There's a case to be made that first wave feminism helped push this along (the suffragette movement was a little bit after this and coincided its appearance in the United States), but it's more that once the industrial revolution happened, we no longer needed to marry children to each other the very nanosecond they hit puberty.
@josh i don’t know why i have to bring this up but the idea that everyone was marrying and having kids at 12 is just not accurate. average medieval peasant was married in their twenties, with women marrying slightly younger. nobles and land owners married their kids off very young to consolidate wealth and power in the family. that is all.
@lichelordgodfrey @josh @eTerrorist If it was true instead of just puritan sampling bias it should be treated as a disease rather than normal
The continued reduction in the age of onset of puberty should not be treated as a biological anomaly. It is likely that some 20 000 years ago, humans had already evolved to experience menarche at around 12 years and at present many countries are moving back to this position.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2465479/
What’s really interesting, though, is that this getting of periods when you’re sixteen is not the archetypal human state of nature either. It was kind of a blip that happened at the beginning of modern times—a retardation that followed a deterioration of living conditions even as the march of human progress achieved lots of impressive milestones.
https://www.lastwordonnothing.com/2018/01/02/the-historically-slippery-age-of-puberty/
