Age Disparity, Marriage, and the Gendering of Heterosexuality

In the vast majority of American marriages, husbands have been older than their wives; indeed, for most of American history, girls were legally able to marry at least two years earlier than boys in almost all states. While there has been some change in this pattern in the more recent past, it remains the case that men generally marry younger women. This is because the qualifications for marriage—financial stability for men; beauty and fertility for women—have themselves been age dependent. Because of this, however, age has inflected what it has meant to be an attractive marital partner: women and girls have been valued for their youth and men for their maturity. Age has been baked into conceptions of attractiveness and fitness for marriage.  

This essay considers the meanings of these age disparities for the dynamics of heterosexual marriage, arguing that the gendered power differentials that have traditionally inhered within marriages are in part attributable to age difference, and that heterosexual romance has been partially built around the age contrast. It also explores what these age differences meant in practice for a variety of married couples in U.S. history, focusing on the nineteenth century. Using demographic and census data to demonstrate the underlying numerical claims, and letters, diaries, and published sources to explore the meanings of age in marital relationships, I argue that age has actually been a crucial, if overlooked, aspect of the construction of gender itself, especially in the prism of heterosexual marriages.