
1. Roughly how has average age difference between spouses change versus husband’s age or versus spouses age? [1]
“the older the bride, the nearer her own age will be her groom… , while for men the reverse holds: the older the age at which men marry, the more likely they are to marry women much younger than themselves.”
2. What trends in modern society are factors in reducing the average age difference? [1]
“Changes are occurring in modem societies, however, that could result in alterations to this normative pattern. At least four are noteworthy. Although not necessarily in order of importance, these changes include (1) the postponement of first marriage by large numbers of women in favor of education and/or career, (2) the continuing high divorce rate and its dispersion throughout the life cycle, (3) more equitable distribution of power between men and women as women acquire economic independence and a better chance at economic dominance, and (4) the cycling of surfeits and deficits in the availability of appropriately aged marriage partners.”
3. How have the percentages of husbands 5-9 years older changed over time for US population? For 10 years or more? [2],[3]
Husbands older 1850 | 1900 | 1960 | 1980
5-9 years | 30.9 | 20.1 | 23.0 | 19.5
10+ years | 15.1 | 27.0 | 10.0 | 7.4
4. How do these percentages compare between the 1850 census, Nauvoo, and Joseph Smith? What does the Nauvoo and 1850 Census say about the male cohort aged 34-38 and female cohort aged less than 20? [3],[4]
Husbands older All | F(<20) | M(34-38) | Joseph
5-9 years | 30.9/32.2 | 49.0/38.6 | 9.3/53.9 | 15.2
10+ years | 15.1/17.2 | 16.8/21.1 | 67.4/30.8 | 48.5
Notes: % are 1850 US/Nauvoo in the applicable columns. The sample size for M(34-38) for census is 43, for Nauvoo 13, for Joseph Smith 33. The sample size for 1850 US F(<20) is 314, for Nauvoo 57.
Sources
[1] William R. Bytheway, "The Variation with Age of Age Differences in Marriage" Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, No. 4. (Nov., 1981), pp. 923-927.
[2] Maxine P. Atkinson; Becky L. Glass, “Marital Age Heterogamy and Homogamy, 1900 to 1980” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 47, No. 3. (Aug., 1985), pp. 685-691
[3]1850 Census Data from Steven Ruggles, Matthew Sobek, Trent Alexander, Catherine A. Fitch, Ronald Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Miriam King, and Chad Ronnander, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Population Center [producer and distributor] (2004)
[4] Susan Easton Black, “Marriages in the Nauvoo Region 1839-1845,” on-line database
Why does this statement:
“the older the bride, the nearer her own age will be her groom… , while for men the reverse holds: the older the age at which men marry, the more likely they are to marry women much younger than themselves.”
seem like a prooftext for the old adages:
“Men are simply boys that have grown older” &
“Women don’t get older, they get more desparate.”
Edwin, I have never thought of those adages that way, my head being too deep in the statistical curves that bear the rule of thumb out, some of which can be seen in Dr. Smith’s chapter. Thanks for making that awesome connection.
The reason I bring age differences up is that in the nineteenth century it was not out of place for a man in his upper 30’s to marry a teenager. That has definitely changed with women getting more education opportunities and being more financially self-sufficient these days.
I suppose that O’Donnell’s criticisms make him a heterogamiphobe
The comment was knee-jerk humor that struck me as I read your comment, but it seems to me that part of what we are documenting is that men tend (statistically) to prefer women of their age or less, and women, used to look for a good provider and that quite often included men much older than they. So the older a man got, the wider his options and choices. The older a woman got, the fewer her options.
In poorer societies, getting a teenager out of the house and into marriage as soon as possible can get to be essential to caring for the rest of the family. Just some observations.
Though it doesn’t apply to Joseph’s plural marriages, in the Utah period, plural marriage made women more “valuable,” so to speak.
Women didn’t have to be desperate and choose a man who was religiously not faithful, if they were willing to be in plural marriage.
