Captain was a pedophile!!

i agree... he did act kinda perverted .. but he scared the hell out of her on there honeymoon!!!

It was very common in this time period and up to the early 20th century for girls to be married as young as 14 and usually to older men. Both of my great grandmother's were married at 14 and 15 and my great grandfathers were much older (10-15 yrs). My paternal grandmother was in her mid teens and my grandfather in his late 20's when they married. You have to remember, these were times when women had very little choice but to marry in order to survive. Families often had many children and girls, especially, were considered to be a burden unless they could work the farm or bring in money. They were married off early out of necessity at times.

Believe it, eliz. My grandma (born 1929), wasn't informed at all about her monthlies, thought she was going to die. There are certain cultures (grandma's family was German) who are very reserved and don't talk about things that have to do with procreation. I'm not saying that all Germans are like that, of course. But, in my experience, it wasn't uncommon for young women to be totally ignorant about certain important things at that time.

Pick up a book and educate yourself on the time period .

......


I'd like a chance t' shoot at an educated man once in my life .

I hope that neither you nor anyone else takes offense at this, but it never ceases to amaze me about how ignorant the vast majority of people are about the radical changes that have occurred in culture in just one generation.

I am in the middle of the "Baby Boomer" generation. We are usually counted as those having been born from 1945 through 1964, that twenty year span that follows the beginning of the return of the men from WWII.
- In 1945 the United States military, along with most of America was segregated by skin color. Not just by common practice but often by state or even federal law. By 1964 the Civil Rights Act had become law and American integration finally began in earnest. Our race problems are not behind us, but modern youth cannot imagine the world my parents lived in.
- The television had been invented in 1920 (I think). The first commercial broadcast was in Germany of the 1939 Olympics, live, of course. Now, we have flat screen TVs, hundreds of channels on cable or satellite, and on-demand viewing.
- Romeo was 15 and Juliette 14 in the original stage play by William Shakespeare. Marriage for girls as young as 14 was taken as routine and is still legal in some states (I think) under certain circumstances. A woman was considered an "Old Maid" if still single into her twenties. Meanwhile, most of us thing that it is sensible for young women to wait until their late twenties or even into their thirties if they ever bother to marry at all.
- Hormonal or other pharmaceutical means of birth control were unavailable in 1945 and birth control by any means (condoms) was illegal in most states in 1945. Now, birth control is strongly advocated including the use of abortion through the first two trimesters, or even later.
- After the spending for the war declined the federal government rapidly shrank. But, that didn't last long. The increase in federal government spending has been more gradual than some of the other changes, but it has also been relentless until it has become the largest sector of the economy (I may also be wrong about that, but probably not by much).
- In 1945 one could count on being able to find good work and a reliable job for life on a high school, or even 8th grade education. By 1964 youth were strongly encourage to go to college and today a college degree is no guarantee of obtaining paid employment, much less a reliable middle class income.
- In 1945 most people cross the country by train and cross the ocean by ship. Either journey taking several days. Only the wealthy went by air and that took 12 to 24 hours. By 1964 trains and ships were passing away as transportation because most people who needed or wanted to travel could easily do so by air.
- In 1945 we were still in the "Swing Era." By 1964 we were being invaded by the British.

I'm sure that many can add to the above list, but the way we treat sex, including sex with young women, is only one of many things that have changed so much in a short time that Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Baby Boomer Redux cannot imagine the country existing that way.

Another Boomer here, and I have known three women who married at 13 who wanted to do so at the time, no shotguns or arrangements, just love. Two of the ladies were born in the early 1900s, and the thirds was a back-to-school college student in my classes. She was 35 in 1978, and a grandmother thanks to her 17YO daughter's baby. As far as I could tell, all were still devoted, loving couples.

Yes, our culture has changed vastly. "Teen-agers" did not exist until after WWII. Even after that, children were people too young to work, just the youngest kids. In middle-class and households with fewer financial assets, kids got jobs if they wanted to go to college or live on their own or buy a car, etc. If the family needed survival money, kids would quit school to work full-time and/or multiple jobs. I was fortunate to work in our family biz, but I saw many classmates as young as 12 working in jobs adults hold now, such as grocery "bag boys," restaurant staff, gas station attendant (before self-serve), and all the "gopher" jobs in industry. Any kid on a farm worked as hard as his/her parents. Also, any girl who was pregnant was instantly old enough to get married, and many older husbands married them if the father was not willing or able ("I'm shipping out, and I want to become a man before I die.").

Research your own family tree, and you will eventually find very young brides wed to men from their own age to their grandpa's age. Don't think of these grooms as pedophiles. Some married for love, some for loneliness, some to "rescue" the bride from a bad situation, and some for lust, sure. But they didn't think of the ladies as children, and the young women probably didn't think of themselves that way.

~If you go through enough doors, sooner or later you're gonna find a dog on the other side.~

No, he wasn't a pedophile....it was common during that time period for girls to marry in their teens. The life expectancy was not as long and a girl's role in life at that time was to marry and have children. If a girl's socioeconomic standing was not high, sometimes marrying a girl off meant her survival and parents would be able to have more resources for the younger children. Whether it is right or wrong is not the question, that is how society was at that time.

Also, it was very common for menstruation and sex not to be spoken of, those were very taboo subjects. In fact, many parents have a hard time discussing those issues now to their children. Back in 2000 I was a camp counselor and on the question form it had asked the parents (it was an all girl camp) if their girls had been informed about periods (in case they got theirs at camp). My girls were ages 10-13, and more than half of the parents stated they had not spoken to their daughters yet about periods. I was really shocked because by that age group they should know. There is nothing bad about periods, yet, even today many have a hard time speaking to their young daughters for some crazy reason. If in 2000 parents still had issues with that, it does not shock me that is how it was back then.
In fact watch the movie Little Women, Jo sees Meg for the first time and Meg is very pregnant. Jo asks why Meg didn't tell her and Meg stated they don't talk about such things. Not that she was ashamed of her pregnancy, but pregnancy symbolized that sex had taken place, which, one did not speak of.

The part I've always found funny was that Lucy seemed genuinely surprised when the Captain told her she'd be living with him now rather than her parents as they rode through town returning from their honeymoon. I can understand a young girl from that era being naive about sex and childbirth, but surely she would have realized getting married would mean leaving her parents' home!