[ SECRET POST #4524 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4524 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #648.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Wait... you think upper class European women were commonly having kids at 16/17 in the 19th century? Yeah, nah, doubt it!
The idea that that sort of thing was common "in the past" is basically made up by dudes who like teen girls.

[(Anonymous)]

Eh, it's more that it was explicitly a thing NOBILITY ONLY did.

Sauce: I live with a historian whose entire thing is cultures and all that throughout Europe in the past.

[(Anonymous)]

Queen Victoria was married at 20
Queen Consort Juliane Marie of Denmark was married at 23
Princess Sophia Frederica of Denmark and Norway was married at 16, but had no children until she was 23

[(Anonymous)]

And that's a slice from how many marriages that existed?

[(Anonymous)]

Actually, I picked them because they were married in 1840, 1752, and 1774 (respectively), two of them are Dutch (like Hans Christian Andersen), and between the three of them they'd cover the general arc of culture that Hans Christian Andersen (born 1805) would most likely have been influenced by.
I can probably find more, but I have a Candy Crush game open in another window and it's calling my name.

[(Anonymous)]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_brides

[(Anonymous)]

Then there's also the infamous example of Lady Margaret Beaufort who by age 13 was widowed and pregnant with the future King Henry VII of England.

[(Anonymous)]

Henry VII was born in 1457
The goddamn FIFTEENTH CENTURY
Come on!

[(Anonymous)]

And that was extreme even by their standards!

[tree_and_leaf]

In the Middle Ages, it was not uncommon, where members of the nobility were married as children or barely-teenagers, for several years to pass before they slept together. Even if mediaeval people didn't share our ideas about consent and when adults were adults, they weren't stupid and had noticed that thirteen year olds having babies often ended badly. As indeed it did for Margaret - while she and the baby both survived, the birth was very difficult, and she had no further children in either of her two other marriages, apparently because she'd been left infertile by the injuries she sustained. (She had actually been married twice by the age of thirteen, although her first marriage was annulled and she never regarded John de la Pole, the boy she was first married to, as her husband. There's no evidence the marriage was anything more than nominal).

There were specific reasons why Edmund Tudor desperately wanted an heir by Margaret as quickly as possible - it wasn't the norm. Although, of course, it also wasn't considered *completely* unacceptable.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you have a source for that, specifically for the 16/17 y.o. part? I ask because my understanding was that the part that was made up was about girls much younger than that - the idea that 12 and 13 year old girls were having kids, that sort of thing - but 16 and 17 year olds having kids seems much more commonplace even today. And just poking around a bit on the Wikipedia pages of the British royal family, Caroline Matilda - for example - married Christian VII when she was 15 and had her first child at 17. Although that's late 18th century, not 19th.

Of course, none of that has any bearing on whether or not it's morally right.

[(Anonymous)]

Historically, upper class European women were more likely to marry young, as young as 12, than their middle and lower-class counterparts, and to be expected to pop out babies quite soon.

cf. Catherine de Vivonne, madame de Rambouillet:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_de_Vivonne,_marquise_de_Rambouillet

"Born in Rome, she was the daughter and heiress of Jean de Vivonne, marquis of Pisani, and Giulia Savelli, who belonged to a noble Roman family. She was married at the age of twelve to Charles d'Angennes, vidame du Mans, and in 1612, marquis de Rambouillet. They had seven children, two sons and five daughters."

or Christine Louise of Savoy, at 13, to a close relative no less:

"... Returning to Savoy, Luisa Cristina was soon engaged to Maurice as part of a reconciliation between Christine Marie.[2] Luisa Cristina married [her uncle] Maurice in Turin on 18 August 1642. Maurice had previously been a cardinal and had to receive permission from Pope Urban VIII who consented to the match. The thirteen-year-old bride and forty-nine-year-old Maurice moved to Nice where Maurice was the governor of the city – another part of the reconciliation..."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princess_Luisa_Cristina_of_Savoy

Yes. It's skeevy as shit. But it did happen, whenever the dynastic and property negotiation that went with these marriages were more favourable to the families if they took place sooner.

Compare with working class and middle class women, where the average age at a first marriage was mid-twenties, bouncing up and down a bit with the general economic prosperity.

I mean, you could know this too, if you actually looked at history books instead of denouncing any opinion you don't like, simply because you don't like it.