Was Jane Austen a pedophile?

[Coventina]

This Foley flap has got me thinking about age differences & the sexuality of teenagers.

Many are calling Foley a "pedophile" while other state that pedophilia is attraction to prepubescent children only.

It's got me thinking about the novels of Jane Austen where young girls are often the targets of older men.

Sense & Sensibility: a 16 year old girl ends up marrying a 36 year old man.

Pride & Prejudice: a 16 year old girl marries an older man whose age isn't given, but is assumed to be at least in his 20s. Granted he is the villain, but it was never the age difference that was the issue.

Emma: Mr. Knightley was 16 years old when Emma was born. He admits to her that he fell in love with her when she was 13. That would have made him 29. Although, when they marry she is 21 and he is 37.

Now, these books are nearly 200 years old, so society has changed. But if pedophilia is a true perversion (which I hold to be true) then the time difference shouldn't matter. Bad is bad, and all that.

So are these stories of pedophilia? Or, is the sexuality of sexually mature teenagers something else?

What do you think?

[Bunny]

1. Well, it used to be very common for young women to marry early.

If you made it to 20 without a husband, you were practically an old maid! And, many men waited until they were financially established before they sought out a wife, so it could explain the more advanced age of the men in her stories. :shrug:

[miss_american_pie]

2. Personally I would call Foley a pederast

but I think in the case of society at the time those novels were written, grown women were regarded as children, so there's an entirely different power structure that isn't really comparable.

[ghostsofgiants]

17. "What's a pederast?"

"Shut the fuck up, Donny."

(Sorry, the word pederast always makes me think of The Big Lebowski, haha.)

[Zomby Woof]

18. YOU'RE OUT OF YOUR ELEMENT!

(Same here)

[miss_american_pie]

19. lol

Thank you. I needed a laugh. :hi:

[crim son]

3. Bunny has it right. And times have changed.

An older man who marries a very young woman, even if she's legal, might be said to be "robbing the cradle" or a "dirty old man." Why? Because today we expect a marriage or sexual relationship to take place between (for lack of a better word) equals; otherwise we feel uncomfortable about it. As for the question of whether or not the men of Austen's time were pedophiles, I think a better question is, how fulfilling were those marriages?

[wildhorses]

4. ..........

:popcorn:

[bleedingheart]

5. the average life span in Austen's time was probably mid 50's

and that was if you had good health and money to eat well and get some medical attention (although their medical attention could be a problem...bleeding, etc)

People married young as a result.

However what I remember from my women's studies class was this...women in the upper classes married younger than the lower classes because of money (ain't it always the problem...) So poor girls had to go into trade, help on farms and do odd jobs to make more money to pay their own dower to help start a household with their future spouse...he too was also working to earn enough to buy land etc...

It is a sign of the times...

My great aunt was pregnant and married at 14...no one batted an eyelash about it.

[tigereye]

6. writing about typical social mores at the time

doesn't make one a pedophile, now does it? If men of means currently married girls of that age, that might be another matter. (i.e., Jerry Lee Lewis or Bill Wyman?)

I think there is an age of consent issue as well, many people who are 14 or older or 16 or older now, depending on the state, are able to consent to sexual involvement, right?


However, anyone who sexually manipulates the innocent/the young, is probably a pedophile, in some ways...

[supernova]

7. It was also common

to die in childbirth, so an eligible man of some means and age would naturally seek a younger wife who could be more expected to survive the rigors of pregnancy and birth. It's also possible that he would have outlived at least one wife, maybe two for said reason.

My grandmother got married when she was 15 and granddaddy was 17, I think. That was in 1908.

[Spider Jerusalem]

25. Yeah...

several marriages seem to've been a fairly common thing back in the days when childbirth was still a regularly life-threatening and fatal occurrence; my gggg-grandfather (one of those men of 'some means and age'...an attorney, heir to the family plantation, and later a Treasury Department official under Andrew Jackson) was married four times; his first marriage came at age 36, and his first wife was dead within a year delivering a stillborn child; a year after that he married again, at age 38, to a 22 year-old, who died in childbirth at age 32; and eleven months later he married a third time, at age 49, to a 23 year-old, who was dead within about 13 years of their marriage, when he married for a fourth time.

[Zomby Woof]

8. No more than Nabokov

That is, writing about a relationship is not the same as advocating or being in the relationship.

