Wellesley Graduates and Non-graduatesWellesley Graduates and Non-graduates
If these differences did not bring about any change in the birth-rate, they could be neglected. A slight sacrifice might even be made, for the sake of having mothers better prepared. But taken in connection with the birth-rate figures which we shall present in the next chapter, they form a serious indictment against the women's colleges of the United States.
Such conditions are not wholly confined to women's colleges, or to any one geographical area. Miss Helen D. Murphey has compiled the statistics for Washington Seminary, in Washington, Pennsylvania, a secondary school for women, founded in 1837. The marriage rate among the graduates of this institution has steadily declined, as is shown in the following table where the records are considered by decades:
A graph, plotted to show how soon after graduation these girls have married, demonstrates that the greatest number of them wed five or six years after receiving their diplomas, but that the number of those marrying 10 years afterward is not very much less than that of the girls who become brides in the first or second year after graduation (see Fig. 35).
C. S. Castle's investigation[107]of the ages at which eminent women of various periods have married, is interesting in this connection, in spite of the small number of individuals with which it deals:
Women in coeducational colleges, particularly the great universities of the west, can not be compared without corrections with the women of the eastern separate colleges, because they represent different family and environmental selection. Their record none the less deserves careful study. Miss Shinn[108]calculated the marriage rate of college women as follows, assuming graduation at the age of 22:
She has shown that only a part of this discrepancy is attributable to the geographic difference, some of it is the effect of lack of co-education. Some of it is also attributable to the type of education.
The marriage rate of women graduates of Iowa State College[109]is as follows:
Study of the alumni register of Oberlin,[110]one of the oldest coeducational institutions, shows that the marriage rate of women graduates, 1884-1905, was 65.2%, only 34.8% of them remaining unmarried. If the later period, 1890-1905, alone is taken, only 55.2% of the girls have married. The figures for the last few classes in this period are probably not complete.
At Kansas State Agricultural College, 1885-1905, 67.6% of the women graduates have married. At Ohio State University in the same period, the percentage is only 54.0. Wisconsin University, 1870-1905, shows a percentage of 51.8, the figures for the last five years of that period being:
From alumni records of the University of Illinois, 54% of the women, 1880-1905, are found to be married.
It is difficult to discuss these figures without extensive study of each case. But that only 53% of the women graduates of three great universities like Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin, should be married, 10 years after graduation, indicates that something is wrong.
In most cases it is not possible to tell, from the alumni records of the above colleges, whether the male graduates are or are not married. But the class lists of Harvard and Yale have recently been carefully studied by John C. Phillips,[111]who finds that in the period 1851-1890 74% of the Harvard graduates and 78% of the Yale graduates married. In that period, he found, the age of marriage has advanced only about 1 year, from a little over 30 to just about 31. This is a much higher rate than that of college women.
Statistics from Stanford University[112]offer an interesting comparison because they are available for both men and women. Of 670 male graduates, classes 1892 to 1900, inclusive, 490 or 73.2% were reported as married in 1910. Of 330 women, 160 or 48.5% were married. These figures are not complete, as some of the graduates in the later classes must have married since 1910.
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:
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 fora 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:
which shows that the relative fertility of mothers married at the ages of 17, 22, 27 and 32, respectively, is as 6, 5, 4, and 3 approximately.
"The increase in population by a habit of early marriages," he adds, "is further augmented by the greater rapidity with which the generations follow each other. By the joint effect of these two causes, a large effect is in time produced."
Certainly the object of eugenics is not to merely increase human numbers. Quality is more important than quantity in a birth-rate. But it must be evident that other things being equal, a group which marries early will, after a number of generations, supplant a group which marries even a few years later. And there is abundant evidence to show that some of the best elements of the old, white, American race are being rapidly eliminated from the population of America, because of postponement or avoidance of marriage.
Taking the men alone, we find that failure to marry may often be ascribed to one of the following reasons:
1. The cultivation of a taste for sexual variety and a consequent unwillingness to submit to the restraints of marriage.
2. Pessimism in regard to women from premature or unfortunate sex experiences.
3. Infection by venereal disease.
4. Deficiency in normal sexual feeling, or perversion.
5. Deficiency of one kind or another, physical or mental, causing difficulty in getting an acceptable mate.
The persons in groups 4 and 5 certainly and in groups 1, 2, and 3 probably to a less extent, are inferior, and their celibacy is an advantage to the race, rather than a disadvantage, from a eugenic point of view. Their inferiority is in part the result of bad environment. But since innate inferiority is so frequently a large factor, the bad environment often being experienced only because the nature was inferior to start with, the average of the group as a whole must be considered innately inferior.