This “shortage” of women, ironically, may have driven down the marriage age in Utah. (Daynes’ book demonstrates this for the most aggressive period of plural marriages during the “Mormon Reformation.”) It also happened to a degree during the intense pressure on plural marriage by the federal government in the late 1800s….
Interesting stuff, Keller – especially the excel graph. However, to really address the (non)viability of the statutory rape charge, it would go much further to have a column of <18 and maybe even one of <16. Categorizing 19 and 13 year olds in the same column just doesn’t give enough information to evaluate the efficacy of the assertion. Particularly, since the biggest spread in the curves comes in the first column (<20).
NBZax,
That is a good point. One of the reasons we went with the 5 year age bins is aesthetics, increasing the age bins smooths the curves out. If the plots get two busy, it gets hard to extract information. And we are also trying to match our results to prior age-specific breakdowns, and 5 year age bins are fairly standard.
With that said, I will post some of my plots that have narrower bin sizes.
Could you explain the graph in a bit better detail, as well? In looking over the graph again, I do not see an indication of whether these are ages at time of marriage or time of census. Given the shape, and limited sample sizes (and inclusion of JS line), I think time of marriage, but I’m not sure. Time of census would be much easier to collect, but would skew numbers away from the youngest set, obscuring the most relevant signal when addressing young brides.
The sample size also looks surprisingly low for Nauvoo and the Censuses. What care was taken to make sure those sample sets were representative of the population?
NBZax,
You can get some info on our data sets in Greg’s book chapter that I linked to.
In short, the Nauvoo set was compiled by Susan Easton Black and others from newspaper and county records, but couples were eliminated when 1 spouse’s birthdate wasn’t exactly known, which cut the sample size roughly in half. The Kirtland set was compiled in a book by Milton Backman. The 1850 census data comes from a 1% random sample (the IPUMS site details its sampling method). Of those, only a small fraction indicated they had been married within the last year. I went through and selected all the married couples that were unambiguously paired. There was a quote in the Times and Seasons thread that IPUMS suggests marriages were under reported. Joseph Smith’s data set was used from Todd Compton’s 33 plural wives.
In order to match the census data to Nauvoo the data had to be adjusted. For example, at census time, a 16 year old bride could have been 15 at marriage with probability 50% (Assume birthday uniformly distributed through last 12 months and marriage date uniformly distributed as well.)
Thanks! That clears up a lot. I look forward to seeing the graphs with new binning.
It took awhile to figure out how to make these plots web accessible, but here they are.
First plot is an age specific female marriage pmf curves for the 1850 census sample and the Nauvoo sample.
Second plot is a cmf, or it keeps track of the percentage of females in the marriage sets that were already married by the age on the x axis. In other words to find the % of female teenage brides read the graphs at age 20.
Thanks for posting those, Keller. Fun how one guy can have his own statistically significant cdf to be compared to census data!
The graphs show a very interesting tension that I don’t know entirely what to make of. There is a stronger tail on the young side for the Mormon data relative to the broader population, but the peak – describing more ‘typical behavior’ – is actually later than the general population (most easily seen in the first plot).
The Joseph Smith cdf is surprisingly linear – kind of an accentuation of whatever the tension is that’s seen in the first graph. Does the Gregory Smith book have anything to say about that?
Greg’s book is a work in progress, so it might have more to say about the trends you are observing. And I think the plan is for us to co-author a paper for some scholarly publication after we do some more research.
I have a few theories that would require further exploration. Missionary work probably delayed some of the marriages, which might explain the lull for 17 year olds. For example Lyman Smith was engaged to George A. Smith’s cousin before his mission started so she had to wait. Slightly more Mormons (than the US) began marrying at younger ages, and the reasons for that could be social or theological. When polygamy was introduced it drove the average age for brides down a couple of years at its peak. Mormons also married older woman, and I think that was one way of looking out for one another.
