Part 22 (1/2)

Remembering what a selected group of young women go to college, the eugenist can hardly help suspecting that the women's colleges of the United States, as at present conducted, are from his point of view doing great harm to the race. This suspicion becomes a certainty, as one investigation after another shows the same results. Statistics compiled on marriages among college women (1901) showed that:

45% of college women marry before the age of 40.

90% of all United States women marry before the age of 40.

96% of Arkansas women marry before the age of 40.

80% of Ma.s.sachusetts women marry before the age of 40.

In Ma.s.sachusetts, it is further to be noted, 30% of all women have married at the age when college women are just graduating.

It has, moreover, been demonstrated that the women who belong to Phi Beta Kappa and other honor societies, and therefore represent a second selection from an already selected cla.s.s, have a lower marriage rate than college women in general.

In reply to such facts, the eugenist is often told that the college graduates marry as often and as early as the other members of their families. We are comparing conditions that can not properly be compared, we are informed, when we match the college woman's marriage rate with that of a non-college woman who comes from a lower level of society.

But the facts will not bear out this apology. Miss M. R. Smith's statistics[106] from the data of the Collegiate Alumnae show the true situation. The average age at marriage was found to be for

_Years_ College women 26.3 Their sisters 24.2 Their cousins 24.7 Their friends 24.2

and the age distribution of those married was as follows:

_Equivalent_ _Percentage of married_ _College_ _non-college_ Under 23 years 8.6 30.1 23-32 years 83.2 64.9 33 and over 8.0 5.0

[Ill.u.s.tration: Wellesley Graduates and Non-graduates

FIG. 36.--Graph showing at a glance the record of the student body in regard to marriage and birth rates, during the years indicated.

Statistics for the latest years have not been compiled, because it is obvious that girls who graduated during the last fifteen years still have a chance to marry and become mothers.]

If these differences did not bring about any change in the birth-rate, they could be neglected. A slight sacrifice might even be made, for the sake of having mothers better prepared. But taken in connection with the birth-rate figures which we shall present in the next chapter, they form a serious indictment against the women's colleges of the United States.

Such conditions are not wholly confined to women's colleges, or to any one geographical area. Miss Helen D. Murphey has compiled the statistics for Was.h.i.+ngton Seminary, in Was.h.i.+ngton, Pennsylvania, a secondary school for women, founded in 1837. The marriage rate among the graduates of this inst.i.tution has steadily declined, as is shown in the following table where the records are considered by decades:

'45 '55 '65 '75 '85 '95 '00 Per cent. married 78 74 67 72 59 57 55 Per cent. who have gone into 20 13 12 19 30 30 39 other occupations than home-making

A graph, plotted to show how soon after graduation these girls have married, demonstrates that the greatest number of them wed five or six years after receiving their diplomas, but that the number of those marrying 10 years afterward is not very much less than that of the girls who become brides in the first or second year after graduation (see Fig.

35).

C. S. Castle's investigation[107] of the ages at which eminent women of various periods have married, is interesting in this connection, in spite of the small number of individuals with which it deals:

_Century_ _Average age_ _Range_ _Number of cases_ 12 16.2 8-30 5 13 16.6 12-29 5 14 13.8 6-18 11 15 17.6 13-26 20 16 21.7 12-50 28 17 20.0 13-43 30 18 23.1 13-53 127 19 26.2 15-67 189

Women in coeducational colleges, particularly the great universities of the west, can not be compared without corrections with the women of the eastern separate colleges, because they represent different family and environmental selection. Their record none the less deserves careful study. Miss s.h.i.+nn[108] calculated the marriage rate of college women as follows, a.s.suming graduation at the age of 22:

_Women over_ _Coeducated_ _Separate_ 25 38.1 29.6 30 49.1 40.1 35 53.6 46.6 40 56.9 51.8

She has shown that only a part of this discrepancy is attributable to the geographic difference, some of it is the effect of lack of co-education. Some of it is also attributable to the type of education.

The marriage rate of women graduates of Iowa State College[109] is as follows:

1872-81 95.8 1882-91 62.5 1892-01 71.2 1902-06 69.0

Study of the alumni register of Oberlin,[110] one of the oldest coeducational inst.i.tutions, shows that the marriage rate of women graduates, 1884-1905, was 65.2%, only 34.8% of them remaining unmarried.