BERTH RATES OF COEDUCATIONAL GRADUATES 389 



This finding of normal marriage rates among men educated with women 

 during the significant period near the age of twenty seems of the very great- 

 est importance provided it is found also in western coeducational colleges. 

 I doubt that it will be. Eastern coeducational colleges draw men with 

 difficulty and those they get are perhaps of a selected type: namely, those 

 only who have no antipathy to women. Naturally, such men marry freely. 

 A study 3 of this matter is urgently needed in western state universities. 

 For in that region boys with antipathy to women or to marriage are yet 

 obliged for reasons of convenience and economy to select a coeducational 

 institution. Does marriage capture them too in large numbers, antipathy 

 and all? // so, coeducation will become of interest to eugenists as a con- 

 structive force. 



Marriage among my coeducational women, while distinctly better than 

 in women's colleges, 4 compares poorly with the general population. In 

 the United States 92 per cent of the women aged 45 to 65 are on a given day 

 (1920) living in wedlock, while only 65 per cent of our surviving women 

 (table 1) have been married or widowed or divorced. 



EFFECT OF 1893 DEPRESSION 



From 1873 on, the women (629 in number) taken decade by decade, 

 have one-third of them remained single with the following exception: Among 

 those graduating just before the crash of '92-'93 and for nine long years 

 following, spinsterhood rose to about 40 per cent, which is the norm all 

 the time at most women's colleges. And at Mount Holyoke and California 

 a similar extra bulge followed the great depression of '93 and single blessed- 

 ness rose to 48 per cent. 5 It is also found that the men's marriages in the 

 nine classes nearest the depression of the nineties produced only 1.9 children 

 per marriage, while the eight later classes produced 2.2 although they are 

 not yet complete. No such influence (from the crisis?) was observable in 

 the women 's marriages. This conforms to the observation that men marry 

 anyhow and then economize on children, while college women marry only 

 if everything appears really propitious. 



3 Such a study will be difficult to make because state financed institutions may not keep 

 life histories of their graduates with the care used by privately endowed institutions, to 

 whom every graduate is a "prospect" of financial hope. My study of Stanford men, soon 

 to be published, shows them highly married. 



4 For the classes 1896 to 1919, 67 per cent as against only 56 per cent for the same 

 Barnard classes in their 1930 Alumni Register. And see also Huntington and Whitney, 

 Builders of America (1927), pp. 44, 334-5. 



8 Ibid. My study of University of California. 



