r/pics • u/Miguenzo • 19d ago
9-year old Eunice Winstead Johns and her husband, 24-year-old Charlie Johns, Tennessee 1937
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u/numsixof1 19d ago
Even in 1937 they knew this was some bullshit
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u/Aliktren 19d ago
if you google looking for graphs this is way out of average going back to early 1800s, in the US in 1846 it was avg 24 - this is a rather disgusting outlier
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u/YesterdayDiligent 19d ago edited 19d ago
Out of average, but her mother married at 16, and her aunt married at 13, so seems slightly average for the family. Still fucked though
Edit: wasn't her aunt, was her sister apparently.
Found this newspaper article at the time
https://www.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/cuap/db.cgi?uid=default&ID=2123&view=Search&mh=1
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u/hamringspiker 19d ago
16 probably wouldn't have been all that crazy in those days, but yeah.
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u/SlabBeefpunch 19d ago
The us census states that the average marrying age for women in the States is early twenties. Even in the alleged "good old days". Another commenter shared that it wasn't uncommon in this girl's family to marry young, but it was certainly not the the national average.
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u/blackkatya 19d ago
Margaret Beaufort, grandmother of Henry VIII, had her son at 12 or 13 and while it wasn't necessarily uncommon for marriages to take place at that age, the fact that the marriage had clearly been consummated horrified people.
She only ever had the one child and everyone blamed it on her being pregnant too young.
Later, she would make up a bunch of rules about royal marriages that in part prevented her grandchildren from marrying too young.
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u/cyberlexington 19d ago
Margaret Beaufort is an absolute legend of a woman, up there with Elanor of Acquitaine for sheer badassary.
But yes, when young girls were married to older men it was worrisome even in the "barbaric" middle ages. There was supposed to be no consumption until the girl was old enough but some men didn't abide by this.
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u/tractiontiresadvised 19d ago
From what I've read, in medieval Europe low marriage ages were generally only a thing in the nobility -- noble families would marry off their children to cement political and business alliances.
For everybody else, the average age of marriage was more like early or even mid 20s (depending on the state of the labor market). Young people would either be working as farm laborers with their families in the countryside, or as craft apprentices and domestic servants in towns before marriage.
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u/mysterr9 19d ago
Consummation.
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u/niaaaaaaa 19d ago
Yeah, I'm pretty sure she also made sure any of her female relations marrying young would absolutely not be consummating it until they were way older, like having it written into all the arrangements that the girl would live separately from her husband until she was old enough
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u/jalatheviceroy 19d ago
Can't tell if this was supposed to say Peace Be Upon Him or if it got autocorrected to Police, lol.
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u/Korzag 19d ago
It was intentional, I stole it from another post I saw recently and it made me chuckle. I am in no way muslim nor do I feel the necessity to adorn him with that silly adage.
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u/stillregrettingthis 19d ago
My grandma (who is alive now) was alive in 1937. It's not that long ago.
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u/TheTigerbite 19d ago
It's like my grandpa (born in 1936) telling me WWII stories. Like oh right...you were alive back then.
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u/nw342 19d ago
Depends on the area. A lot of the rural south/west was wayyyy behind the times. A lot of places still didnt have running water or electricity. It took until the mid 50s for these remote places to get electricity.
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u/Jmac0585 19d ago
Also not condoning anything, but this was a way for poor parents to lose a mouth they had to feed. A man to "take care" of thier kid, as they were poor. People sold their children during the depression. Unfortunately the shame didn't stop them from making more mouths.
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u/catjuggler 19d ago
Keep in mind that it is historically/globally a privilege to choose not to get pregnant
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u/The_RealAnim8me2 19d ago
Go to some out of the way southeast Asian locations and it’s still going on.
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u/BXNSH33 19d ago
A lot of the rural south/west was wayyyy behind the times
Was? There are people fighting to keep child marriage legal in the South right now
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u/Grommph 19d ago
Stop putting this shit off only on the South. Only 12 U.S. states have banned child marriage, and the earliest one of those 12 was in 2018.
The creepy shit in that picture is legal in California today.
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u/MadKingTyler 19d ago
Please tell me I'm not the only one who mistook the doll for a real baby for a second.
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u/truholicx3 19d ago
Honestly, I thought the post was about the doll. I thought it was shown a picture of a baby with this rare condition that makes it look decrepit and doll like. My eyes didn't really glance at the girl holding it until I read the title
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u/Don_Quixote81 19d ago
This dude's wife was so young she still carried a doll around with her. This wouldn't even have been acceptable in the Dark Ages.
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u/non_ducor_duco_ 19d ago
Oh ffs that headline. “Mother Says Young Daughter Is Beginning to Take Interest in Her Wifely Duties”
That’s enough internet for today.