Joseph’s profile has him marrying across three generations. Some woman were old enough to be his mother. I think the distribution of his wives’ ages support the dynastic explanation (to some degree) for polygamy. I think polygamous sealing was the glue that held the church together.
I would add that I think we have to be careful with Joseph Smith’s small sample size. Changing a wife here or there would change things.
It may be that all that can be demonstrated with any real confidence is that Joseph’s marriage ages were not untypical. If you took Joseph Smith and multiplied him by 33, so to speak, into 33 individuals, those individuals would simply drop into the mass of people marrying in Kirtland, Nauvoo, or non-Mormon 1850s America.
If anyone knows of any attacks on Joseph in his lifetime over the age of his wives, I’d like to see it. I haven’t found any.
Interesting thought, Keller. I hadn’t put too much stock into Bushman’s dynastic interpretation, but this curious cdf will make me rethink that a bit.
I would add that I think we have to be careful with Joseph Smith’s small sample size. Changing a wife here or there would change things.
I thought about that, but the posted Nauvoo sample size isn’t much larger and has a very different, yet reasonably well defined cdf, so I don’t think this is the case. It would actually be easy to check, though. As 33 is simply the number of plural wives of Joseph Smith that Todd Compton was willing to stake solid claims on given the secrecy surrounding the issue, it seems entirely likely that there were more. If I’m not mistaken, Brodie suggests 50+ marriages. Just add in the 20 or so speculative ones and see how much the distribution actually changes.
It may be that all that can be demonstrated with any real confidence is that Joseph’s marriage ages were not untypical. If you took Joseph Smith and multiplied him by 33, so to speak, into 33 individuals, those individuals would simply drop into the mass of people marrying in Kirtland, Nauvoo, or non-Mormon 1850s America.
I fail to see why you would find that a useful thing to do, in any but the most apologetic sense. That is taking the special case and saying we can find matches for all 33 somewhere in the population, so each of the individual cases was therefore ‘typical’. Any behavior, unseemly or not, could be explained away in this manner, so it’s not a terribly useful approach. It’s pretty clear that by any stretch of the imagination, JS’s marriages were atypical for both Nauvoo and the general population. Did anyone else, even among those practicing plural marriage in Nauvoo have close to as many wives and over such a wide age range? (Maybe Bennett, but I doubt anyone wants to go there). Embracing the ‘atypicality’ because of dynastic or other considerations will get much more mileage than expending effort to classify all his marriages as ‘typical’.
If anyone knows of any attacks on Joseph in his lifetime over the age of his wives, I’d like to see it. I haven’t found any.
This again seems like a bit of a dodge, since the identities of his wives and even their existence was treated with secrecy at the time. Maybe I’m wrong, but I bet the editors of the Warsaw Signal would have been happy to play the age card if they had known.
I do think the fact that none of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries complained about the age of young woman is significant. Most of these people outlived Joseph Smith and weren’t shy about saying what they thought of polygamy, and knew about some of the marriages (whether we are talking about the 16 year old Fanny Alger, the teenage Partridge sisters, the proposition to teenage Nancy Rigdon, or the marriage with Helen Mar Kimball). Law knew about the Partridge sisters and was well interviewed about his problems with Joseph Smith throughout his life.
But you are right to some degree, making an appeal to silence is a fallacy unless it can be shown that such silence is insignificant. In this case I think it is, especially when we see no one complaining about the following marriages in the 1850 census sample.
25m-13f, 26m-14f, 26m-15f, 49m-16f,55m-17f
And the beauty of the statistical analysis is that we don’t need to rely on anecdotes of these types of marriages, but can draw conclusive findings about American society as a whole.
So on both counts – young female age and wide age difference between spouses, Joseph is functioning within the norms of his society. The new criticisms about those two topics employ a text book example of the presentist fallacy.
But that’s just the point. People did know about it–at least the Nauvoo Expositor did. John C. Bennett did.
The first complaints I have found about marital ages all date from the second half of the century. People like John Hyde, or Ann Eliza Young bemoaned the “grey headed partriarchs” marrying young maids, etc., in Utah.
