How does anybody know what age young women reached puberty in previous centuries?

[raccoon]

Even the 19th century, how would anybody know, unless she recorded it in her diary? Did anybody keeping medical records about that at the time.

And especially, go back a few centuries...Medieval times...how would anybody know? Even if it's known that some noblewoman gave birth at 14, say, obviously that would imply she had reached puberty at 13, or earlier. But would that tell you anything about the non-nobles, who probably didn't have a diet as healthy as the nobles did?

So, how would anybody know? Or are they just guessing?

[xultar]

1. I took part in a multi year Black Women's Health study. That question was asked...

I was 9 when i started my period.

I'm sure there are records, my grandma was asked when she was in her 70's...we took her to a new Dr and they wanted a full history.

[JuniperLea]

2. You can tell by the age women start having babies...

It's really hard to hide that.

[raccoon]

4. Sure, but would anybody have records of when peasant women in the Middle Ages had babies?

Or 19th century women who were what you'd consider middle class, but didn't marry for years after reaching puberty?

[SoCalDem]

9. People were mostly illiterate then, and the people writing all this stuff down

did not care all that much about the smelly masses.. Times were pretty dicey back then, so they probably only cared much about not getting the plague or some other disease & did not dwell on much else..

[JuniperLea]

11. Only after the fact...

Skeletal remains can tell you how many children a woman had, and the age range. I'm sure there's more documentation of that than there is of any medical issues of the peasantry.

[Warpy]

12. Women weren't even listed in parish registries

when records started to be kept in the late middle ages. Girl babies weren't recorded in family bibles. There is just no way to tell when this happened to girls back then because girls were simply not considered, at all, except as baby machines to produce sons to work the fields and inherit any property.

My own best guess is that the same range of ages of puberty existed then as now, but with the cluster at the later ages instead of the earlier, mostly due to poor diet. Even the aristocracy knew some degree of hunger in times of poor harvest like the little ice ages.

Guesswork is all we have, though, thanks to the existence of women as chattel for so long, barely named and unrecorded.

[texastoast]

3. I would think it is in the skeletal record

Bones tell lots of stories.

And in marriage records. Most patriarchal cultures waited until menses to send them off to mate/marry.

[supernova]

5. It has to do with diet

If diets are skimpy on nutrients then onset of menarche will be delayed until even 14-15.

No there isn't a lot of direct data, but you can infer alot about diet from socieconomic standing in previous centuries.

I started at 11 1/2, FWIW.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Menarche. And the age data are well known.

Records were kept in many areas, particularly by churches, and in France since before the Revolution.

In fact, the first academic paper I ever wrote was on the topic of the regression of age of puberty. Age at menarche (first menstruation) was the proxy for young women. It peaked around 1880 at age 19, and in 1978 (when I did my paper) it was around 12.2 according to a WHO source. Enter menarche age range at Google.

I have two old friends from high school who had daughters whose menarches occurred prior to their TENTH birthdays.

--d!

[SoCalDem]

7. Body weight has a lot to do with the onset of menses

If you look back to times when people may not have gotten enough food & their children's growth was stunted, they may have started late.

The "first bra" was often an indicator of impending maturity. I am 61, and I can definitely recall that well into 8th grade, a lot of the girls in gym class did not "need" them yet, and the school nurses were still coaching the girls on how to handle the "situation" should it happen the first time at school. That would have made us 13 or 14.

100 years ago, it was not uncommon for girls to marry at 16, which could have been only a few years after their first periods.. Perhaps it was soothing to parents to have that fertile girl safely married off so they would not have to support bastard children..:shrug:

[cynatnite]

8. Skeletons can tell a lot about a person's lifestyle and their health...

Not only that there are a host of other ways of gaining evidence about such things. They've been able to discover a lot from remains that are thousands of years old.

[AnArmyVeteran]

10. I read a story about an eight year old giving birth in Mexico.

Sex abuse can hasten puberty.

[Brickbat]

13. About a year ago I saw a study come out that said that girls who live with adult unrelated males

(such as stepfathers and mothers' boyfriends) hit puberty earlier than girls whose fathers live in the house.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. When I was in graduate school, the Episcopal Chaplaincy hosted the choir

of New College-Oxford for a week-long residency. Boys sang the soprano parts, and young men (students at New College) sang the alto, tenor, and bass parts.

We held a reception for the choir one evening after evensong, and one of the student members told me that some of the music written for the English tradition of choirs of men and boys was too hard vocally for present-day boys. The reason was that in the Tudor/Stuart period, boys' had treble voices till the age of about 15 (the choirs kept records of who came and went and at what ages), so they were both larger and more intellectually advanced than the 8-13 year-olds who make up the modern choirs. For that reason, some of the early music, although written for boys, was better sung by adult women, who could sing the music without straining.