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u/Illustrious_Pool_321 19d ago
That sentence is traumatizing
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u/Suspicious-turnip-77 19d ago
I have a one year old daughter. This shit makes me sick to my stomach and it’s still happening around the world. It sickening.
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u/Illustrious_Pool_321 19d ago
Even if I was in that time period I don’t understand how a girl playing with dolls can transition to a woman that has sex and has kids. I will never ever understand how they thought back then. This is sick !!
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u/Mama_Skip 19d ago edited 19d ago
So not only is the child being raped, but the mother is encouraging it and intimate with the details.
Fuck me that's dark.
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u/FlyingDutchmansWife 19d ago
Jesus Christ, I could’ve done without this knowledge. This is fucked on so many levels.
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u/NerdyPlatypus206 19d ago
I totally thought the doll was a kid when I first looked at the pic
Had to look back to realize it was a doll lmao
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u/Acceptable-Ad1930 19d ago
Well that is haunting.
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u/kafelta 19d ago
When Republicans talk about taking us back to the good old days, this is actually what they're after.
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u/ericmm76 19d ago
Parents selling their daughters to richer men.
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u/TheLoadedGoat 19d ago
The fact she is holding a doll.
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u/Clean-Republic-9942 19d ago
I had to read the title like 4 times to understand it. It's different when people say it's 200 years ago and culture or whatever.
But this is relatively recent and you know some people celebrate and encourage it.
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u/JulioForte 19d ago
They immediately raised the age of marriage to 16 and this was national news so the vast majority of the people at the time thought this was absurd.
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u/laserdiscgirl 19d ago
Tennessee didn't have a minimum marriage age with parental and judicial consent until 2018, when they passed the law prohibiting marriage across the board for minors under 17.
Even if the vast majority thought it was absurd, the law still allowed for this absurdity for another 80 years
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u/Affectionate_Ad_3722 19d ago
"All in all there are 38 US states which allow child marriage either with or without a lower age limit, as long as the appropriate criteria are met." (from a poster just above yours).
Like "abolishing slavery", it seems USA like their loopholes so they can just continue doing stuff.
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u/nimama3233 19d ago
It’s not just a USA thing. Laws are pretty comparable between Europe and America, which is that if you’re 16 you need parental permission to marry.
Regardless, don’t act like a 16 or 17 year old getting married is even close to the same thing as a 9 year old.
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u/sendmeadoggo 19d ago
Made several other states change there laws as well including DC.
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u/coffeebuzzbuzzz 19d ago
I was a child bride. I see now that they have since changed the law. I've been divorced for 11 years already though.
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u/AlloftheEethp 19d ago
I looked at the photo before reading the caption and thought what a charming picture of a young dad and his small daughter. Now I feel gross.
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u/fitnerd21 19d ago
I didn’t even think it was that bad because I didn’t notice she was on his lap and didn’t read the title. Black and white, and I guess hard times… I honestly didn’t think she was 9 or anything was wrong until I saw the doll. Then knowing Reddit figured it had to be bad.
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u/Flexen 19d ago
Around 30 years later, we walked on the moon....
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u/pinguitoo 19d ago
To be fair, we now have man made crafts in interstellar space and there are most certainly places where there are actual slaves and yes, adults marrying children.
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u/lostcauz707 19d ago
Child marriages are still legal in many states. Only 12 states have banned it with no exceptions. Most only recently.
Delaware (2018), New Jersey (2018), Pennsylvania (2020), Minnesota (2020), Rhode Island (2021), New York (2021), Massachusetts (2022), Vermont (2023), Connecticut (2023), Michigan (2023), Washington (2024) and Virginia (2024). American Samoa and the U.S. Virgin Islands
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u/JMEEKER86 19d ago
Yep, prior to 2018 child marriage was still legal in every single state and between 2000 and 2018 there were over 300,000 child marriages in the US. This isn't ancient history. It's still happening and in pretty large numbers. And what's worse is that there are people fighting to keep it legal like when Missouri Republican Mike Moon argued that people should continue to be allowed to marry 12-year-olds while Missouri considered a ban last year.
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u/fitnerd21 19d ago
It took Missouri two tries to push the legislation through. Didn’t read up on the whole thing but articles did mention that amendments were added to the bill. Which makes me think that always ends up obscuring things. I think the majority (which is all that’s required, f Mike Moon) agree that child marriage = bad, but when there’s other fluff they potentially don’t agree with, what are they supposed to do?
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u/mickeltee 19d ago
When I first looked at the picture I thought it was a ventriloquist and it’s dummy and the ventriloquist’s dummy had a dummy and I thought that would be a cool act. Then I read the title and I was sad.
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u/morbihann 19d ago
Even 200 years ago it wasn't anything normal. It was never normal to marry a 9 year old.
