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(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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The average mother having their average daughter at an average of 25 is historically probably quite an overestimate. 20 would be a much safer guess, but there's a good chance it's lower than that too.
Doesn't change the math that much though, easily less than a thousand generations since the advent of agriculture either way.
Surprisingly no. At least in central and western Europe, child marriages were very much a nobility thing. Securing alliances and such. And even for those the first child may well have been much later.
I don’t have an individual statistic on hand but https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/01/18/age-of-marriage-giving-birth-in-medieval-europe/ has collected a bunch of sources that suggest that the usual age of first marriage in medieval Europe for women was around their mid 20s, pretty much the same as today.
I'm not talking about child marriage. Traditionally women were considered to be of marrying age at around 15 or 16 (note that this doesn't mean they got married at exactly this age -- it means the lower bound). The blog you link seems to be intentionally or unintentionally conflating child marriage (prepubescent girls) with marrying between 15 and 20. And indeed the sources it cites seem to largely support an average marrying age of around 20 for women until the 17th century.
This is also of course only for the medieval period, which is relatively recent all things considered. That still leaves 8500 years unaccounted for until the advent of agriculture, and during those 8500 years it's far more likely for women to have given birth to their first child younger rather than older than in the medieval period.
Although interestingly we have to take into account how many children were born per woman and until what age. Then we have to consider how many survived.
This would push the average age above that of the average age of first childbirth. The child must survive to eventually descend to you. I don't think it makes the age 25, but likely higher than 15
You're joking though. Right? Or are you thinking about wealthy people? The ones who might be written about?
I come from several generations of "prom night" conceptions and "shot gun weddings".
Read the page I linked. It specifically lists sources that specifically talk about peasants in medieval Europe who on average married later than nobility.
Prom night conceptions and shotgun weddings are a phenomenon of the 20th and 21st century and would have been considered absolutely scandalous for most of history.
Yeah, when we're talking about a 12000 year span and your references don't go past the last thousand, it isn't very representative. Relevant, certainly, but do you think that had much bearing in ancient Egypt? And that only gets us halfway through the time span we're talking about.
uhm, actually the age of marriage basically exclusively depended on the real circumstances. in the roman empire, it was much lower, because rome was eternally at war, which consumed a whole lot of soldiers. that would not have been possible if women hadn't had a lot of children, for which you'd have to start early.
the christian religion increased the minimum marriage age from 12 (!!) to 15 in the 3rd century CE (late roman empire), because rome stopped being a war-based country and there was simply no need for that many soldiers anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age
also the same link explains that the average age of first childbirth was significantly lower for american settlers than for european peasants in the early modern age; again the reasoning is that the american settlers were a highly expansive population (roughly a doubling of population every 20 years!! in the time period 1650 - 1880).
Well Rome is difficult, what you said is more true for the Republican era, after that Rome didn't need to "produce" soldiers they simply offered Roman citizenship and benefits. They were largely able to reintroduce recruit from Provences. The promise of good pay, war spoils, and land also helped.
As for marrigeable ages, your sources mostly pull from written documents. Roman society was aggressively patriarchal so daughters were often used as a way to broker alliances or an increase in social status. There is also the payment of dowry that incentives men to marry off their daughters as soon as possible
I'm sorry, but I am also a source.
Anecdotal data isn’t
It is. But only as data point(s), not as a trend or generalization.
You can't just look at the age of the mother when she has her first daughter. You also have to consider her age at the time of her last daughter. Even if she has her "prom night" daughter at 18, if she later has another daughter at 36, we're looking at an average age of 27.
Plus talking about the deep past you have to consider infant mortality rates as well. If someone has 10 kids, but only the ones they had after 29 survived then that changes the math.
see my other reply below
Lots of babies and children died before adulthood though, so its actually not a bad bet for 25 as an average birthing age for one that survives to adulthood. Not that every woman would lose her first 2 kids or whatever but enough certainly did to drive the average up somewhat from what it would be with modern medicine.
Always remember: these people were DNA-identical to us. All this life-saving, life-extending, life-improving technology... is always just 2-3 generations from poof
i think it's also worth noting that a whole lot of children basically died due to malnutrition ... think about it. contraception was not existent, so if a woman gets pregnant 8 times, but the family can only feed 2 children, that effectively means that 6 would essentially starve (or die due to other "preventable" diseases, but actually the better prevention than modern medicine is just food, since enough food strengthenes the immune system).
even if you had modern medicine at the time, children would still starve; the thing that really drives down child mortality is just a lower birth-rate altogether, since the family can still feed 2 children, regardless of whether they actually make 2 or 8 babies.
Also decreases in available food impacts fertility and menstrual cycles. If you had very little food you are likely to start menstruation later in life. If you have a hard time getting food you can have an irregular cycle leading to less ovulation periods per year
Can confirm. My great grandma told me she got married at 18 which made her an "old maid" at the time
Tbf, it was also far more common for people to have a shitload of kids, which takes time and thus would mean the mother was a fair bit older for the youngest few. My grandma was the youngest of 12 and her mother was well into her 40s when she was born.
Yeah. As society becomes more complex, maturity and preparedness comes much later. "Growing up" takes much longer.
Go back a thousand years, things were much simpler. There was less to navigate and learn so "the real world" started much earlier.
Look at any other creature without society and see how their life unfolds. They're "adult" very quickly because within a short time they've got enough figured out to go out into the world alone.
Meanwhile, we're now at a point where it's normal to have a first child in the 30s and 40s, feeling completely unready.
But they don't have a single kid, so the average age when giving birth is maybe higher
i looked that up a while ago and apparently the median age of first childbirth was around 21 or 22 for women, though this depends on wealth: wealthy people had children earlier (on average), going down to about 16-18 for many noble women.
poor people often didn't have children at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriageable_age
That's a poor claim to make. The European societies almost always were encouraged to marry off their daughters even the poor. I supposed slightly less men got married accounting for death rates and the possibility to remarry after your wife dies, but that vast majority of poor people that made it to adulthood had children. There was no contraception and women were married off the vast majority of the time.