When Susie King Taylor published her 1902 memoir,Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, narrating the story of her escape from slavery and subsequent service as a nurse during the Civil War, the book made little mention of her 1862 marriage. Susie Baker, as she was then called, had been fourteen when she wed Edward King, a soldier in the unit alongside which she served on Saint Simon’s Island, Georgia, then occupied by Union forces. Taylor’s age readers must intuit for themselves by reading forward from the year of her birth, provided at the beginning of the book. And perhaps...

In 1762, Arthur Dobbs, the sixth governor of the royal colony of North Carolina, took a second wife, his first having predeceased him in their native Ireland. Dobbs’s second wife, Justina Davis, was fifteen, and Dobbs was then seventy-three. One critic, attempting to bring shame on Dobbs, painted the scene like this: “Our Old Silenus of the Envigorated age of seventy eight [sic] who still damns this province with his Baneful Influence grew stupidly enamoured with Miss Davis, a lovely lady of sprightly fifteen of a good family and some fortune.” The letter continued, describing Dobbs as “the Old Fellow,...

Born in 1798 in Lunenberg, Massachusetts, Abel Stearns went to sea at age twelve following the death of his parents. Rising to the position of supercargo in the South American and China trade, he set out for Mexico in 1827 to make his fortune and became a naturalized Mexican citizen the next year. Making his way north from central Mexico to Alta California, he first settled at Monterey, the region’s capital, before making the pueblo of Los Angeles his home. There he went into business, indeed multiple businesses, and soon became one of the region’s richest and most important merchants,...

On Saint Valentine’s Day, 1854, Sarah E. Hervey and Thomas J. Parton were married in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, about ten miles north of Boston. Sarah was thirteen and Thomas was nineteen. Because Massachusetts had passed a law in 1834 mandating that any girl below the age of eighteen and any boy below the age of twenty-one required the consent of their parents before marrying, Thomas sent his brother-in-law, George Moseley, to obtain the marriage license for them. He lied about their ages, claiming that Sarah was eighteen and that Thomas was twenty and had his father’s consent. Once...

As Elizabeth Oakes Smith remembered it, the spring thaw came early to Portland, Maine, in 1823. On March 6 of that year, as rain poured down and the winter’s snow melted away, she and newspaper editor Seba Smith married, surrounded by family and friends in the home of her mother and stepfather. She was “clad in white satin, with lace flounces,” and wore white flowers in her “long golden brown hair” that reached down below her waist. The preacher from her local church performed the ceremony. As Smith described her husband in the autobiography she would pen almost sixty years...

In November 1894, newspapers across the country announced the news that Civil War general Cassius Marcellus Clay, former minister to Russia and cousin of Senator Henry Clay, had married for the second time. The major focus of the stories was that he was eighty-four years old and his new bride, Dora Richardson, was fifteen. The two had met after Dora, an orphan, moved in with relatives who lived as tenants on Clay’s Kentucky estate, White Hall. Clay’s first marriage had ended in divorce, and his ex-wife and children all protested the marriage. But both General and Mrs. Clay defended their...

On July 7, 1908, Imogene Glenn and Grover Hollopeter were married in Olympia, Washington. She was fourteen, he nineteen; they had known each other for about four years and had been “going together” since Easter Sunday of that year. Because Washington mandated parental consent below twenty-one for boys and eighteen for girls in order to issue a marriage license, Grover and his sister Edith Gilbert obtained the signed consent from his parents, while Imogene forged her own mother’s signature. Following a ceremony by a fully licensed minister, the Hollopeters left for a trip through Reston, Tacoma, and North Yakima, Washington....

Edward West Browning, New York City multimillionaire and real estate magnate, met Frances Belle Heenan, a student at the New York Textile High School, in March 1926. He was fifty-one and she was fifteen. The meeting took place at a high school sorority dance at New York’s Hotel McAlpin; Browning sponsored the sorority, and Heenan was pledged to it. He fell for her immediately, and by the next month rumors were circulating that they might marry. TheNew York Times, among many papers, was already covering the story of this outlandish couple, known as “Peaches” and “Daddy” for the nicknames...

On January 19, 1937, nine-year-old Eunice Winstead snuck away from her parents’ three-room cabin in Treadway, Tennessee, a tiny hamlet tucked in the mountainous northeastern corner of the state, just below the Virginia state line. She was going to meet her neighbor, twenty-two-year-old Charlie Johns. They set off, clutching the marriage license that Charlie and his friend Sam Wolfe had gotten a week earlier at the courthouse in Sneedville, the county seat. They were looking for Walter Lamb, a Baptist preacher who lived in a hollow near the Clinch River. Wolfe, accompanying the couple, found Lamb at home and asked...

As a white, middle-class child in Oakland, California, in the 1950s and 1960s, Lucy Lang wanted nothing more than to grow up and escape the confines of home. Although Lang’s parents seem not to have differed much from most parents at the time, she bridled at the restrictions they imposed on her. She also dreamed of love and fantasized about sex. As Lang would explain in the autobiography she wrote many years later, “I started seriously looking for a husband when I was twelve. I’d had enough of being a child, enough of being told what to do. I was...

In 2004, Liset Rodriguez and James Linderos of Bellmead, a central Texas town of just under ten thousand people, were married. The two began dating when Liset was twelve and James sixteen. They married two years later, when Liset was fourteen, because the state of Texas was threatening a statutory rape charge. Liset was one of almost sixty Texas girls to wed at fourteen that year, all with parental permission and despite the state’s mandate of sixteen as the minimum marriageable age. She gave birth to a daughter, Mersaydiz, soon thereafter. Liset’s mother, Juana Rodriguez, who also married at fourteen...

Child marriage remains a persistent issue around the globe. The United Nations estimates that one in three girls in developing countries will marry before reaching the age of eighteen, one in nine by the age of fifteen. Approximately thirty-nine thousand girls marry every day. In 2010, there were more than sixty-seven million women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four who had been married as children. Half were in Asia, one fifth in Africa. Complications from childbirth and pregnancy are the main cause of death among adolescent girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen in developing countries. Around the...