Just how many women married young during the frontier period can be seen in the percentage of women married at various ages. At age sixteen, 27 percent were already married; at age twenty, 83 percent had taken marriage vows. By age twenty-four, a mere 3 percent were still single, and that dropped to less than 1 percent by age twenty-eight. By these standards, those in the second cohort stayed single much longer. Only 6 percent of them were married by age sixteen, although 57 percent had wed at age twenty, 88 percent by age twenty-four, and 95 percent by age twenty-eight. Even so, women in the second cohort married when they were young, and most married.

The higher marriage rates during the frontier period shown in figure 1 indicate not only a higher proportion of women marrying but also a lower age at marriage than prevailed during the subsequent periods in Manti. From one cohort to the next, the mean marriage age increased approximately one year. In the frontier period, it was 20.25 years of age, in the middle period 21.07, and in the last period 22.30. The median age at marriage for each period was lower; during the frontier period, it was 18.67 years, while it was 20.25 and 21.58 for the middle and last periods, respectively. In i960, the median age at which women married was 20.30, approximately the same as in the middle period in Manti, although the marriage rates in Manti for that period are higher because a higher proportion of women married. All these average marriage ages of Utah women are low compared with 23.65 for 1900 and 25.36 for 1990 in the United States in general.

Nevertheless, the overall average ages for the first two periods in Manti obscure important differences between immigrants and other women. Those women who migrated with the Saints from Nauvoo, those women born in Utah, and those women who immigrated to Utah before their fourteenth birthdays—referred to here collectively as Utahns—married considerably younger than did those women who immigrated to the Great Basin when in their teenage years or older—here called immigrants. A considerable number of those in the Utahn category were immigrants from Europe, but they were in Utah when they became of marriageable age and thus were subject to the influences of the Utah marriage market at an early age. The influence of immigrants on the mean age of marriage during the first two periods can be inferred from table 1. In the first period, immigrants constituted 31.3 percent of women who first married in Utah; by the second period, the percentage of such immigrants had dropped to 16.6. Because immigrants accounted for only 5.0 percent of those marrying after 1890 and therefore had small impact on the average age of marriage, the last period is excluded from this table.

[Table 1]

Almost one-third of those marrying during the frontier period were immigrants, and they married on average at age 25.12—seven years later than did those women who were in Utah from their early teens. By the second twenty-year period, while the number of immigrants decreased by a third, the average age of Utahns at marriage increased two years, to 20.46, and the mean age declined almost a year for immigrant women, to 24.22. Clearly, the considerably older age at which immigrants married substantially increased the overall mean marriage age. Utahn women actually married at younger ages than the average indicates.

These mean ages at marriage are approximately what other scholars studying the nineteenth-century Mormon population have found. Using the large data base collected in the Mormon Historical Demographic Project, Geraldine P. Mineau, Lee L. Bean, and Mark Skolnick found that the mean age at marriage was 20.86 for monogamous Mormon women born between 1800 and 1869. Those born in the last decade of that period, between i860 and 1869, married when they were slightly younger, on average at age 20.69. These are similar to the averages in the Manti study, though the latter includes both monogamous and plural wives. In a later study, Mineau, Bean, and Douglas L. Anderton found that once-married women born before 1859 along the Mormon Trail married at a mean age of 18.70. This is fairly close to the mean age of 18.07 for the Manti pre-1852 birth cohort, although the Manti data set is lower because it includes not only women who married more than once but also some women whose early, short-lived marriages were omitted from the family group records, which are the basis of the Mormon Historical Demographic Project.

These mean ages at marriage for the Manti women are also comparable to those Larry M. Logue found in his study of St. George, a Mormon town in southern Utah. Basing his calculations on all daughters of St. George residents, he found that women in St. George married at a mean age of 19.40 from 1861 to 1880. These dates overlap ten years for each of the first two periods in the Manti study, but the St. George mean age at marriage lies almost halfway between the Manti mean ages for those two periods. The women in the Manti study thus appear to be fairly typical of women in the nineteenth-century Mormon population.

Compared with other nineteenth-century groups in the United States, Mormon women in general married at younger ages. In Massachusetts, for example, women married at a mean age of 23.6 in 1860, while in Edgefield, South Carolina—where there were many fewer foreign immigrants—white women married for the first time at age twenty. Women in the West married at early ages, though not quite so young as did Mormons. According to Logue's calculations, women in western rural areas who married before 1900 did so at a mean age of 20.5. By the turn of the century, Mormon marriage patterns approached the national norms; however, the median age of 21.6 for Manti women during the last period remained slightly below the median ages 22.0, 21.9, and 21.6 for 1890, 1900, and 1910, respectively, for the coterminous United States, as reported by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Although many Mormon women immigrated from northwestern Europe—in 1870, 67.9 percent of Utah residents twenty-five or older were foreign-born—Utah mean ages at marriage were significantly below those across the Atlantic. Single women who immigrated to Utah from Europe between 1850 and 1887 often married soon after their arrival in Utah, as table 2 indicates. Women entering plural marriage generally wed more quickly than those marrying monogamously, showing the inadequacy of the idea that plural wives were women "left over" after most other women had married.