Women: Age Rise In Marriage
Women: Age Rise in Marriage
My mother, Cecilia, harbored her faith and dreams unto me. Her life sufferings were shared with me, and as I aged, I began to understand her and why she did and said what she said. Regardless of our differing cultures and generation difference, her wisdom transcended many ideas I maintained. The man she married was her shelter from the outside world and the cold wind that she never wanted to play a role in. She held faith, trust, and most of all love in this one being; this one being that was my father. Her stories always carried their shared laughter, their strong passion and I would listen and wonder who this man really was. I would smile and look into my mom’s eyes that began to turn gray. Then do I remember how he broke the peace, the peace I would never know. The peace that I longed for as a child, but let go because of my mother’s gray eyes. As a mere seventeen year old girl getting married, she cooked, cleaned, and took care of her husband like a “good wife and mother.” She was everything I was not at her age, due to culture, urbanization, education and family structure. I loved her and even the peace that she was not able to implant onto me. The peace of a close sheltered family, the bond of a father and a daughter; instead I learned the fundamentals of a spirited single mother.
Whether separation, or divorce, a great number of children are being raised by a single parent. Divorce is rising continuingly. A topic that is not new to me, or other people and so to offspring’s to unmarried single parents. “Divorce is the legal breakup of a marriage. Almost half of all U.S. marriages end in divorce. Like every major life change, divorce is stressful. It affects finances, living arrangements, household jobs, schedules...and if the family includes children, they may be deeply affected.”
The bulk of marriages that end have increased from 34% in 1990 to 50% in 2001. In the same lines, about 80% of divorce cases dissolved was due to social structure, the value system in society, cultural and temperamental differences and an unsatisfied sexual appetite.
The statistics of divorce in itself brings about the harboring of fear to even marry. The fear of failing breaks a piece of one’s confidence, so the pressure to find “Mr. Right” becomes an arduous duty. Many parents value education to help their children “…complete their education as well as allowing them to gain in maturity and [poses] adequate life skills.” Millions of times my mother strangled me with education, pushing me to not worry about friends, romantic relationships, and other people’s misconducts, with marriage not ever being an option till a certain age range. My life plans were set: complete high school, attend and leave college as a professional scholar, work for a few years on my own and by late twenties and early thirties marry and have kids within or less than a two year period. Funny enough, most of my peers that I ran across too had the same parental ideas of an increased age marriage, which usually provoked some laughter in us. And as we aged, and began viewing some girls in high school, getting pregnant, and fears grew, because our minds went back to childhood days when a girl must be married to bare kids and second, be of a certain age, in our minds “old.” I reflected back to history and began to wonder why females were waiting longer years before marrying. For example, in many African cultures, once a young girl began her menstruation, she was considered a woman that was able to marry and bare children. To demonstrate in one of the most famous novels, Romeo and Juliet, Juliet, according to Lord Capulet, "hath not seen the change of fourteen years" in addition, the Nurse affirms "Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen" (Brians 2).
In fact, the author Jane Austen of the 19th century had “heroines married at the earliest age of 17 or 18” which was a norm in her time. “In other cultures, age at marriage may be slightly lower. For example, in Mexico the mean age of marriage currently is 23.3 years for men and 18.4 years for women. This has increased as well, reflecting Mexico’s increasing industrialization.” To draw upon a Quinceanera, one of the biggest celebrations in the Latin community is believed that once a girl enters the age of fifteen she arrived into womanhood. This celebration still remains very much celebrated. Concurrently the passage into womanhood means that marriage is now available. However, Mexico’s increasing industrialization has tampered the favor of early marriage. On the same hand, “the median age at first marriage” is a pattern that is being noticed also in Europe with more of the population sustaining a single life … [when] forty-seven percent of girls were brides before the age of nineteen in 1959 (Soll 1).
When observing more and more successful women are expressing the revolution of women’s equality, and some are emphasizing their unbounded wedding finger, the representation of a woman free from a man’s control and bondage is identified. Her success, which in turn, includes her education, may “delay [her] marriage till [she] complete(s) a moderate level of education” as in India, Pakistan, Guatemala, Brazil and El Salvador (Muslim Marriage 1). In urban areas or educated populations, like Philippines and Singapore, never marrying is becoming a commonplace. The inherent implications of a higher age rise and a longer gap between the parent and child’s generations and delayed child bearing exposes the risk of conception. “Research findings have shown that a 1 year delay in age at 1st marriage reduces fertility by 20% of a child. Schooling delays marriage age as well as marriage laws, but structural and economic changes may be more important than policy changes. Policies affect the status of women and opportunities” (Greenspan 1992).
