And...Regardless, you won't find anything that supports the LDS contention that 19th century women regularly married in their early teenage years. It was not a commmonplace occurence in society but...it was in the Mormon society (just like the FLDS).
The LDS are unsuccessfully using inaccuracies to distance themselves from the FLDS. In reality, the FLDS, of today, looks, believes and behaves pretty much like the LDS prior to 1890.
When you ask Mormons how their doctrines differ from the FLDS, other than polygamy, you don't get a response. That in itself is telling.
It could be they simply don’t want to get into a discussion of comparative religion. Ask me what makes my religion different from another, and I’ll be more comfortable describing my religion, and letting you figure out what’s different about it.
being a political forum, I try to avoid discussing the details of my religious beliefs.
I saw a chart that showed that in 1850, a MAJORITY of girls were married before they turned 20, even though the AVERAGE age was 22. I don’t know that the chart was backed by unbiased evidence, so I still cannot claim truth, but it was a data point — one easily refuted if I can find an actual link to the 1850 census.
However, even that chart didn’t claim “early teenage years”. although it showed a fair number younger than 18. If I read someone post a claim that women “regularly married in their early teenage years”, I would ask for a reference source to prove it, just as I am looking for references the other way.
As to post 54, I’ve already noted that the average marriage age is meaningless if you are debating how many married at a certain age — and is in fact biased high because there is a hard limit on the younger side, and virtually no limit on the high side.
Let me explain more. A lot of people are used to “average” when talking about distributions which follow a bell curve, meaning equal weighting on either side.
But the marriage age curve is not a bell curve, it is heavily skewed to the left.
For example, in post 54, they mention that in one area, the AVERAGE age of marriage was 21.4 for women. Now, the YOUNGEST a woman is going to get married is 12. The OLDEST they could get married is whatever age they die, but you could say most will have married by the time they are, say 50.
The distance from 12 to 21.4 is 11.4 years. The distance from 21.4 to 50 is 28.6 years. The curve is skewed. For every woman who waits until 30 to get married, in order for the average to be 21.4, you’ll need almost 3 women who got married at 18, or 2 women married at 17.
This is an excellent thing to remember when discussing economic statistics. The least a person can make is zero dollars, but most of the time people who are NOT WORKING aren’t counted in wage statistics.
So when people talk about average wages, they are almost always skewed upward, because a few people who make lots of money make up for hundreds who make little money.
For example, if the average salary is $50,000, and you include one CEO who made $100,000,000, how many people with ZERO income do you need to get $50,000 average? You take the distance from the high number to the average, and divide it by the distance from the low number to the average: 99,950,000/50,000 = 1999 people making nothing. Or, 20,000 making $10,000 a year.