Of all women who do marry, about fifty-six per cent are married by their twenty-fifth birthday, about eighty-four per cent by their thirtieth birthday and about ninety-five per cent by their thirty-fifth birthday. After thirty-five a woman has to get busy if she wants to marry!
Thirty-five is when an unmarried woman can no longer consider herself a “young maid.”
The marriage prospects for girls today would not be quite so unfavorable if our men would all seek mates. As it is, with from ten to fifteen per cent preferring to remain single, at least a million girls will not have an opportunity to marry. As far as we can gather the reason behind this masculine perversity is that boys, unlike girls, are not indoctrinated with the idea that marriage should be one of their big goals in life.
But why, you may ask, are there more eligible girls than men in America? The imbalance caused by the war is not the only reason. Here are some other reasons for the shortage of males that looms:
—Men die younger than women. The “weaker sex” is actually the tougher sex when it comes to reaching a ripe old age.
—Our male surplus of immigrants has been about used up. Immigration is a form of pioneering and has been considered primarily a task of man. When the flow of immigrants was heavy it accounted for many thousands of our male surplus. Now the flow has dwindled to a trickle.
—America is no longer a “young” nation. And of course the older our population becomes, the more feminine it becomes for the reasons mentioned above. There are still more boy babies born in America than girl babies (about 105 boys per hundred girls) but because the males die faster—both by natural causes and by accidents—the males slip into the minority now after the age of twenty-five.
War affects marriage in very peculiar ways. During the initial phase of World War II, marriages increased at a spectacular rate. This probably was due to the increasing prosperity (prosperity increases both marriages and divorces!) and by the psychological incentives to mate as a result of war. These include not only the impulses to elude the draft, but the yearning of a boy to keep some visible contact with home and the yearning of the girl to have some concrete commitment from a man when so many of them were leaving the community to go to war.
By 1942, 1,800,000 marriages took place in the country, the highest number in history. Then the rate started dropping off as men became more scarce, so that by 1944 the number of marriages was only 1,440,000. In 1945 the trend was changing. Judging from events after World War I, the postwar years will see a spurt in marriages that may take the rate to nearly two million a year for a couple of years. But that won’t change the fact that a good many girls still will not have a chance to marry.
But even if you do marry, what are the chances you will get a mate you like?