Meanwhile in the United States, the average age for a man to marry is 26.8, while a woman is 25.1. Escaping back to the 1960s, the lowest average age for men was 22.8 years old, at the same time over a hundred years ago in 1900, the mean age for a women marrying was 22. Losing the illusion that some women “were sold into marriage as young children”
Of March 2007, in hope of strengthening the UK’s borders, the UK government felt that raising the age of a marriage visa from 16 to 18-21 is best in combat to end forced marriages. Officials announced ‘there are sometimes situations in which a young person is forced by family pressure into an unwanted union.’ Subsequently elevating the minimum age to 21, would ‘allow the young people involved to have completed their education as well as allowing them to gain in maturity and possess adequate life skills.’ Some may say the extended age will lead to more impulsive sex by teenagers and young adults, following unwanted pregnancies (BBC News 2007). In full effect, the news, press and other media announced that there was a teen pregnancy epidemic in 2009. Nonetheless most young adult girls are marriageable. Evidence shows that historically youths and young adults gave birth to children, and it continued after many generations, then why is it being called an epidemic? The truth is, youth pregnancy is not an epidemic, the main unfocused argument that is missing is marriage. However, with parents bottling their offspring’s minds about the “right” age to marry, increasing divorce rates, and a push to “have fun” before settling down, why would adolescents and young people want to marry? Since ‘the easy availability of premarital sex is another factor that has reduced the urgency of getting married and contributes to increases in the mean age of marriage’ (Retherford, Ogawa, and Matsukura 18 and Ferrante 349).
An exchange for early marriage is increasing premarital sex in young adults and unmarried singles. In Iran, a survey reveals that the rise has risen so much for both men and women that more unwanted pregnancies and abortions are occurring, even though in “Iran’s Islamic legal code” abortions and sex outside wedlock is illegal. Growing numbers of Iranians are backpacking marriage, leading to more illegal sex; turning heads from “Iran's state-run body for youth affairs…” One in four men ages nineteen through twenty-nine revealed that they have experienced sex outside of marriage. Age of marriage for men has grown to forty and for women thirty-five “a blow to the government's goal of promoting marriage to shore up society's Islamic foundations.” With 15 million single young adults, over a million to two million were easily eligible for marriage under the Iranian marriage age. “Seven million were already past the government's recommended marrying guideline age of 29. The trend was producing” the ‘unpleasant and dangerous social side effects’ of premarital sex, Ali Alkbar Asarnia disapprovingly said. To help boost marriage rate in Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad presented ‘Reza love fund’ in order to help citizens find partners, supply marriage loans and reestablish marriage. Sociologist Hojatoleslam Ghasem Ebrahimipour announced that with the strength of feminism in the midst of more educated women and has an income, the easy access of sexual acts; ‘…she does not want to accept masculine domination through marriage.’
Transformations within delayed marriage age have also occurred in Asian countries, like Nepal, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Japan, Malaysia, and South Korea and with “regional totals” (Tait 1). “Policy implications are [being] ascertained” [to why] the norm for female age at marriage has risen from 15 years to 17-18 years in south Asia, and from 18 years to 24 years and older in east Asia [compared to] men's marriage age [that has not risen as much].” [Synchronized changes] have occurred with fertility declines and small family sizes and lower population growth, with changing roles for women, and with emergent youth subcultures and increased prevalence of premarital sexual behavior.” Factors of industrialization, economic and the want to “advance one’s children’s status” are two reasons of the decline in total fertility rate in women, concluded by Davis (Ferrante 344). Singles are on the rise and is expected to remain rising (Greenspan 1).
In the United States, half of the US population is unmarried; the age rise is more primarily seen in more industrialized countries. Even countries that are welcoming themselves into more development are beginning to see a rise in the average marriage range for women; a reflection on the feminist stance as more women are working and are completing college (Greenspan 1992). The separation of home and workplace led to the breadwinner system due to the fact that women had too many children to engage in work outside the home, leading the fight into a feminist world (Ferrante 343-344).
All things considered, women are more receptive to structural change and have gone far from having a small direct role in the responsibility and consumption of what her family consumed (Ferrante 344) and powerfully elevated her freedom and voice through feminism. Moreover, I believe that my mother’s view and some other parents view overriding stance against marriage at a young age may be due to the statistics of the dissolution of marriage, and attribute it to young age and minimum education. On the reverse side, marriage rise for both sexes has driven up sexual acts outside of wedlock, more unplanned pregnancies, due to changes of culture, urbanization, education and family structure. My mother’s gray eyes, her single parent status and the peace she could never share with me are all her warnings to me of early marriage. Somehow I understand my mother’s viewpoint to “mature up in education” and everything else will follow, however, at the cost of fear? The feminist world has opened up a world of equality for women in most fields and areas, if not all. And I am willingly to walk hand-in-hand with it, and welcome any circumstances that arrive to my opening, whether marriage or not.