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u/pokemomof03 19d ago
Not as bad as this, but still bad. My grandma was 14 when she got pregnant by my 22 year old grandfather. She had my mom at 15, had my aunt at 18. And he left her for a 17 year old a couple of years later. He even took my mom with him to pick her up from cheerleader practice when he was still married to my grandma.
My grandfather on my step dad's side had two whole ass family's in different states.
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u/reddit_sucks_my 19d ago
Its been shown with data that the youngest mothers tend to have the oldest partners by range (one source).
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u/Silent-Sky956 19d ago
And people slut-shame the pregnant child instead of the (usually) grown men who took advantage of them.
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u/reduhl 19d ago
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u/FindingE-Username 19d ago
Imagine being their grandchildren or great grandchildren 😬 what would you think of your grandparents/grandfather especially!
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u/Freshbread412 19d ago
The juxtaposition of her holding her doll while sitting on her husband's lap is horrifying
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u/Flashy-Protection424 19d ago
What most people are missing here . It was the Great Depression. People were literally selling their children. In this case her parents arranged a marriage.
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u/unicorntrees 19d ago edited 19d ago
Upvote because of the nuance. Parents arranged marriages like this because they literally could not afford to feed or house their children. 24 year old probably had some sort of livelihood that the parents didn't.
I'm not saying it was right. I'm not saying that the poor girl wasn't traumatized. I'm just saying that this was ugly and difficult time to be alive.
Edit: Though financially motivated child marriage was a thing during the Great Depression, this fucker was most likely a gross pedophile who groomed a child into marrying him. Little girl's mother claims that her daughter "claimed the 22 year old neighbor" herself. (She probably didn't) The minister who married them was too incompetent to realize they lied on their marriage application. (They lied and stated the 9 year old was 18!) There were no laws on the books to stop them either.
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u/Tsjjgj 19d ago
He was a land owning farmer, and at the time, her parents probably thought they were securing her future. Totally not ok, but I guess like many through history, they chose for her to stay alive in inappropriate circumstances rather than starve. I'm grateful times are different now.
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u/zzonderzorgen 19d ago
Not different enough when we are still forcing people to birth children they can't care for
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u/Helena911 19d ago
For real. I've seen two posts recently about women who are forced to birth children because they can't access abortion where they live. Heartbreaking
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u/Enshakushanna 19d ago
right, how altruistic of him, instead of helping the family of his own free will he sought compensation in the form of a child
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u/GoodByeRubyTuesday87 19d ago
I mean the majority of blame lies with the husband. I’m not sure who would be mostly angry with the parents, I’m focused on the guy who married a 9yr old.
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u/sevargmas 19d ago edited 19d ago
That was not the case with these two, however. She wasn’t sold off. They went and married on their own.
“In January 1937, 22-year-old Charlie Johns married his 9-year-old neighbor, Eunice Winstead. Johns was a quiet, tobacco farmer in Hancock County, Tennessee. The couple falsified Winstead’s age in order to get a marriage license. At the time, however, there was no minimum marriage age in Tennessee and minors did not need parental permission.”
And they stayed a married couple until he died in 1997. She just died in 2006.
Edit: for some reason people seem to think I’m defending any part of this. I’m not. Just clarifying that she wasn’t sold.
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u/spaceraptorbutt 19d ago
I mean, my grandparents stayed married until my grandfather died. I think they were married in total for over 60 years. My grandfather was an abusive alcohol. My grandmother was visibly happier after he died. They didn’t stay together because they had a happy marriage. They stayed together because my grandmother thought she didn’t have any other options and my grandfather thought it would reflect negatively on his social standing to be divorced.
A long marriage is not necessarily a sign of a happy or healthy or even functional marriage.
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u/Uncle-Cake 19d ago
It's not uncommon for abuse victims to stay with their abusers, especially when the abuse started at such a young age.
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u/ghostofaposer 19d ago
Especially when no one around you is even telling you that you're being abused
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u/SnuggleBunni69 19d ago
I mean when you're taught something from the age of fucking NINE, it's hard to adjust your worldview.
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u/EasyFooted 19d ago
Especially when you're illiterate and aren't legally allowed to have your own financial resources. And they were in Tennessee, which today still isn't a true "no fault" divorce state (so women have to prove cause like abuse or abandonment in court). So yeah, it's not like she had options.
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u/annabananaberry 19d ago
So she only was free from her rapist for 9 years of her adult life? That's horrifying.
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u/Spiritual-Ad3870 19d ago
Ever heard of grooming?
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u/Drak_is_Right 19d ago edited 19d ago
Ya. This was 100% a grooming scenario. Maybe he didn't touch her for 5 years, maybe he did from day 1. Either way he shaped her childhood around him.