That being said, there is a world of difference between the leering predatory practices of Foley versus the consensual romantic wooing in a 19th century English novel. Plus, U.S. laws vary, and in Foley's case, he was targeting minors, even if they are sexually mature. Mores and customs across societies are elastic to a point (the Right decries this as relativism, but it's reality, which they are adverse to), and I hesitate to offer any more in these comparisons.

[Coventina]

9. I want to add some info on marriage ages here

I am getting these numbers from "Approaches to the history of the western family 1500-1914" by Michael Anderson.

I'm summing up a paragraph here, but basically he says that in England the average age of first marriages between 1600 to the 1930s was 27 for men and 25 for women.

Now, this doesn't mean that people didn't often marry earlier than that, it's an average after all, but the common conception that extremely early marriage was common is actually a misconception.

The poster that made the statement about women of upper classes marrying earlier than those of the lower classes is correct. But overall, the population of England has historically above average marrying ages.

So, it seems that Jane's novels don't deal in what was "common". Acceptable, yes, but common, no.

[supernova]

10. Well, that's true

She confined her writing to what she knew best: the landed gentry.

[JoDog]

12. And if I recall my woman's lit class correctly

A lot of what Jane Austen wrote in those novels was meant to be received in a mocking tone. Sort of "see how silly and strange the manners of the upper class are". In a way, she was trying to point out how confusing and unfair courtship and marriage were for upper class women. The marriage of these young characters to older men underscored these imbalances.

Also, for most of history, women have been expected to marry and start producing children almost from the moment they are physically able to. And in looking for the most financially stable man for a daughter to marry, family were drawn to older, more established suitors. The question was less "find someone she likes close to her own age" and more "find someone with enough money to take care of her and any children she'll have". Considering that society encouraged these women to cultivate few marketable skills, well, that makes some economic sense.

The situation was different for poorer women. Many of them had marketable skills (cooking, cleaning, spinning, teaching, weaving, sewing, etc.) and could have supported themselves (although sometimes just barely) or their families needed the money they brought in. So it wasn't a disaster if they didn't get married until they were in their 20s.

From your friendly neighborhood spinster (no, really, I'm single and I have a spinning wheel!).

[El Fuego]

11. Sexually mature teenagers aren't "children"

They're just not adults as arbitrarily defined by law. I think pedophilia in a psychiatric context involves only pre-pubescent children.

In days of yore, when people only lived to be 35 years old, they had to marry young! Time's a wastin'.

[anarch]

13. I always thought George Knightley was kind of creepy

or at least that comment of his about falling in love with Emma when she was thirteen was creepy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. Another concern was virginity

It was very important for upper-class young women to be virgins at marriage (to ensure that their children were actually fathered by their husband), so younger was better.

Among the lower classes, parish records indicate that an awful lot of brides were pregnant. In fact, among the peasants, getting pregnant was almost a prerequisite to marriage, because no one wanted a wife who couldn't have children.

[woo me with science]

15. No, but Lewis Carroll was. nt

[ghostsofgiants]

16. Ephebophilia is probably more apt for the Foley situation.

I agree with miss_american_pie, I'd go with "pederast."

I know nothing about Jane Austen.

[Benfea]

20. Society changed radically in the 1800s.

Prior to the 1800s, teenagers were not considered children and were often kicked out of the house or married off. During the 1800s unattached, unemployed teenagers in big cities ended up hanging together, forming these protogang things and causing lots of trouble, which led to the modern practice of keeping teenagers at home until they reach 18 or so (implemented by passing laws requiring children to stay in school until at least 16).

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. The teenage years are a recent invention

When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was an elderly Swedish woman in our church who had been sent to America by herself at the age of 13 to work for a cousin's business. That was the norm among poor Scandinavian families back in her day (ca. 1900, I guess it would have been.) The kids who weren't going to inherit the farm or who couldn't get married off right after puberty were sent away to work.

Also, it wasn't so long ago--within my lifetime-- that most European countries and Japan offered education only to age 14 or 15 for teenagers who weren't going to go to a university. After leaving the equivalent of 8th or 9th grade, they would go straight to work or into an apprenticeship program. When Japan was really growing economically in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was such a labor shortage that companies would send buses around to small towns to recruit new junior high school graduates, who would then leave home to work in factories.

My older German relatives started treating me as an adult after I was confirmed in the Lutheran church at age 15. They let me sit at the grown-ups' table, gave me alcoholic drinks at parties, and no longer watched their language in front of me. My great-grandmother, who died in 1971 at the age of 94, told me that when she was young, she was told to marry an older man, because he would be better established financially than someone her own age, so at age 18, she married my great-grandfather, who was 28. Her own mother, my great-great-grandmother, caused great worry in her family because she was still single at age 23.

