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:
'45 '55 '65 '75 '85 '95 '00 Per cent. married 78 74 67 72 59 57 55 Per cent. who have gone into 20 13 12 19 30 30 39 other occupations than home-making
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:
_Century_ _Average age_ _Range_ _Number of cases_ 12 16.2 8-30 5 13 16.6 12-29 5 14 13.8 6-18 11 15 17.6 13-26 20 16 21.7 12-50 28 17 20.0 13-43 30 18 23.1 13-53 127 19 26.2 15-67 189
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:
_Women over_ _Coeducated_ _Separate_ 25 38.1 29.6 30 49.1 40.1 35 53.6 46.6 40 56.9 51.8
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:
1872-81 95.8 1882-91 62.5 1892-01 71.2 1902-06 69.0
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.