Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.
Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger 6 down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!
It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don’t be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.
Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: “The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman’s children.”
The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.
Twenty-one of those seventy-one children died in childhood.
This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.
In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with 7 which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.
Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.
The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their ’teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.
May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap kettles and candle molds and looms and smokehouses and salting tubs and spinning wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn’t domestic. He was domestic.
Our young engineering friend, John, when he looked forward to his future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all 8 except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to “give” Mary a home.
Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn’t marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.
The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:
Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to 1745, there were:
Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;
Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;
Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.
Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age.
It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it 9 remains unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:
“——First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children.”
“——Eight children born within twelve years, two of them feeble-minded.”
“——First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children.”
“——Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having borne eight children in ten years.”
From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.
The women’s colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive. Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of Northampton, Massachusetts:
(We are taking college facts not because this chapter is confined in any respect to college people, 10 but merely because the matrimonial histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know of.)
In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370 women.
In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who were still single.
This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out. The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:
The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don’t take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per mother.
We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they were graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together constituting one case.
In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than 3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.
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Perhaps the modern wife’s habit of going on living and thereby protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.
In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children, only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the former.
This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of that evil we shall observe later on.[1]
In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at all to religious celibacy.
12
In the meantime we return to John and Mary.
While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.
They won’t even let you start in “doing good” nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.
But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!
Mary took a civil-service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time that John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.
There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year’s work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors 13 of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.