Here is a link to a page that has a table of American and European ages of consent going back to 1880: https://chnm.gmu.edu/cyh/case-studies/230?section=primarysources&source=24
I was completely shocked to find that most states had their age of consent set at 10 in 1880, and, as I said in the title, Delaware had it at 7 years old. Europe was similar. What was going on back then? I can understand that people tended to get married younger in the past, but 7-10 years old!?
Was pedophilia "normal" back then? Also, don't be surprised if the people pushing for it to be normalized today use this to make their agenda seem more palatable.
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WarGy ago
Pre-marital Sex in general was taboo back then, so age off consent laws were less relevant than they are today, because if you were fucking somebody then they were your spouse anyway.
we_kill_creativity ago
Is that actually true though? That's what I more or less thought too, but when I ask myself for proof of that, I don't have much. I have movies made in the 50s that seem to want me to think that, but not much else.
WarGy ago
I'm mostly going off of historical books and movies I've seen that paint this kind of picture (i.e. sex with slave women was admissible because they were seen as property rather than people, sailors were seen as taboo for their promiscuity, high class women were abstinent, etc.). The 1880's would have been around the Victorian era and the general consensus is that it was a relatively sexually reserved time. I couldn't point to any real historical evidence to confirm or deny my point, but maybe someone will come along who can.
samhara ago
Jeffrey Masson is a scholar who wrote an important book about Freud and "Hysteria" - a "disease" which supposedly afflicted women in the 19th c. and which does not exist anymore. Freud's patients all had this "disease" (It was because it was thought that woman did not experience orgasm. - so their inhibited sexuality made them high -strung.) and these women sufferers were his original patients.
( This also connects to the development of the vibrator - which was used as a remedy for "hysteria" - but no one connected it consciously to sex [the doctors must have known/ right?] until the 1920' when the vibrator was used in early pornography - then they took it out of the Sears Catalog. The vibrator was one of the first electric items offered in the that mail - order store. But it was for hygiene, not sex.- )
Women also had to wear very tight and small corsets, which also was not good for their health. Even in my lifetime, in the South, if a woman didn't wear a girdle, and then was raped, it was considered her fault for "asking for it" or being provocative. When I was a girl, females could not wear pants to school. Skirts were the rule.
Masson worked on the Freud letters and discovered that originally Freud admitted that these woman sufferers / patients had been molested by older relatives. Freud changed his theory to "Wish Fulfillment" i.e. the woman desired sex with their fathers so they imagined it was taking place.
Masson was shunned by society and had to sue the New Yorker magazine for defamation and libel. -
The Freud family is connected to #Pizzagate as you likely know. I'd give you more citations but my site was vandalized. - http://jeffreymasson.com/books/the-assault-on-truth.html - "The Assault on Truth" Jeffrey M. Masson.
we_kill_creativity ago
Then why wasn't the age of consent 20 instead of 10?
WarGy ago
Probably just tradition, used to be you married young to start having children as soon as possible.
we_kill_creativity ago
Can 7-10 year olds have kids?
WarGy ago
Perhaps, but some people might want to wait a few years after marriage to have children. This might be a relic of people marrying two families together also.