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This chapter explores the ideas of marriage in the minds of young adults. The vast majority of them wish to get married, yet the institution itself seems disconnected not only from where they are in their lives, but also where many of them want to go. Marriage becomes a future event that will somehow happen someday in the scripted manner in which they conceive of it. In the present, therefore, they remain cautious about it. Those must wait for the right person — not just any sexual partner — or until they’re ready to “settle down” and marry. Many young adults now perceive their 20s as the time to extend your adolescence, enjoy yourself, and try on different identities and relationships before getting serious. The chapter also explores the prevalence of “early” marriage as well as divorce, and discusses the increasing frequency of cohabitation.

This chapter offers a social and demographic analysis of the large families who claimed pronatalist tax exemptions in Old Regime France between 1666 and 1760. Samples suggest that recipients were mostly members of urban middling groups including craftsmen and professionals. Demographically, their high fertility was the result of early, long‐lasting marriages and the employment of wetnurses. In social, economic and demographic terms, these families do not seem strikingly different from the French urban households who were beginning to adopt contraceptive practices during the same era. The chapter also reviews contemporary religious sources that not only forbade contraception, but that endowed marriage and prolific reproduction with positive spiritual value. It concludes with a brief study of the strategies some of the large families used to pass on assets and preserve harmony among their numerous progeny.

This chapter discusses the extent of child marriage practices in Vedic and classical Hindu traditions and concentrates on early marriages as a socio-legal problem. It discusses important evidence about how the problem may have gone up during medieval times and even under the British rule. The chapter also shows that since the practice of child marriage has declined today, it could be said that child marriages no longer constitute a grave problem.

Many issues disproportionately affect girls. Sex-selective abortion and infanticide have created a gap of 60 million “missing” females. The cultural context of Female Genital Cutting and efforts to eradicate its usage are analyzed. Limits on girls’ education are reviewed from Chapter Seven. The risks created by early marriage including fistulas, as well as limiting educational opportunities and future economic earnings are discussed.

This chapter discusses premature or very early marriage. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, many east European Jews married off their children at the age of 13, 12, or even younger. They saw this practice as a typical characteristic of traditional east European Jewish society. However, it was common only in one sector or class of the Jewish community — the upper class — a group that included the wealthy and the learned. Most of the Jewish community, the simple masses, were unable to allow themselves the ‘luxury’ of early marriage. Their children had to wait and save up until they had sufficient resources to set up a new household and until they were relatively certain that they could support themselves. The chapter then looks at the reasons for the popularity of very early marriage among east European Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing the connections between early marriage and the social needs of the Jewish community. It also analyses Jewish marital patterns.

Moving beyond the ABC prevention strategies addressed in Chapter 5, this chapter describes four alternative prevention strategies that are often overlooked by public health experts but that offer important insights into how people and communities are responding to the epidemic: 1) careful partner selection and early marriage, promoted as a way of channeling young adults into “safe” sexual relationships as soon as possible; 2) divorcing a partner who may be putting his/her spouse at risk; 3) condemning materialistic aspirations which lure people into transactional sex; 4) directives to abstain from alcohol use, seen to compromise decision-making and trigger risky sexual behavior. Religion and religious leaders play a role in each of these responses.

The chapter introduces the theme of the book: pre-industrial marriage in Europe and Asia. The book aims to challenging the rhetoric of an East-West dichotomy in marriage patterns and mechanisms between Asia (China) and Europe (England). In Europe, late marriages, high celibacy rates, preventive checks, individualism – in Asia, early marriages, universal marriage, positive checks, parental authority (e.g. Malthus, Hajnal, Wrigley/Schofield, Macfarlane, Wolf, Skinner). The chapter claims that the East-West binary, based on studies of social norms and aggregate statistics implies a picture that is too simplistic. It argues for the EAP approach to the study of pre-industrial marriage: comparison of local populations in Asia (China, Japan) and Europe (Belgium, Italy, Sweden) for which individual-level longitudinal data are available, using the same models and methods of analysis (presented in chapters 2 and 3).

The chapter summarizes the findings of the comparative and country-specific studies included in the book. In relation to the East-West binary, the EAP findings confirm the previous picture of general differences in marriage pattern and family system. However, when studied at the individual-level, great similarity in human behavior across study populations was found. When comparing ages at first birth instead of age at first marriage, the East-West divide diminishes considerably. Also, some potential determinants of marriage behavior like sex, age, or duration of widowhood influenced marriage chances in the same way, while others like co-resident kin or socioeconomic status indicated similarity in behavior given the differences in family system. In relation to marriage as the prime mechanism of the Malthus model, results give little support. In the European locations there was no marriage response to fluctuation in food prices in the lower socioeconomic status groups, and male marriage candidates from more prosperous families married earlier in all study populations.

This chapter details how the nascent Eastern European Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah turned its sights on the Jewish family as part and parcel of its attack on the medieval practices of the Jews. In the period from the early part of the 19th century to about 1870, the Haskalah was a tiny movement, persecuted by the Jewish communal authorities. Yet it was during these years, perhaps even as a result of persecution, that the maskilim or disciples of the Haskalah evolved the fundamental arguments of their movement. While the maskilim shamelessly borrowed their ideas often word for word from the European Enlightenment, they integrated them into a peculiarly Jewish framework, that is, into their own reality. The chapter focuses on the conjunction between ideology and identity in the early Haskalah, for what is most interesting in the thought of this movement is not so much the ideas themselves but how they resonated against the problems of Jewish adolescence: early marriage and the teen years spent in the house of one's in-laws.

