Fig. 36.—Graph showing at a glance the record of the student body in regard to marriage and birth rates, during the years indicated. Statistics for the latest years have not been compiled, because it is obvious that girls who graduated during the last fifteen years still have a chance to marry and become mothers.
If these differences did not bring about any change in the birth-rate, they could be neglected. A slight sacrifice might even be made, for the sake of having mothers better prepared. But taken in connection with the birth-rate figures which we shall present in the next chapter, they form a serious indictment against the women's colleges of the United States.
Such conditions are not wholly confined to women's colleges, or to any one geographical area. Miss Helen D. Murphey has compiled the statistics for Washington Seminary, in Washington, Pennsylvania, a secondary school for women, founded in 1837. The marriage rate among the graduates of this institution has steadily declined, as is shown in the following table where the records are considered by decades:
| '45 | '55 | '65 | '75 | '85 | '95 | '00 | |
| Per cent. married | 78 | 74 | 67 | 72 | 59 | 57 | 55 |
| Per cent. who have gone into other occupations than home-making | 20 | 13 | 12 | 19 | 30 | 30 | 39 |
A graph, plotted to show how soon after graduation these girls have married, demonstrates that the greatest number of them wed five or six years after receiving their diplomas, but that the number of those marrying 10 years afterward is not very much less than that of the girls who become brides in the first or second year after graduation (see Fig. 35).
C. S. Castle's investigation[107] of the ages at which eminent women of various periods have married, is interesting in this connection, in spite of the small number of individuals with which it deals:
| Century | Average age | Range | Number of cases |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 16.2 | 8-30 | 5 |
| 13 | 16.6 | 12-29 | 5 |
| 14 | 13.8 | 6-18 | 11 |
| 15 | 17.6 | 13-26 | 20 |
| 16 | 21.7 | 12-50 | 28 |
| 17 | 20.0 | 13-43 | 30 |
| 18 | 23.1 | 13-53 | 127 |
| 19 | 26.2 | 15-67 | 189 |
Women in coeducational colleges, particularly the great universities of the west, can not be compared without corrections with the women of the eastern separate colleges, because they represent different family and environmental selection. Their record none the less deserves careful study. Miss Shinn[108] calculated the marriage rate of college women as follows, assuming graduation at the age of 22:
| Women over | Coeducated | Separate |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | 38.1 | 29.6 |
| 30 | 49.1 | 40.1 |
| 35 | 53.6 | 46.6 |
| 40 | 56.9 | 51.8 |