Looking at the country as a whole, some towns and sections offer better marriage prospects than others. This is a little known fact. For example, the cities of New England offer the poorest possibilities for young women to marry of any section of the country. This is mainly because the textile industries in that area attract so many more women than men. Of the thirty United States cities offering the poorest opportunities for marriage for women, twenty-two are in New England. And of the thirty offering the best opportunities for women, about half are in Michigan, Ohio and Northern Indiana, where the automotive industries—which attract far more men than women—are located.
It is interesting to note that during World War II the marriage rate increased very rapidly in areas with new war industries requiring a great number of men—shipbuilding, aircraft, metal working. In Baltimore, the marriage rate went up nearly forty per cent; in Hartford, important in aviation, it went up twenty-five per cent.
Areas that consistently favor girls by providing a surplus of eligible men are the Far West and the Southwest, particularly Texas. The Deep South is much less favorable.
Where does your state stand on the ratio of eligible men to eligible women? The typical American male marries at about twenty-five and a half and the typical female at twenty-two and a half, or about three years earlier. Thus perhaps the fairest comparison would be to take the single men between twenty-three and twenty-eight and the single women between twenty and twenty-five. The following table shows how each state rates in such a comparison. It is based on the 1940 census.
NUMBER OF SINGLE WHITE MALES 23-28 YEARS OLD FOR EACH 100 SINGLE WHITE FEMALES 20-25 YEARS OLD
| Nevada | 177.21 | Indiana | 97.96 |
| Wyoming | 164.66 | Georgia | 97.56 |
| Idaho | 130.61 | Illinois | 95.42 |
| California | 128.01 | Minnesota | 95.41 |
| Arizona | 127.09 | Delaware | 94.29 |
| Montana | 125.49 | Missouri | 94.28 |
| Washington | 121.78 | Mississippi | 94.20 |
| Dist. of Col. | 119.20 | Maine | 93.20 |
| Oregon | 116.82 | Alabama | 93.17 |
| New Mexico | 113.19 | Iowa | 91.83 |
| Florida | 111.39 | New Jersey | 91.12 |
| Texas | 109.17 | Ohio | 90.92 |
| Vermont | 107.50 | New York | 90.46 |
| Virginia | 106.64 | Pennsylvania | 90.17 |
| Maryland | 106.18 | Tennessee | 90.03 |
| North Dakota | 105.76 | Nebraska | 89.56 |
| Colorado | 102.59 | Utah | 89.23 |
| Michigan | 101.68 | New Hampshire | 89.14 |
| Louisiana | 101.61 | Kansas | 88.66 |
| Kentucky | 100.98 | Connecticut | 88.57 |
| Wisconsin | 100.82 | South Carolina | 87.55 |
| Arkansas | 99.24 | North Carolina | 86.35 |
| West Virginia | 99.12 | Massachusetts | 83.25 |
| South Dakota | 98.32 | Rhode Island | 82.61 |
| Oklahoma | 97.99 |
Nevada leads the list as the paradise for girls since there are 177 men there for each 100 girls. At the other end of the scale Rhode Island is over-populated with females (due to its many textile mills) and so is an unpromising place for girls to find a mate but a fine place for men. There are one hundred girls for every eighty-three men.
Notice that all of the first nine states offering the best possibilities for girls are in the West, and that the five most favorable states for men are in the East. Perhaps the old slogan “Go West, young man, go West” might be revised to read “Go East, young man; go West, young woman.”
There is another age range that needs consideration. That is, the groups who have not married by the time most people marry. These groups are the men between thirty and thirty-five and girls between twenty-five and thirty. Both these groups need to get busy because they face a very definite possibility of becoming crusty old bachelors or disgruntled spinsters. Since men past thirty tend to marry women who are more than three years younger than themselves it might be valid to compare the number of girls twenty-five to thirty to the men thirty to thirty-five. Here again the West is the great land of opportunity for girls while the Carolinas and the New England textile states are still less inviting to girls. One interesting thing is that in the Southern states of Kentucky, Virginia and Louisiana a girl’s ratio is pretty favorable up to twenty-five years but after that they become definitely not good places to find a husband.
If we take all single men as a whole and compare them to the single women, without regard to age, here is how the states seem to shape up: