American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States by Nicholas L. Syrett (review)

Nicholas L. Syrett’s new book, American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, takes a fascinating topic and uses it to present significant insights into the history of childhood, coverture, parental rights, sexuality, eugenics, and much more in the history of American families. While Syrett’s astute analysis of these broader issues is an important part of the book’s contribution, we also get rich microhistories of the motivations of individual child brides, their husbands, and their parents. In sum, the book marvelously adds to our understanding of the history of marriage, family, and sexuality.

Syrett begins the book in early America when the law still enforced men’s full patriarchal power over wives and children and the sharp distinction that we now draw between childhood and adulthood had not yet emerged. Child marriage seemed significantly less problematic when wives would never attain equality with their husbands and when many Americans believed marriage itself, rather than age, transformed a person from a child to an adult. Syrett thus argues that the later fight for women’s status and the increasing desire to protect children from the vagaries of adulthood were necessary preconditions to the formation of the conviction that child marriage is wrong.

Syrett is careful, however, not to present a Whiggish narrative, and he demonstrates that less progressive concerns most frequently propelled the turn against child marriage. For example, in the nineteenth century, many states began changing their marriage laws to give parents more authority over their children’s marriages. Parents hoped either to control their sons’ and daughters’ labor until the age of majority, to influence whom their children married, or to prevent “ne’er-do-well men” from inheriting the family wealth (33). First-wave feminists opposed child marriage as well, but even in these cases, they acted out of self-interest. Women hoped to prevent female oppression more generally by making sure girls were sufficiently mature to choose the husbands they would be stuck with forever. Another generation of reformers in the late nineteenth century sought to stem child marriage to slow the rapidly accelerating divorce rate and to preserve the reputation and sanctity of marriage.

Syrett highlights the continued importance of self-interest in his analysis of the twentieth century. Though it was only in the twentieth century that Americans began to worry about pedophilia, many new policies aimed primarily at stemming a newly assertive and sexual youth culture or targeted white working-class parents who had allegedly failed to properly protect their children. Some of the advocates of these laws also supported eugenics, and reformers certainly disproportionately attributed youthful marriage to immigrants and to the white working class in Appalachia. At the same time, Syrett aptly shows the ways that these new concerns about the welfare of youth stopped at the edge of whiteness. He asserts that “thousands of poor African American and Mexican American girls . . . married as legal minors every year with no one caring at all” (224–25).

By World War II, reformers raged against the marriage of teenagers rather than younger girls. Soon after that, fears of teenage pregnancy reigned. Nonetheless, even in the late twentieth century, marriage was still seen as the corrective to the larger problem of extramarital sex. Syrett concludes by asking us to discard our “misplaced faith in marriage itself,” which of course “cannot make people capable parents . . . be kind to each other [or] . . . ensure that they are financially secure enough to rent an apartment or raise a child” (270–71).

One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is how Syrett reminds us that the domestic sphere can be a space of coercion, control, and abuse for many children and adolescents, whether they live in a natal or marital home. Particularly in his microhistories, we see evidence that many children married to escape...