from the column
the age at which girls are ready for marriage is culturally constructed.
In Western culture, we think that marriage is only appropriate for 20-year-olds, not teens, and that has been true for more than a hundred years. But with the introduction of the birth control pill, the feminist revolution and economic independence for women, the age at first marriage has risen sharply. In 1860, the median age for marriage in America was 22 for women, and now it's 26.
As those numbers show, there simply is no connection between reproductive maturity and the accepted age of marriage for girls in Western culture; the median wait between first period and marriage is eight years. But in other cultures, that connection is much more explicit — the median wait is three years.
More interesting, there is wild variation in what girls are allowed to do during those three years. For example, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia encourage girls to engage in premarital sex as a way to find a good match. The Efe of Zaire let girls have several trial marriages (which means, of course, sex with different men or boys), before they settle down. Other cultures marry off their girls at first period, or before, to eliminate the possibility of premarital relations, while some cultures strictly forbid any male contact until marriage and keep their girls under lock and key.
These social rules are based on how each culture thinks about women as the instruments of passing on genes; controlling female sexuality is controlling female reproduction. Underneath it all, worry over the passing on genes, worry that a man might be cuckolded into caring for another man's child, worry about how much females like sex and what they might do with their desires, directs cultural norms.
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