-61 81 87
1862-71 87 87
1872-81 90 81
1882-91 84 55
1892-01 73 48

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 for a few years, is not always
so clearly realized. The diagram in Fig. 36 may give a