Then there are among celibate men two other classes, largely superior by nature:
6. Those who seek some other end so ardently that they will not make the necessary sacrifice in money and freedom, in order to marry.
7. Those whose likelihood of early marriage is reduced by a prolonged education and apprenticeship. Prolongation of the celibate period often results in life-long celibacy.
Some of the most important means of remedying the above conditions, in so far as they are dysgenic, can be grouped under three general heads:
1. Try to lead all young men to avoid a loose sexual life and venereal disease. A general effort will be heeded more by the superior than by the inferior.
2. Hold up the rôle of husband and father as particularly honorable, and proclaim its shirking, without adequate cause, as dishonorable. Depict it as a happier and healthier state than celibacy or pseudo-celibacy. For a man to say he has never met a girl he can love simply means he has not diligently sought one, or else he has a deficient emotional equipment; for there are many, surprisingly many, estimable, attractive, unmarried women.
3. Cease prolonging the educational period past the early twenties. It is time to call a halt on the schools and universities, whose constant lengthening of the educational period will resultin a serious loss to the race. External circumstances of an educational nature should not be allowed to force a young man to postpone his marriage past the age of 25. This means that students must be allowed to specialize earlier. If there is need of limiting the number of candidates, competitive entrance examinations may be arranged on some rational basis. Superior young men should marry, even at some cost to their early efficiency. The high efficiency of any profession can be more safely kept up by demanding a minimum amount of continuation work in afternoon, evening, or seasonal classes, laboratories, or clinics. No more graduate fellowships should be established until those now existing carry a stipend adequate for marriage. Those which already carry larger stipends should not be limited to bachelors, as are the most valuable awards at Princeton, the ten yearly Proctor fellowships of $1,000 each.
The causes of the remarkable failure of college women to marry can not be exhaustively investigated here, but for the purposes of eugenics they may be roughly classified as unavoidable and avoidable. Under the first heading must be placed those girls who are inherently unmarriageable, either because of physical defect or, more frequently, mental defect,—most often an over-development of intellect at the expense of the emotions, which makes a girl either unattractive to men, or inclines her toward a celibate career and away from marriage and motherhood. Opinions differ as to the proportion of college girls who are inherently unmarriageable. Anyone who has been much among them will testify that a large proportion of them are not inherently unmarriageable, however, and their celibacy for the most part must be classified as avoidable. Their failure to marry may be because
(1) They desire not to marry, due to a preference for a career, or development of a cynical attitude toward men and matrimony, due to a faulty education, or
(2) They desire to marry, but do not, for a variety of reasons such as:
(a) They are educated for careers, such as school-teaching, where they have little opportunity to meet men.
(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft.
(c) They have remained in partial segregation until past the age when they are physically most attractive, and when the other girls of their age are marrying.
(d) Due to their own education, they demand on the part of suitors a higher degree of education than the young men of their acquaintance possess. A girl of this type wants to marry but desires a man who is educationally her equal or superior. As men of such type are relatively rare, her chances of marriage are reduced.
(e) Their experience in college makes them desire a standard of living higher than that of their own families or of the men among whom they were brought up. They become resistant to the suit of men who are of ordinary economic status. While waiting for the appearance of a suitor who is above the average in both intelligence and wealth, they pass the marriageable age.
(f) They are better educated than the young men of their acquaintance, and the latter are afraid of them. Some young men dislike to marry girls who know more than they do, except in the distinctively feminine fields.
These and various similar causes help to lower the marriage-rate of college women and to account for the large number of alumnæ who desire to marry but are unable to do so. In the interest of eugenics, the various difficulties must be met in appropriate ways.
Marriage is not desirable for those who are eugenically inferior, from weak constitutions, defective sexuality, or inherent mental deficiency. But beyond these groups of women are the much larger groups of celibates who are distinctly superior, and whose chances of marriage have been reduced for one of the reasons mentioned above or through living in cities with an undue proportion of female residents. Then there are, besides these, superior women who, because they are brought up in families without brothers or brothers' friends, are so unnaturally shy that they are unable to become friendly with men, howevermuch they may care to. It is evident that life in a separate college for women often intensifies this defect. There are still other women who repel men by a manner of extreme self-repression and coldness, sometimes the result of parents' or teachers' over-zealous efforts to inculcate modesty and reserve, traits valuable in due degree but harmful in excess.
