The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:
Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.
Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under thirty-five years of age are, in each 1,000, only 428.
In the South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A difference of 115!
Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of Mexico than along the Atlantic Coast? One hundred and fifteen more out of every 21 thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in relative human virtue.
You can’t escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your vicinity.
Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you’re thirteen, if you’re a girl, they’ll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride. Which you will be in a day or two.
Live in Russia, and if you’re a girl you’ll get married before you’re twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It’s the most primitive of civilized countries. It’s halfway between Africa and, say, Rhode Island.
These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly developing industrial region like Rhode Island.
In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before they were twenty were twenty-one in every hundred.