Luckily most girls weren't getting married off at 12
Here's part of the note I wrote on substack
There’s a tendency in media to paint medieval people as backwards, almost willfully ignorant and cruel, particularly when it comes to the health and wellbeing of women and girls. I'm thinking specifically of the scene in the pilot episode of House of the Dragon, where the king orders a primitive C-section on his wife, knowing that the procedure will kill her. I realize these shows like to capitalize on shock value to retain viewership, but I find the callousness and disregard for human life in these pseudo-historical shows to be demoralizing and repulsive.
When I was in college I took an Early Modern European History course and one of the most shocking things I learned was that contrary to what I had picked up from popular media, girls were actually not routinely being forced into marriage at 12. Records showed that most marriages were late teens to early 20s. It is kind of reassuring to think that people were at least trying to understand how early sexual experiences and pregnancy at a very young age could damage girl's mental and physical health.
I don't want to deny the brutality of the past or romanticize how women were treated. Without modern technology, supply lines, transportation, life would have been genuinely difficult, and that goes for both men and women. The irony is that it seems that women were more likely to be subjected to dehumanizing marriage practices in elite families where poverty was irrelevant.