When will educators learn that the education of the emotions is as important as that of the intellect? When will the schools awake to the fact that a large part of life consists in relations with other human beings, and that much of their educational effort is absolutely valueless, or detrimental, to success in the fundamentally necessary practice of dealing with other individuals which is imposed on every one? Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so over-stuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company. The same indictment applies in a less degree to men. It is generally believed that an only child is frequently to be found in this class.
On the other hand, it is equally true—perhaps more important—that many innately superior young men are rejected, because of their manner of life. Superior young men should be induced to keep their physical records clean, in order that they may not suffer the severe depreciation which they would otherwise sustain in the eyes of superior women.
But in efforts to teach chastity, sex itself must not be made to appear an evil thing. This is a grave mistake and all too common since the rise of the sex-hygiene movement. Undoubtedly a considerable amount of the celibacy in sensitive women may be traced to ill-balanced mothers and teachers who, in word and attitude, build up an impression that sex is indecent and bestial, and engender in general a damaging suspicion of men.[115]
Level heads are necessary in the sex ethics campaign. Whereas the venereal diseases will probably, with a continuation of present progress in treatment and prophylaxis, be brought under control in the course of a century, the problem of differential mating will exist as long as the race does, which can hardly be less than tens of millions of years. Lurid presentation, by drama, novel, or magazine-story, of dramatic and highly-colored individual sex histories, is to be avoided. These often impress an abnormal situation on sensitive girls so strongly that aversion to marriage, or sex antagonism, is aroused. Every effort should be made to permeate art—dramatic, plastic, or literary—with the highest ideals of sex and parenthood. A glorification of motherhood and fatherhood in these ways would have a portentous influence on public opinion.
"The true, intimate chronicle of an everyday married life has not been written. Here is a theme for genius; for only genius can divine and reveal the beauty, the pathos, and the wonder of the normal or the commonplace. A felicitous marriage has its comedy, its complexities, its element, too, of tragedy and grief, as well as its serenity and fealty. Matrimony, whether the pair fare well or ill, is always a great adventure, a play of deep instincts and powerful emotions, a drama of two psyches. Every marriage provides a theme for the literary artist. No lives are free from enigmas."[116]
More "temperance" in work would probably promote marriage of able and ambitious young people. Walter Gallichan complains that "we do not even recognize love as a finer passion than money greed. It is a kind of luxury, or pleasant pastime, for the sentimentally minded. Love is so undervalued as a source of happiness, a means of grace, and a completion of being, that many men would sooner work to keep a motor car than to marry."
Men should be taught greater respect for the individualityof women, so that no high-minded girl will shrink from marriage with the idea that it means a surrender of her personality and a state of domestic servitude. A more discriminating idea of sex-equality is desirable, and a recognition by men that women are not necessarily creatures of inferior mentality. It would be an advantage if men's education included some instruction along these lines. It would be a great gain, also if intelligent women had more knowledge of domestic economy and mothercraft, because one of the reasons why the well-educated girl is handicapped in seeking a mate is the belief all too frequently well founded of many young men that she is a luxury which he can not afford.
Higher education in general needs to be reoriented. It has too much glorified individualism, and put a premium on "white collar" work. The trend toward industrial education will help to correct this situation.
Professor Sprague[117]points out another very important fault, when he says: "More strong men are needed on the staffs of public schools and women's colleges, and in all of these institutions more married instructors of both sexes are desirable. The catalogue of one of the [women's] colleges referred to above shows 114 professors and instructors, of whom 100 are women, of whom only two have ever married. Is it to be expected that the curriculum created by such a staff would idealize and prepare for family and home life as the greatest work of the world and the highest goal of woman, and teach race survival as a patriotic duty? Or, would it be expected that these bachelor staffs would glorify the independent vocation and life for women and create employment bureaus to enable their graduates to get into the offices, schools and other lucrative jobs? The latter seems to be what occurs."
Increase of opportunity for superior young people to meet each other, as discussed in our chapter on sexual selection, will play a very large part in raising the marriage rate. And finally,the delayed or avoided marriage of the intellectual classes is in large part a reflection of public opinion, which has wrongly represented other things as being more worth while than marriage.
"The promotion of marriage in early adult life, as a part of social hygiene, must begin with a new canonization of marriage," Mr. Gallichan declares. "This is equally the task of the fervent poet and the scientific thinker, whose respective labors for humanity are never at variance in essentials.... The sentiment for marriage can be deepened by a rational understanding of the passion that attracts and unites the sexes. We need an apotheosis of conjugal love as a basis for a new appreciation of marriage. Reverence for love should be fostered from the outset of the adolescent period by parents and pedagogues."
