An East–West dichotomy? Shifting marriage age patterns in Taiwan and Sweden over two centuries

ABSTRACT

Age at marriage varies greatly over time and between places. This study examines changes in age differences between spouses, as well as age at marriage, over 200 years in Taiwan and Sweden. Changes across vastly different socioeconomic and demographic contexts are explored in these two different kinship and marriage systems. Five different data sources are used to create micro-level data on spousal age differences for Swedish marriages formed between 1830 and 2006 and for Taiwanese ones that occurred between 1870 and 2015. The findings reveal two clearly distinct marriage systems that converge in some ways over time but remain divergent in other aspects. Since the 19^th century Sweden has had a population that marries much later in life, when compared to Taiwan, though the pace of marriage postponement in Taiwan has made the age profiles of contemporary married couples appear more similar to those of their Swedish counterparts. In addition, the distribution of ages at marriage has also become more dispersed in the contemporary than in the historical period for both countries. While age at marriage varied greatly over the two centuries, this study puts particular emphasis on how age at marriage for both men and women interacts with age differences between spouses. Findings revealed a gendered age preference in both Taiwan and Sweden, and how this has changed over time with rising female status and development. In contrast to shrinking age differences in Taiwan over one and a half centuries, average age differences in Sweden remained relatively constant, with the dispersion of age differences following a U-shaped pattern and reaching a minimum in around 1970.

KEYWORDS:

• Age at marriage
• spousal age difference
• East–West family systems
• European marriage pattern
• Taiwan
• Sweden

Acknowledgments

The Taiwanese historical registers were digitized as the Taiwan Historical Household Registers Database, 1906‒1945 (THHRD) by the Program of Historical Demography at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, Academia Sinica, and contributed to this paper. Hsiang-Shui Chen, Ying-Chang Chuang, Hill Gates, Paul Katz, Ing-Hai Pan, Arthur Wolf, Wen-Shan Yang, Guang-Hong Yu, and others collected the data on the Japanese period of Taiwan household registers used in this paper. The analysis and results expressed here are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the THHRD. We are especially grateful to Yulin Huang for his help with constructing the original dataset, to Wen-Shan Yang for his support regarding the historical Taiwanese registers, and to Chen-Hao Hsu for his research assistance. We also want to thank the staff at the Demographic Database at Umeå University for digitizing the data and preparing our Swedish historical data. Funding was provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST-108-2410-H-001-098-MY2) and by Riksbankens jubileumsfond grant no. P17-0330:1. This study benefited from discussions at the 3^rd European Society of Historical Demography Conference held in Pécs, Hungary in late June 2019.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Marriage squeeze refers to an imbalance between the numbers of men and women that is typically a consequence of varying cohort sizes. A marriage squeeze against women occurs when there are more women in the marriage market and thus a relative shortage of men would decrease the marriage prospect of women. Vice versa for a marriage squeeze against men.

2. Also referred to as little daughter-in-law marriages. It is called sim-pua marriages in the Hokkien language, or tongyangxi in Mandarin.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan [MOST-108-2410-H-001-098-MY2]; Riksbankens Jubileumsfond [P17-0330:1].