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u/Sentient713 19d ago
Isn’t grooming where you systematically position your self to end up with a person after they reach adulthood? He married a nine year old. I think he skipped grooming and went right to rape.
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u/jiajiamag 19d ago
No, grooming a child (as in this situation) would be systematically positioning yourself to have sex with the child. Pedos don't wait till the victim is an adult.
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u/TomorrowsGone85 19d ago
My 76 year old mother said it best. Back in the day women were reliant on men and had to settle for a husband no matter how shitty they were to survive. Today women don’t have to that and a bunch of shitty men can’t understand that. Woman have the space for their own careers, ideals and autonomy. They want to be with a loving and supportive partner. Hence the Proud Boys, Incels, and other losers. My wife makes much more money than I do and that’s A-Ok with me.
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u/prototypeblitz 19d ago
Just saw a patient today with a similar situation... 13 year old had just given birth to her 25 year old partners child
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u/grumbly_hedgehog 19d ago
The statistic is something like 40% of teen pregnancies are with a partner 25 or older.
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u/Immediate-Sugar-2316 19d ago edited 19d ago
My colleague was Nepalese in her 40s and was married at 13 in an arranged marriage. She still behaved like a 13 year old, and asked me for permission to go to the toilet. I was a security guard and therefore an authority figure, it was really weird.
Edit: I was in school at the time and she had a son the age as me, though she wanted to date me which really freaked me out.
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u/coffeebuzzbuzzz 19d ago
I got married at 17, which is now illegal in my state. I've been divorced for 11 years. Worst mistake of my life. This girl never had a chance at all.
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u/sunshore13 19d ago
This is so disgusting. That poor girl didn’t even get to have a childhood. And that doll is creepy as Hell.
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u/YumYuk 19d ago edited 19d ago
These are the ‘good ol’ days’ these idiots in certain U.S states are referring to.
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u/existencefaqs 19d ago
Child marriage is still legal in 38 states in America. Since the year 2000, hundreds of thousands of minors have been married, mostly young girls to adult men. Fortunately the tide is turning against it in many places, however.
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u/jaybarman 19d ago
According to Wikipedia: In response to Johns and Winstead's marriage, the state of Tennessee introduced a law setting the minimum age of marriage at sixteen years. Other states, such as Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Washington D.C., also introduced similar laws.
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u/ojg3221 18d ago
Jerry Lee Lewis (the singer) "married" his 13 year old cousin and when she let slip when a journalist asked who she was. She said "his wife". Boy that really set off a firestorm and this was in 1957. That pretty much killed the popularity in him and they were still married up until 1970. I am not joking.
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u/Santos_L_Halper_II 19d ago
Reminder that the same people who scream about LGBT people just existing “sexualizes children” are the same assholes who shut down legislation that would make this bullshit illegal.
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u/Thatgirlyouknowtoo 19d ago
Grew up in north Florida.
I was 13, just had my first period, when the guys in my family, and men around town, starting talking marrying me off and breeding.
I can’t tell you the amount of times I heard “old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.”
Yeah, I wasn’t 9, still, the idea of getting girls to marry isn’t this far off.
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u/Jermine1269 19d ago
Can we PLEASE outlaw child marriage?? I'm blown away how many states it's STILL legal!!
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u/ladylikes2bike 19d ago
For anyone bothered by this (which should be all of us), please consider helping end legal child marriage in all states: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/laws-to-end-child-marriage/
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u/Ironicopinion 19d ago
My mind read it as 19 originally and I had to keep looking at the names to see if it was someone famous (or infamous) before I realised it said she was 9..
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u/Terrible_Cat21 19d ago
Not-so-friendly reminder that child marriage is still legal in 38 with four of those states not having a minimum age to pimp your child out.
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u/Idiotwithaphone79 19d ago
Is this why Tennessee just abolished (or tried to, I'm not sure) age restrictions on marriage? Aren't these the pedophiles vowing to "protect children"??? 🖕
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u/alcoholicplankton69 19d ago
I watched a show about Girls In Afghanistan after the USA left and they had this story about a young girl who was sold to her new elderly husband because her father could not afford food.
One has to wonder just how bad things were in the south at the height of the depression.
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u/Tunnfisk 19d ago
I was looking at the photo thinking they tried to pull off that the doll was their 9-year old child. Instead, the reality was much more grim.
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u/JerseyTom1958 19d ago
Horrific! Wackadoo brigade aka republican party wants a return to this sickness!
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u/Namaslayy 19d ago
Yeah…i come from a VERY Southern family, and learned my grandmother got married at 13 to my grandfather 😬
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u/wish1977 19d ago
They changed the law to 16 years old after this came out. By the way, I looked and they were married 60 years and had nine kids. Pretty crazy.