If, in addition to this "diffusion of healthier views of the conjugal relation," some of the economic changes suggested in later chapters are put in effect, it seems probable that the present racially disastrous tendency of the most superior young men and women to postpone or avoid marriage would be checked.
Imagine 200 babies born to parents of native stock in the United States. On the average, 103 of them will be boys and 97 girls. By the time the girls reach a marriageable age (say 20 years), at least 19 will have died, leaving 78 possible wives, on whom the duty of perpetuating that section of the race depends.
We said "Possible" wives, not probable; for not all will marry. It is difficult to say just how many will become wives, but Robert J. Sprague has reported on several investigations that illuminate the point.
In a selected New England village in 1890, he says, "there were forty marriageable girls between the ages of 20 and 35. To-day thirty-two of these are married, 20 per cent. are spinsters.
"An investigation of 260 families of the Massachusetts Agricultural College students shows that out of 832 women over 40 years of age 755 or 91 per cent. have married, leaving only 9 per cent. spinsters. This and other observations indicate that the daughters of farmers marry more generally than those of some other classes.
"In sixty-nine (reporting) families represented by the freshman class of Amherst College (1914) there are 229 mothers and aunts over 40 years of age, of whom 186 or 81 per cent. have already married.
"It would seem safe to conclude that about 15 per cent. of native women in general American society do not marry during the child-bearing period." Deducting 15 per cent. from the 78 possible wives leaves sixty-six probable wives. Now among the native wives of Massachusetts 20 per cent. do not produce children, and deducting these thirteen childless ones from thesixty-six probable wives leaves fifty-three probable, married, child-bearing women, who must be depended on to reproduce the original 200 individuals with whom we began this chapter. That means that each woman who demonstrates ability to bear offspring must bear 3.7 children. This it must be noted, is a minimum number, for no account has been taken of those who, through some defect or disease developed late in life, become unmarriageable. In general, unless every married woman brings three children to maturity, the race will not even hold its own in numbers. And this means that each woman must bear four children, since not all the children born will live. If the married women of the country bear fewer than nearly four children each, the race is in danger of losing ground.
Such a statement ought to strike the reader as one of grave importance; but we labor under no delusion that it will do so. For we are painfully aware that the bugaboo of the declining birth-rate of superior people has been raised so often in late years, that it has become stale by repetition. It no longer causes any alarm. The country is filled with sincere but mentally short-sighted individuals, who are constantly ready to vociferate that numbers are no very desirable thing in a birth-rate; that quality is wanted, not quantity; that a few children given ideal care are of much more value to the state and the race than are many children, who can not receive this attention.
And this attitude toward the subject, we venture to assert, is a graver peril to the race than is the declining birth-rate itself. For there is enough truth in it to make it plausible, and to separate the truth from the dangerous untruth it contains, and to make the bulk of the population see the distinction, is a task which will tax every energy of the eugenist.
Unfortunately, this is not a case of mere difference of opinion between men; it is a case of antagonism between men and nature. If a race hypnotize itself into thinking that its views about race suicide are superior to nature's views, it may make its own end a little less painful; but it will not postpone that end for a single minute. The contest is to the strong, and although numbers are not the most important element in strength,it is very certain that a race made up of families containing one child each will not be the survivor in the struggle for existence.
The idea, therefore, that race suicide and general limitation of births to the irreducible minimum, can be effectively justified by any conceivable appeal to economic or sociological factors, is a mistake which will eventually bring about the extinction of the people making it.
This statement must not be interpreted wrongly. Certainly we would not argue that a high birth-rate in itself is necessarily a desirable thing. It is not the object of eugenics to achieve as big a population as possible, regardless of quality. But in the last analysis, the only wealth of a nation is its people; moreover some people, are as national assets, worth more than others. The goal, then, might be said to be: a population adjusted in respect to its numbers to the resources of the country, and that number of the very best quality possible. Great diversity of people is required in modern society, but of each desirable kind the best obtainable representatives are to be desired.
It is at once evident that a decline, rather than an increase, in the birth-rate of some sections of the population, is wanted. There are some strata at the bottom that are a source of weakness rather than of strength to the race, and a source of unhappiness rather than of happiness to themselves and those around them. These should be reduced in number, as we have shown at some length earlier in this book.
