28.73
Men of culture and men of independent means 30.72

These figures give striking proof of how social conditions and standing
affect marriage.

The number of men who, for several reasons, are kept from marrying is
ever on the increase. It is especially in the so-called upper ranks and
occupations that the men often do not marry, partly because the demands
upon them are too great, partly because it is just the men of these
social strata who seek and find pleasure and company elsewhere. On the
other hand, conditions are particularly unfavorable to women in places
where many pensionaries and their families, but few young men, have
their homes. In such places, the number of women who cannot marry rises
to 20 or 30 out of every 100. The deficit of candidates for marriage
affects strongest those female strata that, through education and social
position, make greater pretensions, and yet, outside of their persons,
have nothing to offer the man who is looking for wealth. This concerns
especially the female members of those numerous families that live upon
fixed salaries, are considered socially "respectable," but are without
means. The life of the female being in this stratum of society is,
comparatively speaking, the saddest of all those of her
fellow-sufferers. It is out of these strata that is mainly recruited the
most dangerous competition for the working-women in the embroidering,
seamstress, flower-making, millinery, glove and straw hat sewing; in
short, all the branches of industry that the employer prefers to have
carried on at the homes of the working-women. These ladies work for the
lowest wages, seeing that, in many cases, the question with them is not
to earn a full livelihood, but only something over and above that, or to
earn the outlay for a better wardrobe and for luxury. Employers have a
predilection for the competition of these ladies, so as to lower the
earnings of the poor working-woman and squeeze the last drop of blood
from her veins: it drives her to exert herself to the point of
exhaustion. Also not a few wives of government employes, whose husbands
are badly paid, and can not afford them a "life suitable to their rank,"
utilize their leisure moments in this vile competition that presses so
heavily upon wide strata of the female working class.

The activity on the part of the bourgeois associations of women for the
abolition of female labor and for the admission of women t