My mom had her first child (of four) at 35.
All of us in different states, separated by at least one other state.
My youngest sibling is less than 6 years younger than me.
And she's the only one of us to ever live in Iowa. Makes you think.
Someone should go on Reddit and announce, "I had a baby when I was 40 years old. AMA."
Eh, they could do it now, or they could wait fifty years.
My kids were conceived at 39, 40 and 42.
And, I might add, she's still alive, at an uncharacteristically old age for my family. So maybe there is something to that longevity/maternal age bit.
Well, dammit. I wrapped things up a week shy of thirty. There goes my expectation of aging successfully.
First kid, sadly probably only, at 42. I feel positively ancient all the time, especially talking with classmates ' mothers or when kid asks to "be a backpack." If I make it past 70 I'll be the first mother to do it in at least four of my maternal lineage's generations. Pretty sure every daughter has their first child at least five years later than their mother did going back those known three. I was 8 years older than mine, who died at 67.
My mom had my sister and I when she was 40 and 36, respectively. (There's no way to put that that doesn't sound awkward.) She has already outlived her mother by at least 5 years, I'd have to ask the exact number, but my sister and I were both breech births or C-sections for some other reason, so I don't think she's a good example of late maternal fertility.
I had my two at a month shy of 34 and then a month and a bit shy of 37. Sis had one at 39 and one at 42. Don't mess with Sicilian ancestry when it comes to fertility, I guess.
I hesitate to say this, but the chance of it biting me in the ass seems adequately low... Cassandane had Atossa at 44.
I am occasionally wistful that I didn't live an entirely different life where some absurdly large number of kids would have made sense. My two are both absolutely delightful people, and very different from each other: the alternative world where there were six more draws from the same deck, while not something I would have actively chosen (as I in fact didn't) has a fair amount of appeal.
There may be a newly discovered longevity association , but there's also one with breast cancer, opposite- that is early but not late pregnancy is protective.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21805333/
20: The same! Well, it was a feeling long before we had our two and saw how they turned out. I grew up with a bunch of cousins, including 9 in one nuclear family. My wife was one of six, and she had a set of cousins with thirteen. There's so much for the kids, too, in those families. Not the world we live in, though.
I had my kids at an AMA. My grandmother had her last at 39 and my great grandmothers had kids into their early-mid 40s. This is one reason I always roll my eyes at the panic about older moms. Yeah my great-grandmother wasn't having her first kid at 45 but she did have her 9th and 10th kid at 45 and another great-grandmother had her 8th at 42 (dad was 50). Looking at my family tree most women married in their mid 20s and had kids into their early 40s, 42-44. This was the 1500-1800s so no ART involved. They do seem relatively long lived for the time. For example, one ancestor was born in 1690, had her first kid in 1711 (age 21) and her last in 1733 (age 43). She died in 1774 so lived to be 84.
One male ancestor was born in 1610 and didn't have his first kid until 1654. He had a total of 7 kids, the last one born in 1674. He died in 1687 at 77 years old. His wife's birth date is unknown.
His son (b 1659) had 7 kids with his first wife from 1683-1701. She died in 1711 and he remarried a much younger woman and had 8 more kids. The youngest kid was born when he was 70. He lived to be 79. His second wife only lived to 52 but they died in the same year along with one of his daughters so my guess is it might be infectious disease or something like a fire.
I forgot to add, second wife was 43 when she had her last kid.
This seems like the right thread to bitch about menopause and birth control. As une femme d'un certain age, the chances of my actually getting pregnant well past 50 have to be vanishingly small. And yet my goddamn ovaries keep on tossing out a monthly egg, meaning that birth control still seems necessary. I would deeply like my reproductive system to just relax already and settle down into whatever its postmenopausal plans are.
This is one reason I always roll my eyes at the panic about older moms. Yeah my great-grandmother wasn't having her first kid at 45 but she did have her 9th and 10th kid at 45 and another great-grandmother had her 8th at 42 (dad was 50).
This is a great point.
Now I've fallen down a rabbit hole. My gg grandma had her last at 45 but died at 60. Interestingly, she got married in October and had her first baby in March. (Yes I know that was pretty normal back then).
Looking at my direct family tree I'm not finding a single woman who didn't have a kid past 40. The "youngest" final kid so far is at 41. Clicking around through the branches of siblings I'm finding the youngest last kid to be 33, but that is somewhat of an anomaly. She died 6 years later at 39 and it's possible it was pregnancy/childbirth related (though who knows).
One woman had 3 kids with her first husband then married again and had a second kid at 45. No death date for her (though youngest daughter died in 1808 at age 83).
I'm also not finding a single teen marriage. The women are at the youngest early 20s but usually mid or upper 20s. The men range from early 20s to mid 40s at age of marriage. Another thing I wish would die is the idea that everyone married at age 14 until the 20th century.
Interestingly, she got married in October and had her first baby in March.
I had my first baby in April, and then got married in October.
His son (b 1659) had 7 kids with his first wife from 1683-1701. She died in 1711 and he remarried a much younger woman and had 8 more kids. The youngest kid was born when he was 70. He lived to be 79. His second wife only lived to 52 but they died in the same year along with one of his daughters so my guess is it might be infectious disease or something like a fire.
Was this in New England? There was a major epidemic called the "Throat Distemper," probably actually separate epidemics of scarlet fever and diphtheria that were easily confused, from 1735 to 1740 that would match up pretty well with those dates.
28 Yeah, I have no idea how that idea got to be widespread. Maybe it's a Scots-Irish frontiers thing? Certainly not the norm in settled New England.
I do have a teen marriage in my ancestry. Daughter of a preacher -- not of the established church in Westfield Mass but some kind of dissident faction -- marries a guy at 15 and has a kid 5 months after marriage. 1750s. Next kid is born several years later. She lived to be 85.
