Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 31

[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at all to religious celibacy.

In the meantime we return to John and Mary.

While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.

They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.

But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

Mary took a civil service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time when John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.

There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.

"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a specialty. I must do some more preparing.

He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up, intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!

But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll really make good."

A western university offered a scholars.h.i.+p of $500 a year, the holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain specified technical subject. John tried for the scholars.h.i.+p and got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they eventually sneaked back home again into the power-house, after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting holes into them as they went.

It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going strong.

One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.

Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.

It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a store window.

Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.

"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children what our children ought to have. That settles it."

The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they were born to.

We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one of the large American cities:

R----J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor DeVere's dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has several a.s.sistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support me."

S----V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.

T----V----. Sister of S----V----, who doesn't think much of her.

She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.

T----A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men. "Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry ANYBODY." Works in the cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl. Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run awhile. Tell you something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina do it."

R----B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."

This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in that respect, of the colonial marriage.

The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic value to her husband.

The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.

Of course, the case of the department-store buyer and the teamster is irrelevantly extreme. But aren't there thousands and thousands of cases which, while less advanced, are pointed in the same direction? The more a woman earns, the fewer become the men who can support her. How can the clerk support the cloak saleswoman who has had eighteen dollars a week of her own? How can the barber support the manicurist who has had twelve?

The cloak saleswoman may talk flippantly about it, but, at heart, isn't she seriously right? She has pulled herself up to a certain level. Except in response to a grande pa.s.sion she will not again drop below it. She will bring up her children at a point as close to her present level as she can. That is instinct.

Meanwhile, she isn't married. But what can you do about it? She went to work, like almost every other working woman, because she had to. And you can't pa.s.s a law prohibiting her from earning more than five dollars a week.

"It's all economic," thought Mary. "Nothing else." She had much reason for thinking so.

Did you ever see Meitzen's diagram showing the relation between the price of rye and the number of marriages in Prussia during a period of twenty-five years?

Cheap rye, easy living conditions--number of marriages rises.

Dear rye, hard living conditions--number of marriages drops. The fluctuations are strictly proportional. In the twenty-sixth year, given the price of rye, you could predict very closely the number of marriages.

It's like suicides. It's the easiest thing in the world to predict the number of men and women who will next year "decide"

to take their own lives.

The marriage rate responds not only to the economic conditions of a whole country but to the economic conditions of its various parts.

You live in Vermont. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty in Vermont, there will be 279 out of every 1,000 of you who will still be single.

But you live in the state of New York. Very well. Between the ages of twenty-five and thirty there will be 430 of you out of every thousand who will still be single.

In Vermont, 279. In New York, 430. A difference of 151 in every 1,000.

For those 151 persons, is it human volition? Is it a perverse aversion to the other s.e.x?

Even at that, on the face of it, those who try to argue New Yorkers into marrying young are clearly taking the difficult route to their purpose. It would be more adroit simply to urge them to live in Vermont.

But isn't the real reason this--that New York, with its large cities, is farther removed than Vermont, with no large cities, from the primitive industrial conditions of colonial times?

The North Atlantic states, as a whole, are industrially more advanced than the South Central states. Compare them in this marriage matter:

Among all the wives in the South Central states, there are 543 out of every 1,000 who are under thirty-five years of age.

Among all the wives in the North Atlantic states those who are under thirty-five years of age are, in each thousand, only 428.

In the 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.