HANCOCK COUNTY, Tenn. — The little blonde girl wore a short cotton dress and held a baby doll as she stood beside the 6-foot-tall, dark-haired man.
It was Jan. 30, 1937, and the dark-haired man had something to tell his parents.
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He got married.
The bride — then 9 years old and holding a doll that was her wedding present — was Eunice Blanche Winstead, and she wasn’t playing make-believe.
It was all very real. She was in third grade and now a wife.
Her groom was Charlie Johns, a 24-year-old farmer. They had married 10 days earlier on a country road in Hancock County, a mountainous but impoverished region of northeastern Tennessee. The Baptist preacher charged them $1.
The Winstead and Johns families were not at the wedding.
Eunice later said, “We slipped it over them,” meaning they slipped out and got married. “We are going to build a house and go to housekeeping.”
Perhaps the most shocking thing was that neither family objected and, in fact, gave their blessings.
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The mother of the 9-year-old bride, Martha Winstead, 33, said: “Charlie has several acres of land, some cattle and other livestock. Eunice had claimed Charlie for hers ever since we lived here. Of course, we never had any idea they had a serious thought about each other and they were married before we knew it.”
Getting married young was a family tradition for the Winsteads. Martha married at 16, and Eunice’s older sister married at 13.
The bride’s and groom’s families might have been OK with the marriage, but the rest of America was outraged when word spread in hundreds of newspapers across the country.
Minnesota was one of the hot spots for criticism.
'Horrible'
The headline across Page 1 of the Minneapolis Star on Feb. 3, 1937 read, “Child-Marriage Flayed by Women Here” with the subheadline adding “Minneapolis Terms Tennessee Case ‘Horrible.’ ”
According to the story, women were outraged and wanted something changed, despite the marriage happening nearly 1,000 miles to the south.
Members of local women’s groups were among the most vocal, including the Philanthropic Educational Organization, or P.E.O. The international nonprofit focuses on motivating, educating and celebrating women. Mrs. George Estes, a Minnesota P.E.O. committee president, said there had to be some people in Tennessee who could do something about child brides.
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“Of course, much harm has already been done, but an immediate annulment should be arranged somehow. If the parents are not able to care for the child, she should be placed in an institution,” she told the Star Tribune.
Minnesota’s Daughters of the American Revolution also chimed in, encouraging their Southern sisters to get involved and make this a national issue.
“I think the clubwomen of Tennessee should bring this terrible thing before the legislature in an attempt to annul it,” said Mrs. Francis Olney, DAR regent.
Olney, the past president of the Council of Federated Church Women, said she couldn’t believe a minister would agree to perform the wedding ceremony.
Florence Davis of the Hennepin County Child Welfare Board said it couldn’t happen in Minnesota, as the minimum age of marriage was 15 as long as the parent consented. (At the time, there was no minimum age limit in Tennessee. Even so, Eunice lied and said she was 18. The preacher said later he thought she looked young for her age.)
Mrs. C.W. Mattison, described as a Minnesota housewife and mother, said: “The whole United States should rise up in protest against this horrible thing. I hate to even think about it.”
First lady Eleanor Roosevelt agreed. She joined the Minnesota women and prominent Washington, D.C., leaders in calling for a censure of Winstead’s and Johns’ child marriage. She encouraged the enactment of uniform marriage laws in every state.
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So did the laws change?
Tennessee, undoubtedly embarrassed by the uproar over the 9-year-old bride, soon passed a bill setting the minimum age of marriage at 16.
However, in the weeks and months to follow, a widespread change in the law across the United States did not occur. Only two other states, Rhode Island and Minnesota, along with Washington, D.C., increased the minimum age for marriage to 16.
Today, most states’ laws have set the minimum age of marriage at 18, but some allow for exceptions to the rule, including parental consent or pregnancy, which could drop the minimum age much lower. Each state has different requirements for issuing marriage licenses.
In North Dakota and South Dakota, individuals as young as 16 can be married with parental consent.
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill in May of 2020 that eliminated all provisions for marriage by minors in the state, prohibiting marriage by anyone under 18 in all circumstances.
Life as a 9-year-old wife
After the initial flurry of media attention, including a full spread in Life magazine, the Johnses settled into home life.
Eunice quit school shortly after getting married after a teacher whipped her with a switch for allegedly misbehaving.
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Charlie angrily confronted the teacher and told him he had no right to whip another man’s wife.
Since there was no legal requirement for married children to stay in school, Eunice never returned to the third grade.
According to the podcast episode the Knoxville newspaper came back to visit the couple on their first anniversary. They found them still together and staying with Charlie's parents. By their second anniversary, Charlie said, “She’s pretty good at milking and washing, but she hasn’t learned much about cooking yet.”
In 1942, at the age of 14, Eunice gave birth to the first of their nine children: four girls and five boys. In an interesting twist of fate, that firstborn, a daughter named Evelyn, eloped at the age of 17 despite her father’s disapproval. Charlie previously had her fiance, John Antrican, arrested twice for abduction and perjury. Evelyn said her mother approved of the union.
She later told the paper she didn’t understand why her father was so upset.
“After all, Papa married Mama when she was only 9 years old,” Evelyn said. The Antricans were married for 46 years.
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What happened to the Johnses?
Charlie and Eunice Johns built a fairly prosperous life for themselves. Charlie did well with his 150-acre hillside farm and was also paid handsomely for some underground mineral rights he had owned. By 1960, a newspaper account described a comfortable life in their six-room “spotless” home, where they listened to the radio (but no TV) and used a wood-burning stove, although the house was wired for electricity.
Eunice and Charlie were married for 60 years before Charlie's death in 1997. It was only after his death that Social Security records proved that he was even older than he had stated on his marriage license. He said he was 22, but he was at least 24. (One birth record shows he might have been as old as 26 on his wedding day.)
Eunice died in 2006 at the age of 78, already a great-grandmother.
Reflecting back on her life in 1960 and 1976 interviews, she said her only regret about marrying so young was dropping out of school in the third grade. While she said she had a good marriage, she advised women to wait until they were 21 to become a bride.
“I was lucky and got a good man. But you never know.”
Hi, I'm Tracy Briggs. Thanks for reading my column! I love going "Back Then" every week with stories about interesting people, places and things from our past. Check out a few below. If you have an idea for a story, email me at tracy.briggs@forumcomm.com.
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