It was in the United States as a whole that the census man found 275 out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and of undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development. Look at the cities:
In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age-period from twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.
Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.
In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period, the 48 unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In Boston they were 452.
Therefore:
If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably grievous wrong.
But how is their singleness occupied?
We all know now that to a greater and greater degree it is getting occupied with work, money-earning work.
The unmarried women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period constitute more than one-fourth of the total number of women in that age-period in the United States. In the large cities they constitute usually more than one-third of the total number of women in that period. Wouldn’t it have been remarkable if their families had been able to support them all at home? Wouldn’t it have been remarkable if the human race had been able to carry so large a part of itself on its back?
We now admit the world’s need of the labor-power of women. If women aren’t laboring at 49 home (at cooking, laundering, nursing, mothering, something), they will be (or ought to be) laboring elsewhere.