For all the bad things they said about Joseph Smith, and for all they insisted (contra the RLDS claims) that Joseph had started plural marriage, they don’t say anything about the age of his wives. This seems a strange omission for people looking to hit the Mormons with everything; there are all sorts of over-the-top claims that just don’t wash, and yet Joseph never gets hit with what seems (to us) as the obvious charge.
Again, if you know of a counter-example, I would be pleased to see it.
You misunderstand me. Joseph is in the middle of the pack in these; there are plenty of marriages in Nauvoo, Kirtland, and the non-Mormon 1850s that exceeded the age difference. Joseph isn’t with the outliers; he’s right in the middle of the pack. He wouldn’t stand out at all, had he married only ONE of those women.
Given that plural marriage was not widely known in Nauvoo before Joseph’s death, the fairly strait-laced Mormons didn’t seem to react to age differentials in marriage partners.
This would be interesting, but Brodie’s evidentiary standard for wives (and, indeed, with much to do with plural marriage) is depressingly low.
Her treatment of possible children is more voyeuristic than scholarly. She completely missed the best candidate (Josephine Lyon) and insisted upon Buell based on photographic evidence that she published in the book, but which DNA testing as definitively ruled out.
But that’s just the point. People did know about it–at least the Nauvoo Expositor did. John C. Bennett did.
I think Bennett’s expose was too self-serving to make a good case his silence on particular aspects of a subject he was personally involved in, but it is good point about William Law. He would have been in position to know and say something. This line of thinking makes me wonder, though, at what point do you think William Law would have cared about ages? 12? 10? Did he know about the most extreme cases, such as Helen Mar? Who else could we look to bump up the ‘silence’ argument? Cowdery?
NorthboundZax: If I’m not mistaken, Brodie suggests 50+ marriages. Just add in the 20 or so speculative ones and see how much the distribution actually changes.
Greg: This would be interesting, but Brodie’s evidentiary standard for wives (and, indeed, with much to do with plural marriage) is depressingly low.
There is little question that her standard was much lower than Compton’s. My only point is that given Compton’s high standard, there are probably a few false negatives out there that could potentially be used to beef up the data set and test the notion that ‘changing a wife here or there would change things’ – and Brodie gives a pool to draw from. If you are worried about false positives from Brodie overwhelming the signal, I’m sure you could pare her 20+ extra group down to 5-8 ‘likelies’ that could be used to see if the JS cdf changes much. I suspect it won’t.
This didn’t stop him on a large number of other points, though. He tried to pull out all the stops to condemn Joseph; why miss the obvious (in a presentist sense) issue of age difference?
I’m not sure. English common law age of consent was ten. Most states in the US had similar laws; this didn’t really get raised until the late 19th century, from what I can find. US states eventually raised it to age 12 (in Utah, I think the legislature in the 1860s raised female age to 14, men to age 16 to legally marry). Delaware actually LOWERED the age of consent to 7! [See Melina McTigue, “Statutory Rape Law Reform in Nineteenth Century Maryland: An Analysis of Theory and Practical Change,” (2002).]
I don’t know that he knew about Helen. It should be noted, though, that Helen may not be as “extreme” as we would think. Helen makes the point in her history (IIRC) that she was quite mature, and seems to have hit menarche/puberty earlier than some. So, Helen probably appeared (and acted?) more mature than others of her age. So, I don’t think she really would have “stood out” as someone that was a “child,” if you will.
Plus, there’s no evidence of sexuality in this marriage, so it makes the point even more “moot” if Joseph was using marriage in this instance as a sealing mechanism for the Kimball family.
(I dislike the term “dynastic,” BTW, simply becaue I don’t think Joseph was necessarily building a dynasty. I don’t think the intent was self-aggrandizement so much as it was an early implementation of the sealing doctrine beyond immediate families. There might be “dynastic” intent, but I think the term presumes that without really demonstrating it, and there are other interpretations of the same data that DON’T have the self-exalting elements of “dynastic.” We’re probably stuck with the term, though, given Compton’s popularization of it. I’d prefer something like “surrogate sealing” or the like. I haven’t thought of a good, concise term. Maybe the blogernacle hive mind can help?)
