Nicholas L. Syrett

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Nicholas L. Syrett

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Cover of American Child Bride

Childhood & Marriage

I have long been obsessed with marriage in American culture. I am generally opposed. In order to investigate how Americans have come to place so much faith in the institution of marriage, I chose one case study—the marriage of children—and wrote a book about it. The result is American Child Bride: A History of Minors and Marriage in the United States, which documents the history of minor marriage in the US from the colonial era to the present. The book elucidates the long history of child marriage in the US at the same time that it shows how and when Americans came to find the practice unseemly. Note, however, that no matter how icky and backward it might sound, as of 2023, forty-one states continue to allow minors below eighteen to marry under certain circumstances. To read more about what some are trying to do about it, see here.

In the process of writing the book, I published a chapter of the research in Children and Youth during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (ed. James Marten) and an article in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. The latter won the Fass-Sandin Prize from the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

While I had originally come at the project through an interest in the history of marriage, I soon became interested in the history of children and ideas about childhood and chronological age as well. Since then, I’ve published essays in A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age (with David Pomfret, ed. Kristine Alexander and Simon Sleight) and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Youth Culture (ed. James Marten). I also served as book review editor (with Corinne T. Field) of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth for a number of years and am now President of the Society for the History of Children and Youth.

On the subject of child marriage, I’ve done interviews for radio, television, newspaper, and magazines. You can check out some of them here:

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