Part 50

Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises. Dear rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year, given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of marriages.

It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to predict the number of men and women who will next year "decide" to take their own lives.

The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.

You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who will still be single.

But you live in the state of New York. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every thousand who will still be single.

In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every 1,000.

For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion to the other sex?

Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult route to their purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in Vermont.

But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large cities, is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?

The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:

Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.

Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under thirty-five years of age are, in each thousand, only 428.

In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A difference of 115!

Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of Mexico than along the Atlantic coast? One hundred and fifteen more out of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in relative human virtue.

You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your vicinity.

Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're a girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride. Which you will be in a day or two.

Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before you're twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the most primitive of civilized countries. It's half way between Africa and, say, Rhode Island.

These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly developing industrial region like Rhode Island.

In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before they were twenty were twenty-one in every 100.

In 1900 they were only nine in every 100.

A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!

And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your social set.

Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":

Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people that miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that professional men come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-six.

This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the direct line of social and economic development.

The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the miner. It takes him longer to get through his educational infancy--longer to arrive at his mental and financial maturity. The professional man's wife is a farther developed type than the miner's wife. She has much more economic value (if she works) before marriage and much LESS economic value (in any case) after marriage.

Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a meeting point; where the man's infancy is longest and the woman's economic value as a wife is least, there is, necessarily, altogether apart from personal preferences, the greatest postponement of marriage.

The United States, except possibly in certain sections, has not come to the end of its growth toward postponed marriage.