The Marriage Market

To use the term "market" in connection with marriage may suggest something sordid. Perhaps here lies our first exercise in realism. The term is used to analyze certain aspects of marriage; it is helpful in our intellectual understanding of the situation. Let us fear nothing which helps toward understanding. Why should it make our feeling toward marriage any less refined or delectable than it was before? To analyze a rose into carbon and water does not by one jot or one tittle change the quality of roses nor their power to beautify and enrich human life.

Marriage involves a market as does every other human process where there is a free seeking and choosing, by multitudes of individuals, of good things which are limited in quantity. There is demand and there is supply, whether we look at it from the standpoint of men or of women. The individual who falls in love and marries may feel that this course of events is something unique and personal, which was predestined to happen to him and his partner. Yet in sober reality, the romance and marriage of this young couple were governed by the social circumstances and conditions surrounding them. If the young man had lived in a different community where there were fewer girls and more boys, someone else might have taken his beloved before he had a chance to know of her existence.

It will be helpful to bear in mind certain general facts about the marriage market in the United States. About 80 per cent of both men and women marry eventually, that is, if they live to be fifty-five or more. In the case of women, all but two or three per cent of those who will ever marry have done so by the age of thirty-five; in the case of men a somewhat larger proportion wait until after that age. If the man is in the early twenties, the average tendency is for him to marry a girl about three years younger than himself; the average groom of thirty-five takes a bride six or seven years younger. Because of the usually greater age of men when they marry and the fact that women on the average outlive men by two or three years, there are many more widows than there are widowers. Young men of the professional classes marry on the average at twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age, while those of the laboring and farming classes tend to marry at twenty-five or less.

Just as we need today a greater appreciation of individual differences, so we need also to give more attention to the differences which exist among places, social classes, groups, and situations. These differences are more important than averages and "totals." If there is an average human being, he is a very rare one. If there is an average situation or community, few persons are blessed by living in it.

One of the most important irregularities in the marriage market is the geographically and socially uneven distribution of the two sexes. The number of boys born is very slightly greater than that of girls. While Nature provides a partner for almost everyone, human beings do not stay where Nature puts them. Migration removes adolescent girls from the farm to the village or small city more than it does boys. But it also takes men and boys to the West, to large cities and to industrial communities. The farms, the large cities, metal-working industrial cities, and the West tend toward excess of males; suburbs, small cities, textile cities, and the South and New England tend toward excess of females. In wealthy suburbs there are only three single men to four single women, whereas in industrial suburbs there are four single men to three single women. In New England the sex ratio of the approximately total marriageable population (i.e., single, widowed, and divorced persons aged fifteen and over) is 89, in the Pacific states it is 125.

No one knows how much our marriage rate is cut by these local irregularities in the distribution of the sexes, but it is certainly a factor of considerable moment. In the industrial suburbs as in the working class areas of large cities and in the West generally, it is the men who must compete vigorously for partners; the women are in the favored position, being fewer in number. In prosperous residential suburbs and among the more educated classes women must compete for men. This is a very rough picture of the situation, because the real competition is based not merely on the sex ratio of the whole population, or of the unmarried adult population, but more particularly upon the sex ratio within specific social horizons. Many of the excess males in the larger cities are itinerant workers or foreign-born, who would not normally be accepted in marriage by most of the resident women. In such cities there may be an actual shortage of men in the class within which the native American women, for example, would be willing to marry.

In some cases the young person may decide that his major life objectives will best be served either by moving to another locality, or by deliberately crossing social boundaries in his acquaintance with the opposite sex. If he is an attractive and popular person who feels no worry about his own marriage prospects, he will become a still more worth while person if he is informed and intelligent about this situation which concerns his fellows.

Puzzling as it may seem, women are more affected than men by the sex ratio of their community. A certain irreducible percentage of men seem to remain bachelors anyway regardless of the sex ratio. They do not marry even when there is a surplus of women from which to choose. It is probable that these men remain bachelors either for financial or personality reasons and that many of them should so remain. On the other hand, when the men are in great preponderance in a community, almost every woman marries, there is no great residuum of spinsters. Thus if we examine the population of about forty years of age of the wealthy suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts, and the western industrial city of Pueblo, Colorado, we find that the percentage of men who remain single at this age is about 18 in both communities. On the other hand, the women of this age are 33 per cent single in Brookline, which has a huge excess of women, and only 9 per cent single in Pueblo, which has a large excess of men. Since women are more affected by the surplus or deficiency of men than the men are affected by a surplus or deficiency of women, it would seem that the woman's fate in the marriage market is relatively more a matter of opportunity or circumstance and less a matter of her own personality or personal competence. This means that there are probably many married women who are not well fitted for marriage, and many unmarried women who would make admirable wives. The same statement would not be true to so great a degree about men. It also follows from these facts that there are probably more frustrations among women than men because of wanting to be married and not succeeding. These are further intensified by the fact that men are still more free than women to secure a substitute for one aspect of married life, the sexual.

In general, then, it would seem that the marriage market presents a greater problem to women than to men. While women may take the initiative in attacking the problem, they need to secure the more intelligent cooperation of men.