A popular song had this refrain: “He may be old, but he’s got young ideas.” That appealed to popular fancy because it caught the subconscious mind, which probably knew what the census now reports:
That marriages of persons beyond fifty years of age are steadily increasing in numbers, already being frequent. Out of 100 American men and women, 80 are married before they reach 45, while 10 take the leap afterward and 10 remain single.
Divorces among those who have passed 45 are also becoming more common. This, however, is not making us a cynical people, for the census finds that the majority of divorced people try marriage at least a second time, many making three or four ventures.
Figures—which never lie, though liars often figure—show that the span of life is lengthening during the Jazz Age.
The strain at times gets on our nerves. Frequently one of the contestants howls and goes to pieces. But, on the average, the real effects of the Jazz Age will not show up until our descendants of one hundred years or more hence.
* * *
They Named the Soap After Him
In Dr. W. A. Evans’ column in the Minneapolis Journal, “A. G. M.” writes, under the heading of the Artistic Sex:
“I have a son, seventeen years old, who is and has been for ten years, obsessed with a strange desire. He wants and feels that he ought to be a girl. Ever since he was seven years old, and probably before, although I had never noticed it, he has thought of himself as a girl, acted like one, desired to be regarded as a girl, and has, whenever he could worn girls’ clothing.
“His mother and I had a terrific struggle to allow his hair to be cut like a boys’, when he was six or seven years old. He withstood us until he was nearly ten, when, for the sake of peace, he consented to have it bobbed. Up to that time he had worn it in a great mass of curls, away down over his shoulders, regardless of the ridicule of his playmates. He wore his hair bobbed until two years ago, when he finally had it cut after a fashion similar to other boys. This is just one incident, but it may serve to show you something of his frame of mind.