Oops, 16 at marriage, died at 70. Married in May kiddo (my ancestor) in September. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/23191570/alace-tremain
I think teen marriage was, as a wider phenomenon in America, peaked in the 40s and 50s.
At my high school, teen pregnancy peaked in 1990. Mostly because of Steven.
I can't remember his last name. He had four kids that I know of, three of them in 1990.
Weren't there only like eight kids in your year at school??
The Midwest is renowned for its fertility.
There were 17 my year. Steve was not my year.
28, 31: I assume the idea comes from young marriages (or young engagements) among nobles.
40: and gentry. We're all used to Jane Austen type stories in which women are desperately trying to get married at 18 because they're almost past their best-before date, and we assume that was the norm across society.
In Britain at least, age of first marriage dropped steadily from the early modern age onwards, with a real trough around 1950 and then a sharp increase. https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/blog/2024/07/11/what-age-did-people-marry/ But as the post linked notes, this is very much a European pattern, because Europeans set up a new household on marriage, and that means you have to be able to afford new stuff. As British people got richer, they married earlier because they could afford to. But if you're staying in your parents' kampung or kraal or hut circle or longhouse or whatever after you get married, that constraint won't apply.
And possibly also an awareness that poor countries today tend to have early marriage, so presumably back in the past when everyone was poor everyone must have married early.
From the post: These factors contribute to a tendency to 'read history sideways', a phrase coined by the sociologist and demographer Arland Thornton. This practice involves looking at contemporary societies across the world and assuming they are all at different stages on the same developmental trajectory, from 'less-developed' places with early marriage, to 'more-developed' places with late marriage. This leads to an assumption that marriage in the European past must have been as young as in parts of Africa and Asia in the mid-late 20th century.
Apart from anything else, there will presumably have been a lot of societies where people didn't marry until they were able to have children, and if you're undernourished that will be a lot later than it is in Western societies. Not much of an issue with 12 year olds getting pregnant if everyone's living on half a bowl of millet a day and menarche doesn't come along till you're 19.
Also if you're doing some sort of dynastic politics, cement our alliance with Poland stuff, well, in that case you'll have to do it when it makes sense from that point of view, so accounts based on dynastic matches are going to be somewhat weird and atypical because they reflect political circumstances, which may be very transient, rather than a wider custom.
I am reading about the French Revolution and much is made of Marie Antoinette's foreign origins - she was Austrian, the sister of the the HRE, and known by the French public as "the Austrian woman" if they were polite, or by a pun meaning "the Austrian bitch" (l'autrichienne, emphasis on the "chienne") if they were not.
Her marriage with the Dauphin was explicitly part of a peace process between France and the HRE, but I wonder when and where the last royal marriage of that kind actually happened? There wasn't a suggestion, if I remember, that Tsar Nicholas II married Alexandra as a political move to strengthen an alliance with Britain - Russia was an absolute monarchy but Britain wasn't, and if anything Russia and Britain were rivals in 1894.
42. Menarche was earlier in the upper classes, of course, which ate a plentiful and varied diet. But the kids who were married off as children in the middle ages and early modern periods in dynastic alliances were discouraged from getting it on until the woman was at least sixteen. Edmund Tudor got Margaret Beaufort pregnant when she was thirteen and this was seriously frowned on at the time.
She managed to deliver the baby (the future Henry VII), but wasn't able to conceive again.
44: The Greek pretender married a wealthy American heiress in 1995, but that dynastic bond staved off a different calamity than war.
The last one may of course have been somewhere other than Europe. I'm sure African kings did marital diplomacy well into the late 19th century.
In addition to what has already been mentioned, overall high mortality made cementing marriage alliances ASAP desirable. Ideally you'd want the two people married before one of them died of dysentery or a jousting accident.
What also gets ignored is that alliance marriages tended to completely disregard age, as long as both parties would somewhat overlap in fertile years. You have 12 year old boys being married/betrothed to 28-30 year old women as well as the other way around. Also nobles tended to marry multiple times and find a way out of the marriage once it was no longer politically advantageous. A woman might be betrothed at 9 to one person, marry at 13 to a different person and then again at 21 and then at 32 and then maybe even once more at 35. All of these marriages took into account the potential for fertility into the late 30s/early 40s. IIRC 37 year old Queen Mary married a 28 yo Prince Philip with the idea of producing a Catholic heir for England. It didn't work but not because it was unreasonable to expect a 37 yo woman to still be able to get pregnant. 28 yo Eleanor married 18 yo Henry II and had 8 children with him, the last one at 42.
These factors contribute to a tendency to 'read history sideways', a phrase coined by the sociologist and demographer Arland Thornton.
Oh huh, that's the father of one of my closest friends.
A grad school classmate studied demography as part of her degree, and the age at first marriage was really all over the place in rural early modern England. A good harvest meant a lot of marriages; a poor one meant people would delay getting married. Women were typically in their early twenties and men closer to 30.
Speaking of rural genitalia, Senator Fischer's husband refused to shake the vice president's hand just now.
I'm now engaged in an experiment to see if you can call someone a "tool" in the Nebraska subreddit.
If it gets dropped, I'm going to try "Putz".
What also gets ignored is that alliance marriages tended to completely disregard age, as long as both parties would somewhat overlap in fertile years. You have 12 year old boys being married/betrothed to 28-30 year old women as well as the other way around.
I know at least one song about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trees_They_Grow_So_High
45, 49: Wikipedia says Margaret Beaufort was pregnant at 12, widowed and gave birth at 13, and took her third husband at 14. First marriage was as an infant, later dissolved/annulled. Wow.
At least the guy who got her pregnant died first.