The point too, though, is that Helen was quite frank in later years that she had been married to Joseph–even there, I haven’t yet come across someone attacking Joseph even after the fact in the 19th century. I’m keeping my eyes open, but so far the attacks are all on Utah “greybeards” chasing young girls. Joseph doesn’t get mentioned, which may suggest that even later the age differential didn’t strike people as that remarkable….
I don’t think Oliver knew much beyond the Fanny Alger marriage. He was upset about this, but didn’t say anything about ages that I know of. His letter written to sister Phoebe prior to return to the Church in the late 1840s expresses surprise, I think, at the extent to which plural marriage was then being preached. So, I don’t think he had much of a bead on Joseph’s Nauvoo-era marriage patterns.
Maybe Austin Cowles of the Nauvoo High Council?
==
I like the idea of the Brodie data. Compton lists “possible wives,” which would probably be good secondary candidates.
David,
I am active on a board where there is an anti-Mormon who is attacking the graphs and conclusions that you and Smith have published. Among other things he is saying
(1) you have used “fake data”
(2) the results are “invented”
(3) Mormons are “liars” about this issue
He fired off an email to IPUMS to try to verify your results and they told him they only provide data and they can’t comment on particular uses.
He is an counter-cult preacher of the old school and is the owner of the countercult board where he is making his statements.
I’ve asked him many times to come here and challenge you to your face rather than attack you and Greg behind your backs, but I guess he’s too scared.
Anyway, can you comment about the data, your methodology, and any supporting evidence for your conclusions?
thanks!
The Kirtland data is from:
The Nauvoo data is from:
David gave me the raw data, and of 883 married individuals, there were 219 men and 201 women with exact birth and marriage dates. Of these, 180 marriages were identified in which the husband and wife’s birth date was known. I matched these couples for data analysis. Since it is not clear how many of these marriages were first marriages, these data represents a conservative estimate of teen-age marriage in Nauvoo in the early 1840s.
I suppose they might skew somehow, in which by some unknown process the birth dates of young brides and older men were preferentially recorded, but I don’t see how.
The 1850 U.S. census data is from:
The Joseph Smith wives data is from Compton, In Sacred Loneliness. I included all 33 of the wives he considers proven or likely, and if the dates were uncertain I used the earliest possible marriage date, and chose the LATEST possible birth date, so the estimates are conservative: the women are as YOUNG as possible, and married as SOON as possible, consistent with the evidence.
So, those data are again a low end; the reality may skew slightly higher.
There was no alteration or massaging of the data. David gave me the raw files, and I used MS Excel to plot them.
What would be the point in faking the data? Someone would run the numbers, and then we’d have egg on our faces and be revealed as people who lied. Better to just keep quiet.
I suppose I should be surprised that a Christian minister would ignore the instruction to “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and declare without evidence, or without even discussing the matter, that we faked the data and invented the results, but my experiences with the “counter-cult” have diminished my capacity for surprise.
Fortunately, such people do not represent the majority of creedal Christians, or even the majority of their denominations.
==
As for the techniques:
It ain’t rocket science–it’s not like we’re doing multivariate analysis here. You just take all the marriages, sort them by wife’s date, and then plot them by groups of age. It’s essentially just percentages and stuff, pretty basic math: e.g., # of women of this age divided by total women in marriage cohort.
So, I can guarantee that we didn’t use fake data, and we didn’t invent the results. I suppose their could be some counting error somewhere, but all the data sets match so well that I think that unlikely. And, the spreadsheets let you cross-check numbers, and I used formulas to count the number of individuals of each age, so that’s unlikely.
