South Central states, 543. In the North Atlantic states, 428. A
difference of 115!

Getting married early is imputed unto us for actual personal
righteousness by innumerable clergymen, essayists, and editorial
writers. Are there so many more righteous women along the Gulf of
Mexico than along the Atlantic Coast? One hundred and fifteen more out
of every thousand? We cannot quite credit so great a discrepancy in
relative human virtue.

You can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in your
vicinity.

Live on the Gold Coast of Africa. When you're thirteen, if you're a
girl, they'll boil a yam and mash it and mix it with palm oil and
scatter it on the banks of the stream and wash you in the stream and
streak your body with white clay in fine lines and lead you down the
street under an umbrella and announce your readiness to be a bride.
Which you will be in a day or two.

Live in Russia, and if you're a girl you'll get married before you're
twenty in more than fifty cases out of a hundred. It's the most
primitive of civilized countries. It's halfway between Africa and,
say, Rhode Island.

These marriages before twenty tend to fall off rapidly in a rapidly
developing industrial region like Rhode Island.

In 1860 the married persons in Rhode Island who had married before
they were twenty were twenty-one in every hundred.

In 1900 they were only nine in every hundred.

A drop from twenty-one to nine in forty years!

And if you can't escape, in any numbers, from the law which reigns in
your vicinity, neither can you escape, in any numbers, from the law
which reigns in your social set.

Here's Bailey's book on "Social Conditions":

Live in England and be a girl and belong to the class of people that
miners come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average,
twenty-two. But belong to the class of people that professional men
come from: Your age at marriage will be, on the average, twenty-six.

This difference exists also in the United States. It is in the direct
line of social and economic development.

The professional man is a farther developed type of man than the miner.
It takes him longer to get through his educational infancy--longer to
arrive at his mental and financial maturity. The professional man's
wife is a farther developed type than the miner's wife. Her economic
utility as a cook and as a laundress in her husband's house tends to
approach zero.

Where these two lines of develop