The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.
Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is irrelevantly extreme. But aren"t there thousands and thousands of cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction?
The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her.
How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist who has had twelve?
The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart, isn"t she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain level. Except in response to a _grande pa.s.sion_ she will not again drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to her present level as she can. That is instinct.
Meanwhile, she isn"t married. But what can you do about it? She went to work, like almost every other working woman, because she had to.
And you can"t pa.s.s a law prohibiting her from earning more than five dollars a week.
"It"s all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much reason for thinking so.
Did you ever see Meitzen"s diagram showing the relation between the price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of twenty-five years?
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 1,000 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 s.e.x?
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 1,000, 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 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.
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 cla.s.s of people that miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-two. But belong to the cla.s.s 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 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 Ma.s.sachusetts, 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 surpa.s.s 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. 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 a.s.sured 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 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 a.s.sociated 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 s.e.x 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, had only one function. That was to be a male. He was purely a s.e.x-thing.