The other parts of the population should be perpetuated by the best, rather than the worst. In no other way can the necessary leaders be secured, without whom, in commerce, industry, politics, science, the nation is at a great disadvantage. The task of eugenics is by no means what it is sometimes supposed to be: to breed a superior caste. But a very important part of its task is certainly to increase the number of leaders in the race. And it is this part of its task, in particular, which is menaced by the declining birth-rate in the United States.
As every one knows, race suicide is proceeding more rapidly among the native whites than among any other large section of the population; and it is exactly this part of the populationwhich has in the past furnished most of the eminent men of the country.
It has been shown in previous chapters that eminent men do not appear wholly by chance in the population. The production of eminence is largely a family affair; and in America, "the land of opportunity" as well as in older countries, people of eminence are much more interrelated than chance would allow. It has been shown, indeed, that in America it is at least a 500 to 1 bet that an eminent person will be rather closely related to some other eminent person, and will not be a sporadic appearance in the population.[118]
Taken with other considerations advanced in earlier chapters, this means that a falling off in the reproduction of the old American best strains means a falling off in the number of eminent men which the United States will produce. No improvement in education can prevent a serious loss, for the strong minds get more from education.
The old American stock has produced a vastly greater proportion of eminence, has accomplished a great deal more proportionately, in modern times, than has other any stock whose representatives have been coming in large numbers as immigrants to these shores during the last generation. It is, therefore, likely to continue to surpass them, unless it declines too greatly in numbers. For this reason, we feel justified in concluding that the decline of the birth-rate in the old American stock represents a decline in the birth-rate of a superior element.
There is another way of looking at this point. The stock under discussion has been, on the whole, economically ahead of such stocks as are now immigrating. In competition with them under equal conditions, it appears to remain pretty consistentlyahead, economically. Now, although we would not insist on this point too strongly, it can hardly be questioned that eugenic value is to some extent correlated with economic success in life, as all desirable qualities tend to be correlated together. Within reasonable limits, it is justifiable to treat the economically superior sections of the nation as the eugenically superior. And it is among these economically superior sections of the nation that the birth-rate has most rapidly and dangerously fallen.
The constant influx of highly fecund immigrant women tends to obscure the fact that the birth-rate of the older residents is falling below par, and analysis of the birth-rate in various sections of the community is necessary to give an understanding of what is actually taking place.
In Rhode Island, F. L. Hoffmann found the average number of children for each foreign-born woman to be 3.35, and for each native-born woman to be 2.06. There were wide racial differences among the foreign born; the various elements were represented by the following average number of children per wife:
In short, the native-born whites in this investigation fell below every one of the foreign nationalities.
The Massachusetts censuses for 1875 and 1884 showed similar results: the foreign-born women had 4.5 children each, and the native-born women 2.7 each.
Frederick S. Crum's careful investigation[119]of New England genealogies, including 12,722 wives, has thrown a great deal oflight on the steady decline in their birth-rate. He found the average number of children to be:
There, in four lines, is the story of the decline of the old American stock. At present, it is barely reproducing itself, probably not even that, for there is reason to believe that 1879 does not mark the lowest point reached. Before 1700, less than 2% of the wives in this investigation had only one child, now 20% of them have only one. With the emigration of old New England families to the west, and the constant immigration of foreign-born people to take their places, it is no cause for surprise that New England no longer exercises the intellectual leadership that she once held.
For Massachusetts as a whole, the birth-rate among the native-born population was 12.7 per 1,000 in 1890, 14.9 in 1910, while in the foreign-born population it was 38.6 in 1890 and 49.1 in 1910. After excluding all old women and young women, the birth-rate of the foreign-born women in Massachusetts is still found to be ¾ greater than that of the native-born.[120]
In short, the birth-rate of the old American stock is now so low that that stock is dying out and being supplanted by immigrants. In order that the stock might even hold its own, we have shown that each married woman should bear three to four children. At present the married women of the old white American race in New England appear to be bringing two or less to maturity.
It will be profitable to digress for a moment to consider farther what this disappearance of the ancient population of Massachusetts means to the country. When all the distinguished men of the United States are graded, in accordance with their distinction, it is regularly found, as Frederick Adams Woods says, that "Some states in the union, some sections of the country, have produced more eminence than others, far beyond the expectation from their respective white populations. In this regard Massachusetts always leads, and Connecticut is always second, and certain southern states are always behind and fail to render their expected quota." The accurate methods used by Dr. Woods in this investigation leave no room for doubt that in almost every way Massachusetts has regularly produced twice as many eminent men as its population would lead one to expect, and has for some ranks and types of achievement produced about four times the expectation.
