Marriage and the Labor Market
By M. Carey Thomas
Recent investigations of the after lives of college women and of their sisters who have not been to college have shown us that only about one-half of the daughters of men of the professional business classes who do not inherit independent fortunes can look forward to marriage. Statistics seem to prove that only fifty per cent. of the women of these classes marry. What are the other fifty per cent. to do except work or starve? Most women of independent means marry because their inherited fortunes enable them to contribute to the support of the family. Women of the working classes marry because they too, can help by their labor to support the family. It is only the dowerless women who are prevented by social usage from engaging in paid work outside the home, or in manual labor inside the home, after marriage, who remain unmarried. All other women are married and at work.
Is it well for the great middle classes of our civilized nations that is, for the classes that are not very poor or very rich, to contain these ever increasing number of celibate men and women? To such a question there can be only one reply. If it is ill, as we all admit, why do we not encourage the women of these middle classes to work and marry like the women of the poorer classes who are practically all married? Why in England and Germany and the United States are there these thousands upon thousands of unmarried women teachers, a celibate class like the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages, and like them an ever present menace to the welfare of the state? Why in Italy, on the other hand, are so many of the women public school teachers married? Because in Germany and England and the United States women teachers lose their positions when they marry, and marry and starve they cannot. Because in Italy women teachers are allowed to marry and teach. Is it inconceivable that the state of the future in which women as well as men will vote will deprive women of bread because they wish to marry?