ABSTRACT
This chapter trains an international lens on the very categories that tend to be taken for granted as culture-bound: marriage, the child, the adolescent and the “girl”. It turns out – as it has with so many things colonial – that there is nothing uniquely Indian or Third World about child marriage. The child-woman encountered in Chapter 1 reappears in all her complexity in the history of Europe and America. Western feminism itself has had a very instructive relationship to childhood from which there is much to learn. This chapter also briefly explores the histories of two nations not associated with child marriage – the US and China – even though American and Chinese girls are marrying too young to this very day.
