Marriage and European Views Fertility

Prior to the advent of parish registers in the sixteenth century, very little is known about ages at first marriage for either men or women. Surveying the published statistical evidence from fifty-four studies, Michael Flinn describes an early modern northwestern, Europe family system in which the average age at first marriage for women fluctuated around twenty-five. Flinn does not provide measurements to assess the spread of the distribution around this midpoint, but other studies have determined the standard deviation to be about six years meaning that about two-thirds of all northwest European women married for the first time between twenty-two and twenty-eight. A few teenaged brides were counterbalanced, as it were, by a similar number of women who married in their thirties. Perhaps one woman in ten never married. In the demographer's jargon, that tenth woman was permanently celibate. This unique marriage strategy was vitally important for two reasons: First it provided a "safety valve"—or margin for error—in the ongoing adjustment between population and resources that characterized the reproduction of generations and social formations; and second it meant that the role of women was less dependent and vulnerable insofar as they were marrying as young adults, not older children.

The Demographic Revolution of the eighteenth century produced a declining age at first marriage for women and a tremendous drop in the number who were "permanently celibate." In the preindustrial, demo-economic system of reproduction, about three-fifths of all families were likely to have had an inheriting son while another fifth would have had an inheriting daughter. Thus about one-fifth of all niches in the landed economy became vacant in each generation. In the seventeenth century, infrequent, late marriage was connected with low levels of illegitimacy whereas in the post-1750 period, frequent, early marriage was associated with skyrocketing levels of illegitimacy and bridal pregnancy. The demographic implications of cottage industrialization were as much the result of more frequent marriages, by more people, as of earlier and more fertile ones. In addition rural industrialization permitted married couples to stay together, while previously marriages were fragmented—and wives and children deserted—because the plebeian family's economic base was weak and subject to cyclical strains. Industrialization permitted cottagers, who formed the backbone of many handicraft industries, to move into new zones of economic and social freedom, which translated into stabilization of their marriages.

There were other effects that resulted from independent shifts in the mortality schedule; not the least being the changing configuration of the age-pyramid, which rapidly broadened at its base. Better chances of child survival combined with the diminishing chance of marital breakup to swell the lower age groups at the end of the eighteenth century. Generations followed one another more quickly. This factor played no small role in contributing to the maintenance of high fertility rates.