We also did a convolution analysis for the census data to adjust for errors in the reporting of dates, but it didn’t change how the graphs looked at all.
After we publish in a more traditional venue, I’m sure we’d be happy to make the spreadsheets available for anyone who wants to check our results or do further work on the datasets. (I can’t speak for David, but I can’t see that he would care at all. It’s standard scientific practice, I believe.)
And, that’s no lie. 🙂
But please, save the message board discussion, and e-mail it to us at FAIR. It will be another amusing illustration of anti-Mormon dishonesty to add to our files.
Greg
Greg,
Thanks for the info. This particular preacher is one of the least capable anti-Mormons on the web today. He is essentially identical to the anti-Mormons of the 1970s, but without the knowledge or the reasoning skills that most had. It could be that his work is so bad because he is trying to attack a dozen or more cults all at the same time. He is without a doubt in the bottom 20% in terms of knowledge and capability. It is disturbingly fun to interact with him, though frustrating at times.
If we could think of a way to get him to debate a moderately knowledgeable LDS apologist on TV or radio, it would give the Church more positive publicity than a 1000 TV ads.
His primary ministry technique is to call people names and to hint at their evil character, so I’m not sure he’ll have much to say about your response other than you are just a lying Mormon. What a hoot!
Are you familiar with other, non-LDS studies on marriage ages that might hint that you and David are on the right track?
My, that is saying something. 🙂
I’m not aware of specific studies per se. But, I haven’t looked super hard. It’s part of what we need to do to write these ideas up.
The impetus for this work was the fact that as one reads history, one (or at least, I!) certainly gets the impression that women married younger, and that age gaps were often significant. It was more of a gestalt than anything. A hunch.
But, that’s kind of anecdotal, and critics might rightly protest that this doesn’t reveal any larger trend, even if there are plenty of individual examples.
Differences in mortality rates from the present, and the fact that marriage was much more an economic necessity (for both men AND women) at the time would tend, I think, to encourage older men (who have more resources) to marry younger women more on average.
Plus, different ideas about appropriate age of marriage, and appropriate differences in marriage age probably did too.
So, I would have frankly been surprised if our stuff didn’t show what it did. That would really require explanation, and not what we actually found, which seems pretty intuitive.
As far as I know, no U.S. census data included information on marriage until the 1850 census. So, I suspect that good cross-sectional data is fairly hard to come by for the earlier periods of interest for LDS history.
There are probably going to be differences between the frontier (i.e., the Mormons) and the more established East. And, what happens when people from the East, like many Mormons, moved west to the frontier? How did this affect their decisions?
So, if anyone has any pointers to other studies or data, we’re listening. Shout out in the published version a distinct posiblity. 🙂
Greg
Paul,
Greg has done a masterful job about where our data comes from. The only thing I would have to add is to give your discussion partner some hints on how he can reproduce the IPUMS data.
1) go to: http://usa.ipums.org/usa/sda/
2) In the “Analyze one year at a time” table click on “1850”
3) Fill out the “SDA Frequencies/Crosstabulation Program” edit boxes with the following:
ROW: age
COLUMN: sex
CONTROL: marrinyr(2)
WEIGHT: none selected
4) Push the button labeled “Run Table”
5) read the table produced
6) apologize to Paul
Extracting couples is a little more tedious. I had to make tables based on household serial numbers and eliminate data where the number of individuals married in the last year did not equal exactly 1 male and 1 female.
Paul,
You asked:
“Are you familiar with other, non-LDS studies on marriage ages that might hint that you and David are on the right track?”
I have been looking into this and starting a list. We may or may not use some of these papers depending on what the scope of our paper is. For example, I don’t know how much we want to bring Utah polygamy numbers into the paper. Not all of these will have direct bearing on confirming the 1850 census data. Some papers will be needed to show how much has changed in modern times (post birth control, baby boom, medical breakthroughs effecting life expectancies, increased educational and employment opportunities for women, etc.)