Scott Nearing's studies[121]confirm those of Dr. Woods. Taking the most distinguished men and women America has produced, he found that the number produced in New England, per 100,000 population, was much larger than that produced by any other part of the country. Rhode Island, the poorest New England state in this respect, was yet 30% above New York, the best state outside New England.
The advantage of New England, however, he found to be rapidly decreasing. Of the eminent persons born before 1850, 30% were New Englanders although the population of New England in 1850 was only 11.8% of that of the whole country. But of the eminent younger men,—those born between 1880 and 1889, New England, with 7.5% of the country's population, could claim only 12% of the genius. Cambridge, Mass., has produced more eminent younger men of the present time than any other city, he discovered, but the cities which come next in order are Nashville, Tenn., Columbus, Ohio, Lynn, Mass., Washington, D. C., Portland, Ore., Hartford, Conn., Boston, Mass., New Haven, Conn., Kansas City, Mo., and Chicago, Ill.
There is reason to believe that some of the old New England stock, which emigrated to the West, retains a higher fecundity than does that part of the stock which remains on the Atlantic seaboard. This fact, while a gratifying one, of course does not compensate for the low fertility of the families which still live in New England.
Within this section of the population, the decline is undoubtedly taking place faster in some parts than in others. Statistical evidence is not available, to tell a great deal about this, but the birth-rate for the graduates of some of the leading women's colleges is known, and their student bodies are made up largely of girls of superior stork. At Wellesley, the graph in Fig. 36 shows at a glance just what is happening. Briefly, the graduates of that college contribute less than one child apiece to the race. The classes do not even reproduce their own numbers. Instead of the 3.7 children which, according to Sprague's calculation, they ought to bear, they are bearing .86 of a child.
The foregoing study is one of the few to carefully distinguish between families which were complete at the time of study and those families where additional children may yet be born. In the studies to follow this distinction may in some cases be made by the reader in interpreting the data while in other cases families having some years of possible productiveness ahead are included with others and the relative proportion of the types is not indicated. The error in these cases is therefore important and the reader is warned to accept them only with a mental allowance for this factor.
The best students make an even worse showing in this respect. The Wellesley alumnæ who are members of Phi Beta Kappa,—that is, the superior scholars—have not .86 of a child each, but only .65 of a child; while the holders of the Durant and Wellesley scholarships, awarded for intellectual superiority,[122]make the following pathetic showing in comparison with the whole class.
Graduates of '01, '02, '03, '04, Status of Fall of 1912
It must not be thought that Wellesley's record is an exception, for most of the large women's colleges furnish deplorable figures. Mount Holyoke's record is:
Nor can graduation from Bryn Mawr College be said to favor motherhood. By the 376 alumnæ graduated there between 1888 and 1900, only 138 children had been produced up to Jan. 1, 1913. This makes .84 of a child per married alumna, or .37 of a child per graduate, since less than half of the graduates marry. These are the figures published by the college administration.
Professor Sprague's tabulation of the careers of Vassar college graduates, made from official records of the college, is worth quoting in full, for the light it throws on the histories of college girls, after they leave college:
If the women's colleges were fulfilling what the writers consider to be their duty toward their students, their graduates would have a higher marriage and birth-rate than that of their sisters, cousins and friends who do not go to college. But the reverse is the case. M. R. Smith's investigation showed the comparison between college girls and girls of equivalent social position and of the same or similar families, as follows:
Now if education is tending toward race suicide, then the writers believe there is something wrong with modern educational methods. And certainly all statistics available point to the fact that girls who have been in such an atmosphere as that of some colleges for four years, are, from a eugenic point of view, of diminished value to the race. This is not an argument against higher education for women, but it is a potent argument for a different kind of higher education than many of the colleges of America are now giving them.
This is one of the causes for the decline of the birth-rate in the old American stock. But of course it is only one. A very large number of causes are unquestionably at work to the same end, and the result can be adequately changed only if it is analyzed into as many of its component parts as possible, and each one of these dealt with separately. The writers have emphasized the shortcoming of women's colleges, because it is easily demonstrated and, they believe, relatively easily mitigated. But the record of men's colleges is not beyond criticism.
Miss Smith found that among the college graduates of the 18th century in New England, only 2% remained unmarried, while in the Yale classes of 1861-1879, 21% never married, andof the Harvard graduates from 1870-1879 26% remained single. The average number of children per Harvard graduate of the earlier period was found to be 3.44, for the latest period studied 1.92. Among the Yale graduates it was found that the number of children per father had declined from 5.16 to 2.55.