Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IIIa: Family Formation

Sun Feb 15 2026

Of course brides are only half a marriage and so we should also give some attention to the male marriage patterns implied here. Male average age at first marriage is almost always older than that for females. Even in an early/early pattern, that implies a female average AAFM around 14, 15 or 16, but a male average AAFM generally around 20. In a late-male-marriage pattern, the male AAFM might be as old as thirty. And notably, the common patterns above are (female/male), early/early, early/late, intermediate/late and late/late. Which is to say under all of these pre-modern marriage patterns, grooms will generally be older than brides at first marriage, sometimes much older (notably, this age gap does seem in some societies to narrow for second marriages, again speaking to a situation where first marriages are for the community while second marriages were for the spouses, but of course most individuals only married once). That has its own implications for the structure of power in a household, of course, further reinforcing the patriarchal nature of the household.

But at the same time, that pattern also speaks to how even men are instrumental rather than individual, within a patriarchy because of course we have two models for men: an early model where boys marry while their parents still live and have little if any choice in the matter and a late model where men are made, for social reasons, to delay marriage until fairly late in life, likely also against their actual wishes. I plan to talk about the differential attitudes these societies have to male and female chastity in the next post covering children, but I’ll note that while on the one hand it was common for these societies to have sexual outlets for young men who were not yet of marriageable age, such outlets were mostly available to the wealthy or urban, not to the peasant in a small village.²² Instead, young men chafing, sometimes violently, against family structures which denied them the ability to start households until later in the lives are a common feature of these societies. In Greek literature, for instance, sharp, sometimes violent conflict between fathers and sons is a frequent motif and Greek law with a concern in particular over sons killing their fathers which starts to make a bit more sense when you think about how a late marriage pattern that demands a son delay marriage and household formation until well into adulthood or the death of his father might create intense resentment and anger.