Johnson: Marriage Selection 



105 



see^ that the marriag;e rate has de- 

 dined. The drop in the '60s is due to 

 the Civil War. You will also notice 

 that the percentage engaged in 

 occupations other than housewifery 

 has increased progressively. It is 

 not clear which of these occurrences is 

 causal. 



BIRTH RATE ALSO LOW. 



The ominousneess of this declining 

 marriage rate is aggravated by the 

 low birth rate which these same women 

 are found to contribute. Now com- 

 bining these results to get the birth 

 rate of the graduates as a whole, we 

 have a most discouraging result.^ No- 

 tice that only the earliest classes, with 

 one or two exceptions, have enough 

 children to reproduce the class. And 

 this is not a college, and is not in New 

 England, but in the same small city as 

 Washington and Jefferson College, a 

 much larger institution for men. If 

 then under these favorable conditions, 

 the marriage rate is so low, and marriage 

 is so late,^ we may infer that the low 

 rate is widespread. 



Let us now examine some of the re- 

 sults thus far attained in a study of 

 Wellesley College data, made by my 

 student. Miss Bertha Stutzmann. 



Taking the Wellesley graduates of 



the classes 1905 to 1912 inclusive, it 

 was found that 19.1 per cent, of them 

 were already married in the fall of 1912, 

 when the facts were collected. But for 

 graduates whose scholarship was suffi- 

 ciently high to entitle them to member- 

 ship in the honor society. Phi Beta 

 Kappa, the ratio of marriage to that of 

 those who did not make this society 

 was as 15 to 19. In other words, high 

 scholarship in college women is (in this 

 case at least) not found to be an aid to 

 marriage, while in the normal school 

 girls the opposite was the case.'* It 

 seems fair to assume that intellectuality 

 in women is normally attractive to men, 

 if these women do not neglect their 

 social opportunities. 



We see from this that the Wellesley 

 alirmnae have a very low marriage and 

 birth rate. There is only one mitigat- 

 ing circumstance, that these women 

 have married superior men. Out of 

 the last 15 recently reported engage- 

 ments which I noted, seven are to 

 college or university alumni, although 

 college graduates make up but about 

 1% of the whole population. 



That college women are superior to 

 the average woman is a safe inference. 

 However, we may use another criterion 

 of superiority. Eminence may be meas- 

 ured by space in collective biographies. 



iThe relation between the decline of the marriage rate and the number of women entering 

 professions is shown by the following figures taken at five year intervals, where A represents 

 the percentage married and B the percentage who have gone into some occupation other than 

 home-making : 



^The figures, summed at periods of five years, are as follows, when A represents the years 

 in which the women graduated, B the total number of graduates, C the total number of their 

 children and D the number of children per graduate : 



^A graph plotted to elucidate this point shows that a large majority of the women marry 

 four or five years after graduation, but the number of those marrying after 10 years is not very 

 much less than that of the girls who become brides in the first or second year after graduation. 



^In this same tabulation, it was found that the alumnae of Wellesley College who were 

 members of Phi Beta Kappa had an average of .065 of a child, each, while the rate for the girls 

 who had not attained similar distinction in scholarship was .085. 



