The conditions existing at Stanford are likewise found at Syracuse, on the opposite side of the continent. Here, as H. J. Banker has shown,[113] the men graduates marry most frequently 4.5 years after taking their degrees, and the women 4.7 years. Of the women 57% marry, of the men 81%. The women marry at the average age of 27.7 years and the men at 28.8. Less than one-fourth of the marrying men married women within the college. The last five decades he studied show a steady decrease in the number of women graduates who marry, while the men are much more constant. His figures are:
| Decade | Per cent of men graduates married | Per cent of women graduates married |
|---|---|---|
| 1852-61 | 81 | 87 |
| 1862-71 | 87 | 87 |
| 1872-81 | 90 | 81 |
| 1882-91 | 84 | 55 |
| 1892-01 | 73 | 48 |
C. B. Davenport, looking at the record of his own classmates at Harvard, found[114] in 1909 that among the 328 original members there were 287 surviving, of whom nearly a third (31%) had never married.
"Of these (287)," he continues, "26 were in 'Who's Who in America?' We should expect, were success in professional life promoted by bachelorship, to find something over a third of those in Who's Who to be unmarried. Actually all but two, or less than 8%, were married, and one of these has since married. The only still unmarried man was a temporary member of the class and is an artist who has resided for a large part of the time in Europe. There is, therefore, no reason to believe that bachelorship favors professional success."
Particularly pernicious in tending to prevent marriage is the influence of certain professional schools, some of which have come to require a college degree for entrance. In such a case the aspiring physician, for example, can hardly hope to obtain a license to practice until he has reached the age of 27 since 4 years are required in Medical College and 1 year in a hospital. His marriage must in almost every case be postponed until a number of years after that of the young men of his own class who have followed business careers.
This brief survey is enough to prove that the best educated young women (and to a less extent young men) of the United States, who for many reasons may be considered superior, are in many cases avoiding marriage altogether, and in other cases postponing it longer than is desirable. The women in the separate colleges of the East have the worst record in this respect, but that of the women graduates of some of the coeducational schools leaves much to be desired.
It is difficult to separate the causes which result in a postponement of marriage, from those that result in a total avoidance of marriage. To a large extent the causes are the same, and the result differs only in degree. The effect of absolute celibacy of superior people, from a eugenic point of view, is of course obvious to all, but the racial effect of postponement of marriage, even for a few years, is not always so clearly realized. The diagram in Fig. 36 may give a clearer appreciation of this situation.
Francis Galton clearly perceived the importance of this point, and attempted in several ways to arrive at a just idea of it. One of the most striking of his investigations is based on Dr. Duncan's statistics from a maternity hospital. Dividing the mothers into five-year groups, according to their age, and stating the median age of the group for the sake of simplicity, instead of giving the limits, he arrived at the following table:
| Age of mother at her marriage | Approximate average fertility |
|---|---|
| 17 | 9.00—6 × 1.5 |
| 22 | 7.50—5 × 1.5 |
| 27 | 6.00—4 × 1.5 |
| 32 | 4.50—3 × 1.5 |