THE YOUNG MOTHER 



Alexander Graham Bell's Investigation Shows Her Age Has a Marked Effect on 



the Vitality of Her Children Infant Mortality Increases Steadily as the 



Mother Grows Older—From This Point of View Girls Ought not to 



Delay Marriage beyond the Age of Twenty-five 



THERE is a growine tendencv 

 among women of the most intel- 

 lectual type to postpone the age 

 of marriage and motherhood. 

 Whereas most women marry between 

 20 and 25, graduates of women's 

 colleges most frequently marry between 

 25 and 30. Miss M. R. Smith calcu- 

 lated^ the average age at which college 

 alumnae wed, as 26.3 years. This 

 means that to offset the considerable 

 number who marry as soon as they 

 graduate, there are many who do not 

 marry until the age of 30 or after. 



Feminists without adequate scientific 

 training have attempted to justify 

 this course, and have tried to create an 

 impression that the children of young 

 mothers are in some way inferior, while 

 the best children are those hern to 

 women who have reached a certain 

 maturity. In much of the recent 

 periodical literature due to radical 

 feminists, there is a tendency to suggest, 

 if not to declare, that it is to the advan- 

 tage of both mother and child that 

 women should not undertake the duties 

 of maternity too early. 



Age of 



mother 



when child 



was born 



15-19 



20-24 



2.S-20 



3()-34 



3.S-39 



40 and 



upward 



274 



Total 2,384 



88 

 564 



321 



Whether or not there are social reasons 

 that make late marriage desirable for 

 girls, will not here be discussed. But 

 as for biology, every eugenist knows of 

 the abimdant proof that relatively early 

 marriage is beneficial both to mother 

 and to child. 2 One of the proofs is 

 furnished by a study of infant mortality 

 in relation to age of mother. 



INFLUENCE OF MOTHER'S AGE 



Those children show the greatest vital- 

 ity who were born to mothers between 

 the ages of twenty and twenty-five. 

 Children l)orn after the latter age are 

 increasingly penalized. The total of 

 2,386 is erroneous; it should be read 

 2,384. (Fig. 7.) 



Alexander Graham Bell has recently 

 completed an investigation of the lon- 

 gevity of members of the Hyde family in 

 the United States.^ They represent 

 an intelligent, prosperous, old American 

 stock ; most of the births in the genealogv 

 fall between 1750 and 1825. Table I 

 and Fig. 7 ^show the child mortality and 

 the age of mother when the child was 

 bom. In general, it is evident that 

 a child's chance to survive the diseases 



^Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association, March-June, 1900. Miss 

 Smith noted that marriages unflcr twenty-one were becoming more frequent among noncollcge 

 women, while marriages after thirty-four were growing in number among college graduates. 



* A large amount of evidence from European sources was ]jublishcd liy Corrado Gini in 

 Vol. ii of Problems in Eugenics (London, 1913). 



» These rlata arc published in Vol. ix of the Beiti^i Bhreagh Recorder, a copy of which is on 

 file at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington. 



394 