Here are Craig Foster’s references in the review cited in the original blog entry. I haven’t read any of these but they might be worth further study.
Peter Laslett, “Age at Menarche in Europe since the Eighteenth Century,” in Marriage and Fertility: Studies in Interdisciplinary History, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 291.
Peter J. Gangné, King’s Daughters and Founding Mothers: The Filles du Roi, 1663–1673 (Pawtucket, RI: Quintin Publications, 2001), 1:17–23;
Silvio Dumas, Les Filles du Roi en Nouvelle-France: Étude Historique avec Répertiore Biographique, Cahiers d’Histoire 24 (Quebec: La Société Historique, 1972), 67;
Richard A. Easterlin, George Alter, and Gretchen A. Condran, “Farms and Farm Families in Old and New Areas: The Northern States in 1860,” in Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 39–40.
Michael Gordon, ed., The American Family in Social-Historical Perspective, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983), 16, and Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 674–75.
Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 106.
S. N. D. North, comp., and Desmond Walls Allen, ed.,
Marriage Laws in the United States, 1887–1906 (Conway: Arkansas Research, 1993), 2.
Craig has also brought the following to my attention:
J.D.B. DeBow, “Statistical view of the United States, 1850” . . (Washington, DC: A.P.O. Nicholson, 1854), xli,
A partial list of what Greg or I have found:
William R. Bytheway, “The Variation with Age of Age Differences in Marriage” Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 43, No. 4. (Nov., 1981), pp. 923-927.
Maxine P. Atkinson; Becky L. Glass, “Marital Age Heterogamy and Homogamy, 1900 to 1980″ Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 47, No. 3. (Aug., 1985), pp. 685-691
L. L. Bean; G. P. Mineau, “The Polygyny-Fertility Hypothesis: a Re-evaluation” Population Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1. (Mar., 1986), pp. 67-81
Lee L. Bean; Geraldine P. Mineau; Douglas L. Anderton, “High-Risk Childbearing: Fertility and Infant Mortality on the American Frontier” Social Science History, Vol. 16, No. 3. (Autumn, 1992), pp. 337-363.
Bruce Burgett, “On the Mormon Question: Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s and the 1990s” American Quarterly
Volume 57, Number 1, March 2005
Charles A. Cannon, “The Awesome Power of Sex: The Polemical Campaign against Mormon Polygamy” The Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 1. (Feb., 1974), pp. 61-82.
M. Skolnick; L. Bean; D. May; V. Arbon; K. De Nevers; P. Cartwright “Mormon Demographic History I. Nuptiality and Fertility of Once-Married Couples” Population Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1. (Mar., 1978), pp. 5-19.
G. P. Mineau; L. L. Bean; M. Skolnick, “Mormon Demographic History II: The Family Life Cycle and Natural Fertility” Population Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Nov., 1979), pp. 429-446.
Tim B. Heaton, “How Does Religion Influence Fertility?: The Case of Mormons” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Vol. 25, No. 2. (Jun., 1986), pp. 248-258
James E. Smith; Phillip R. Kunz, Polygyny and Fertility in Nineteenth-Century America Population Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3. (Nov., 1976), pp. 465-480.
Here some resources I have found today, but haven’t read yet.
Z. Wu, K. H. Burch, R. Hart, J. E. Veevers, “Age-heterogamy and Canadian unions” Social Biology, Fall 2000
C. Shehan, F. M. Berardo, H. Vera, S. M. Carley, “Women in Age-Discrepant Marriages” Journal of Family Issues, Vol. 12, No. 3, 291-305 (1991)
Kalmijn, Matthijs. 1998. “Intermarriage and Homogamy: Causes, Patterns, Trends.” Annual Review of Sociology 24:395-421.
Lichter, Daniel T., Robert N. Anderson and Mark D. Hayward. 1995. “Marriage Markets and Marital Choice.” Journal of Family Issues 16:412-431.
Qian, Zhenchao, and Samuel H. Preston. 1993. “Changes in American Marriage, 1972 to 1987: Availability and Forces of Attraction by Age and Education.” American Sociological Review 58:482-95.
