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 21 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 halfway 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 hundred.
In 1900 they were only nine in every hundred.
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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. Her economic utility as a cook and as a laundress in her husband’s house tends to approach zero.
Where these two lines of development, male and female, come to a meeting point; where the 23 man’s infancy is longest and the woman’s value as housewife 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.
It is true that in Massachusetts, within the past forty-five years, the average age of women at marriage has risen from 20.7 to 24.6. That is a very “modern” and “developed” marriage age. But many of the older countries surpass it. In Belgium, for instance, which is a most intensely industrialized country, the average age of women at marriage is 28.19.
It is hard, indeed, to look at the advancing marriage age and to compare its varying rate of progress in different continents, different countries, different localities, and different social circles without admitting that, whatever whirling, nebulous mists of personal preferences it may create and carry with it, its nucleus is purely economic.
Early marriage was made by economic advantages. It was destroyed by economic changes. 24 It will not be restored except by economic adjustments.
“Nevertheless,” said Mary, “I want John.”
John had finished being engineer for the electric railway company.
Out of his two years’ experience he had saved a few hundred dollars. No, he hadn’t. That isn’t probable. The way he made his start into the next phase of his career was not by having any ready money. Having ready money is far from being characteristic of the young man of to-day.
John opened his office as a consulting electrical engineer not on his own resources but as an agent for an electrical supply company. Being agent for that company assured him enough money to pay the office rent and stenographer. For the rest, for his meals and his bed, he depended on his clients. Whom he didn’t have. But he started out to get them.
He opened his office in the city in which Mary was.
And then a strange but normal thing occurred. They spent enough money on theaters and boat rides and candy in the next three 25 months to have paid the rent on a flat. It is true John’s net income was too small and uncertain to have justified the founding of a family. But it was also true that they spent every cent they had. The celibate life is an extravagant life. One of the innumerable sources of modern extravagance is found just there.
Mary reflected on it. She didn’t like it. And she began to see other things she didn’t like in this protraction of the period of singleness.
Her work for the Bureau of Labor had taken her into many places, among all sorts of women. She began to observe the irregular living which is inevitably associated with a system of late marriages.
Mr. Lester F. Ward has learnedly and elaborately informed us that if we go back to the origin of life on this planet we shall find that the female was the only sex then existent, being original life itself, reproducing itself by division of itself, and that the male was created as an afterthought of nature’s for the purpose of introducing greater variation into the development of living things. The male, to begin with, 26 had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a sex-thing.
Whether this biological theory stands or falls, it is certain that it squares with the present character of the sexes. The sex which originated as a sex-thing remains the more actively sexed.
There was once a very good sociologist called Robert Louis Stevenson who made many researches into the psychology of the human race. While on his “Inland Voyage” he observed in this matter that “it is no use for a man to take to the woods; we know him; Anthony tried the same thing long ago and had a pitiful time of it by all accounts. But there is this about some women, that they suffice to themselves and can walk in a high and cold zone without the countenance of any trousered being.”
The celibate life is more possible for most of them by nature. If it were not for that fact, the postponement of marriage would by this time have demolished the ethical code.
Even as things stand, Mary was quite willing to admit, when she saw it, that there are two kinds of women greatly increasing in modern 27 days. Both have always existed, but now they are increasing very rapidly and in parallel lines of corresponding development.
In one column is the enormous army of young women who remain unmarried till twenty-five, till thirty, till thirty-five. Even at that last age, and beyond it, in a well-developed city like, say, Providence, R.I., in the age period from thirty-five to forty-five, twenty out of every hundred women are still single.
In the other column is the enormous army of young women who, outside of the marriage relation altogether, lead a professional sex life, venal, furtive, ignoble, and debasing; an army which has existed since the beginning of time but which every postponement of the age of marriage causes to increase in relative numbers and to gain new strength for poisoning the blood of life.
Love, denied at the front door, flies in by the cellar window. Angel or bat, it is always with us. Our only choice is between its guises.
Mary looked at the army of women celibates in offices and in stores and in their apartments and in their boarding houses, women celibates 28 five and ten and fifteen and twenty years into the period when nature has by irrepealable edict ordained love. It was surely unnatural, for the mass of them. They were not vowed nuns. They were not devoted to any great cause. They were just ordinary, normal young women, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands