Overview
- Charlie Johns, 22, married nine-year-old Eunice Winstead on January 19, 1937, in rural Tennessee, with Baptist minister Walter Lamb officiating for a one-dollar fee after Johns misrepresented her age to obtain a license.
- At the time Tennessee had no minimum marriage age, and later that year lawmakers set 16 as the minimum with a waiting period for girls under 18 in response to public outcry.
- Eunice’s mother, Martha Winstead, publicly approved the union, citing Johns’s land ownership and invoking the Bible to defend the match.
- Coverage by Life and Time helped turn the local scandal into a national cause as women’s clubs pressed for child marriage reforms.
- Reports note Eunice briefly returned to school that summer, became a mother at 14 in December 1942, the couple had multiple children, and they remained married until his death in 1997 and hers in 2006.