Qian, Zhenchao. 1998. “Changes in Assortative Mating: the Impact of Age and Education, 1970-1990.” Demography 35:279-292.
Oppenheimer, Valerie Kincade. 1988. “A Theory of Marriage Timing.” American Journal of Sociology 94:563-591.
Sassler, Sharon, and Frances K. Goldscheider. 2004. “Revisiting Jane Austen’s Theory of Marriage Timing: Changes in Union Formation Among American Men in the Late 20th Century.” Journal of Family Issues 25:139-166.
Vera, Hernan, Donna H. Berardo and Felix M. Berardo. 1985. “Age Heterogamy in Marriage.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 47:553-556.
Xie, Yu, James M. Raymo, Kimberly Goyette and Arland Thornton. 2003. “Economic Potential and Entry into Marriage and Cohabitation.” Demography 40:351-367.
This pre-published paper abstract looks like it is looking into some of the same ideas that Greg and I are.
Karen Rolf, Joseph Ferrie, “The May-December relationship since 1850: Age homogamy in the U.S.” September 19, 2007 see: http://paa2008.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=80695
Thanks guys. There’s a chance he’ll come and look here.
But David, this guys will never “6) apologize to Paul.” This guy is extremely arrogant, absolutely close-minded, and will never, ever, under any circumstance admit to being wrong to a Mormon, no matter how wrong he is proven to be. If he claimed that Joseph Smith died in the WWII assault on Iwo Jima then from that point on he would dig in his heels and never admit defeat. Any evidence brought up would be challenged as false or unreliable. And when he couldn’t think of anything more to say, he’d start in about how great a job he is doing keeping people out of the cult of the 14-year-old-girl-abuser prophet. Like I said before, this guy is so bad and yet so confident that he provides hours of untended comedy.
Thanks for the extra info. Let us know when more becomes available on the topic!
I found a small typo in the instructions to get the data from IPUMS.
The line that Keller wrote:
CONTROL: marinyr(2)
Should be
CONTROL: marrinyr(2)
but otherwise everything works.
Thanks Paul for catching that mistake. I edited my comment to fix this.
I thought people might be interested in the anti-Mormon’s responses after I showed he was completely wrong about the data and the graph (and the lying Mormon statisticians) and kept pressing him to admit that the graph wasn’t a Mormon scam.
“Well, for arrogant Mormons who doesn’t want to see the truth that Joseph Smith Jr. has truly taken advantage of many women during his time especially those who are teen agers our works will be “abysmal” to them. I really can’t force them if that’s what they wanted to believe.”
“I knew that God will use our site to evangelize the Mormon people and plant a seed of truth in their hearts. Please continue to recommend our site. I believe they will eventually understand how Joseph Smith Jr really took advantage of those poor kids to have sexual relationship with him. Omigosh!!!”
“What will you do if a more than 30-year old man had sexual relations with your fourteen-year old daughter and this man was none other than the founder of your Church? Yup, that’s true. The Mormon founder, Joseph Smith Jr. had sexual relations with Helen Mar Kimball because of the formers practice of polygamy.”
He really is good for a laugh. It might be a waste of my time, but the other LDS following the discussions have expressed appreciation at my posting, so I’ll continue until he kicks me off of his board out of sheer frustration.
My response to the last one: “Well, if it came after a real marriage where all the parties and parents consented, and if the sexual relations were between a legitimate husband and wife, and if it was in the 1830s when this was considered perfectly normal, then probably none of us would feel at all bad about it. It would be… normal. But today it strikes us as a very bad thing. And this is your only point. You want us today to be upset about something that wasn’t upsetting back then.”
The fallacy of presentism is something that escapes many people looking at this topic.
He’s also bearing false witness. There’s no evidence that there were sexual relations with Helen Mar Kimball.
But, he doesn’t seem to be someone for whom evidence matters a great deal.