HSU IT Department

> What's the opposite of a cougar?

Vixen?

> For some reason this never struck me before, but even for the 1860s this seems rather a wide age disparity.

Not unusual when women were (more or less) treated as a commodity for the provision of a new generation of property holders.

It meant that the "ideal" age for a man to marry was when they had reached their level of financial security and for women when they at the age to give birth and bring up the youngster.

The appropriate age for marriage is around eighteen for girls and thirty-seven for men.
Aristotle, Politics, Book VII, 1335.a27