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  • Early To Wed: Teenage Marriage in Postwar America
  • Julie Solow Stein (bio)

In the fall of 1957, Myra Brown began eighth grade in Memphis, Tennessee. She had spent the summer months traveling around the South, watching her father and her older cousin Jerry play in their rock band. Myra had fallen in love with Jerry, and to her surprise, he fell in love with her too. After a few weeks of secret courtship, the pair drove to Hernando, Mississippi, where they married on December 12, 1957. Jerry was twenty-two and Myra was thirteen—so young that she had to lie about her age on the marriage license.

When Myra’s father learned of his young daughter’s marriage, he vowed to kill his new son-in-law and searched for him with a loaded shotgun. His search, however, was unsuccessful, and Jerry Lee Lewis continued his ascent as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s fastest rising stars. Despite her family’s objections, the first few months of Myra and Jerry’s marriage went smoothly. Myra dropped out of eighth grade to become a housewife, and Jerry rapidly became one of the most influential forces in rock ‘n’ roll music. His records sold by the millions, his singles “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin” topped the charts, and his rousing performances electrified live audiences and television viewers alike.

In May of 1958, Jerry traveled to England for a six-week tour with his new wife in tow. It was supposed to be his international breakthrough. When reporters revealed Myra’s age, however, the British public reacted with horror. Fans abandoned the singer, leaving him to play to half-empty auditoriums amid catcalls of “baby snatcher” and “cradle robber.” The British Home Office considered expelling Jerry from the country, while the police contemplated charging him with kidnapping. After several unsuccessful shows, Jerry’s manager canceled the rest of the tour, and the singer fled London literally chased by an angry mob.

Jerry was baffled by England’s reaction to his marriage, which seemed unremarkable to the Louisiana native. He had married for the first time at age [End Page 359] fifteen, and again at age eighteen. When his twelve-year-old sister wed her sixteen-year-old boyfriend, Jerry happily served as a witness after their uncle had falsified her age on court documents. At a press conference on their way home from England, the singer optimistically explained, “Back home they take a different view of this sort of thing. I expect to get a great reception when I get back . . . My fans will understand.”1

Jerry was wrong. Americans, it turned out, were just as offended by the news of Jerry’s “child bride.” Within weeks of the canceled tour, the American music industry blacklisted Lewis based on his questionable moral reputation. Radio stations refused to play his records, television programs and concert halls declined to book his band, and stores shipped his records back to the distributor. One of the greatest names in rock ‘n’ roll was unemployable. By June of 1958, Jerry Lee Lewis’s career had come to a screeching halt, where it remained for a decade.2

On the one hand, Jerry and Myra’s marriage was unusual both because of his celebrity and her extremely young age. But on the other hand, it was representative of larger trends occurring in the nation. In the twenty years after World War II, teenage marriage became a common practice in the United States, particularly among girls. Adolescent girls married at higher rates during these two decades than at any other time in the century. In 1950, nearly forty percent of all first marriages involved a bride in her teens. In 1960, fifty percent of first-time brides were under the age of twenty, and over half a million teenage brides walked down the aisle. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, the pages of Seventeen Magazine were littered with ads for engagement rings, hope chests, and wedding china. As late as 1970, over forty percent of first marriages involved a teenage bride.3

Why were postwar teenagers in such a rush to get married? And why were adults...

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