This chapter discusses Jewish marriage in eighteenth-century Poland. Jews, as well as many non-Jews, acknowledged that Jewish marriages embodied a good, stable model and praised them as examples to be emulated in an era when immorality and marital breakdown seemed to threaten the institution. Even in much earlier times, Jewish marriages, particularly those of Polish Jews, were recognized as embodying all desirable matrimonial attributes. In the course of the eighteenth century, Jewish marital practices attracted the attention of all levels of Polish society, as well as of leading maskilim in other countries. It was during the period of the Polish Enlightenment that the model of Jewish marriage was promoted on a wider scale because it conformed to popular ideas based on contemporary mercantilist and cameralist principles. The chapter then considers the convergence of opinion between Jewish and Christian Enlightenment representatives on some aspects of marriage in Jewish society, and looks at the incidence of early marriage in the Jewish population and the vicissitudes in the practice of young couples living in the home of their parents.

This chapter examines changes in marriage and fertility among Jordanians and Syrian refugees in Jordan. It finds considerable continuity in marriage practices among Jordanians from 2010 to 2016. Jordanians witnessed very modest increases in median age at first marriage. Education is the main factor associated with later ages at marriage and first birth among women. The cost of marriage among Jordanians has declined since 2010 and is unlikely to have contributed to trends in marriage age. Despite the small increase in age at first marriage, fertility declined among Jordanians from a total fertility rate of 3.9 in 2010 to 3.3 in 2016. Compared to the Jordanians, Syrian refugees experienced an earlier transition to marriage and a higher total fertility rate of 4.4 in 2016. The marriage and fertility patterns of Syrian refugees point to high selection on factors associated with earlier marriage and higher fertility.

This chapter outlines the practice of and campaign against FGM and early marriage in Kenya, among the Maasai and Samburu, and in the three case study communities. It discusses the scope of the two practices and the nature of the local norms supporting them, as well as observed changes. It also considers the history and range of activism against the practices, and the activities of the Kenyan government. The chapter draws on quantitative data from Kenya’s Demographic and Health Surveys and from the author’s own original survey, as well as qualitative data from the Author’s interviews and from a range of primary and secondary documents.

The introduction asks how individuals and communities respond to transnational activism that pits international norms against local norms. It highlights the theoretical significance of research on norm change among nonstate actors and the substantive significance of research on the practices of female genital mutilation (FGM) and early marriage. In addition, this chapter provides an overview of the argument and describes and justifies the research design (including issue selection, case selection, and research methods). It defines keyterms—norms, FGM, early marriage—and discusses conceptual and practical issues associated with these definitions. It further describes variation in the practice of FGM and early marriage worldwide, as well as the evolution of transnational activism against them.

Marriage has receded dramatically in much of the West; given their historical and theological esteem for matrimony, are Christians faring any better? Not by much. Christian marriage, too, appears to be experiencing a recession. How do modern Christians around the world look for a mate within a religious faith that esteems marriage but a world that increasingly yawns at it? Some of the challenges facing them are mathematical—more women than men in congregations—while others are ideological, such as the penchant for keeping one’s options open. Economic and career expectations counsel delay. Do Christians wait on marriage? Not as long as the irreligious: being active in church predicts marrying earlier in most countries. Over time, this gap in marriage between the more religious and the less religious adds up. The future of marriage is becoming more religious, not less.

This chapter presents the central theoretical framework for understanding local-level norm change in response to a conflict between international and local norms. It disaggregates individual norm change into three discrete activities—attitude change, primary behavioral change, and secondary behavioral and rhetorical change—and establishes the conditions under which each of these changes is most likely to occur. It also identifies factors that influence the extent of exposure to the international normative message. The theory highlights systemic, local, and individual-level sources of variation in both exposure and norm change. It then considers the processes by which international norms diffuse across individuals and through communities, emphasizing both social and temporal dimensions of change.

Chapters 4 through 7 present empirical support for the theory, drawing on both qualitative interview data and original survey data. Chapter 4 focuses on awareness of international norms. It shows that there have been comparable levels of transnational activism against FGM and early marriage in the study communities. While the high salience of the international norm against FGM drives up activism by aid-dependent NGOs, the high salience of the local norm supporting the practice drives down activism by other community organizations. The low salience of both the international and local norms surrounding early marriage drives down activism by aid-dependent NGOs but creates space for activism by actors and organizations that are financially independent. However, the level of activism against both practices varies by community—awareness of the international norms against FGM and early marriage is most likely when communities, and individuals within communities, are accessible to NGOs and other activists.

This chapter considers the barriers to individual behavior change and the diffusion of behavior change through communities. It shows that because of the relatively low salience of the local norm supporting early marriage, individual behavior change closely tracks attitude change. However, the high salience of the local norm supporting FGM means that individual behavior change lags significantly behind attitude change. Because of FGM’s high local salience, behavior change is most likely to occur where individuals are able to somehow mitigate the high barriers to defection—the chapter demonstrates that exposure to noncircumcising ethnic groups is associated with individual behavior change in communities that have experienced minimal norm change, and that elite opposition to FGM is associated with individual behavior change in communities that are at both early and advanced stages of transition.

According to the United Nations, child marriage often is a result of gender bias and discrimination by families that choose boys over girls to pursue education. Advocates argue that early marriage creates a permanent end to a girl’s childhood more often than a boy’s childhood because of early forced sexual encounters, early pregnancy, and premature exit from school to attend to household chores for the new husband. Child marriages have consistently been linked with early, more frequent, and more unwanted pregnancies compared with adult marriages in developing countries. Women married as children often experience significantly greater life stressors and higher rates of suicidal thoughts and attempts than do women married as adults. Despite what is known globally about child marriage, the United States continues to legally allow the practice. This chapter explores the limited information on American child brides and discusses policy and practice implications of this phenomenon.