My mother tells me that the idea of a distinctive style of dress for teenagers came in only in the late 1930s. Before that, she says, you wore children's clothes till puberty, and then you switched to adult clothes.

Look at old movies. The actors all look middle-aged, but then you realize that some of them were in their twenties. Jean Harlow, who does not look at all young to people in our day, lived to be only 26.

So you can't necessarily impose the standards of our day on times past. That was then, this is now.

[Benfea]

31. Yep. Good info, thanks. -NT

[Porcupine]

22. Bat Mitzvahs, Debutante, Quinceniera, First Communions.....

Were all ways of telling children that they now had the responsibilities of adults. They were also ways of presenting young women as ready to take a husband. This is still the case in much of the world; at least that part of the world that is still rural, farming/ranching communities. American kids, my daughters included, know almost nothing practical at the age where many people around the world set up households.

Even in the US the age of consent for marriage was 13 in many states as late as the 50's. While I don't approve of young girls (under 16) having sex under any circumstances I think the current stretching of the term "pedophile" is ridiculous.

The narrowing gap between pedophilia and menopause in america is eventually going to look silly. We really should let biology take the lead on this one. Females who are old enough to healthily bear a child should be able to choose a partner. Yes the brain continues to mature; but evolution has proven to have a certain wisdom that overrides human whimsy.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

23. Maybe not First Communion

Doesn't that occur at age seven among Roman Catholics?

Confirmation is at 14 or 15.

Unfortunately, in this society, a girl who marries and/or has a child in her teens is practically doomed to poverty and dependence. You need an education to have a decent life these days, and starting one's childbearing at 16 is not a surefire way to derail that, but it makes finishing one's education much more difficult.

In the old days, 90% of the people never went past 8th or 9th grade and had grown up doing heavy chores starting at about age 5 or 6. They were more mature at 16 than most of today's 16-year-olds are.

However, I agree that pedophilia is sexual desire for a pre-pubescent child, not for a sexually mature teenager. The issue in the Foley case is that an adult was sexually harrassing subordinates who were much younger.

[HarukaTheTrophyWife]

26. Confirmation is what makes you an adult in the eyes of the Church.

I made mine when I was 15. Everyone was 14-15, it just depended on how old you were in that grade.

[Porcupine]

27. Thanks for the correction. Confirmation it is.

Foley's case involves three really nasty problems.

The first is that he was in a position of great power over the pages he was soliciting for sex. References from sitting members of Congress being a requirement for West Point or Annapolis candidates is just the most obvious.

The second is the fact that he was more than three years older than a minor he was propositioning. 16 and 19 is just barely acceptable in my book; 16 and 50 is when I clean the shotgun.

The final problem is that Foley was a closeted homosexual while both persecuting active, openly gay people and trying to violate moral problems one and two above. I find this almost as repugnant as actual pedophilia as it involves deep issues of violated honesty and trust.

I think the real issues are all about violations of trust and abuses of power.

[JVS]

30. I believe that Communion/first confession was later

in times past. While currently the practice is to start communion around 8 or 9, I remember reading a passage in Goethe's Faust where Gretchen is commented on as being on her way back from confession so she must be at least 14. The only group I know of that still does first communion at such a late age is the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, where first communion follows confirmation at the age of about 14-16.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

32. Until the 1970s or so, all Lutherans had first Communion after

confirmation at age 14 or 15. Then, at some point in the 1970s or 1980s, they began admitting children to Communion at age 10.

[pitohui]

24. i'm fairly sure that novels are fiction

in any case i don't care if foley molested the boy when he was 16 instead of 15, i care that he sexually harassed a boy who couldn't refuse because of his position of power

if only we took sexual harassment as seriously as we did pedophilia, women might actually be able to advance

i don't think young people realize the number of women who are un-employable because they didn't have sex with the wrong guy -- and by the time they find out, they're screwed, they've invested thousands in an education that has become worthless in a moment

this case makes the news because it's a boy, if it was a girl, it would never be reported on, but she'd be just as destroyed and unemployable forever

[yurbud]

28. more importantly, will this be the death of gay-bashing by the GOP?

[Chomskyite]

29. I can't agree Mr D'Arcy was any kind of villain

He was just prideful and prejudiced!