ed by the young
woman who has taken the full four-year course in, say, "Secretarial
Studies" in Simmons and who, throughout her English, her German, her
French, her sociology, and her history, as well as throughout her
typewriting, her shorthand, and her commercial law, has necessarily
kept in view, irradiating every subject, the beacon-light of her
future working career.

"Ah! There, precisely, is the danger. Every Jack should have his Jill;
but if every Jill has her job, why, there again the wedding day goes
receding some more into the future. Let them stop all this foolishness
and get married, as their grandparents did!"

Poor Jack! Poor Jill! We lecture them, all the time, for postponing
their marriage. We ought not to stop there. We ought to go on to
lecture them for doing the thing which makes them postpone their
marriage. We ought to lecture them for postponing their _maturity_. We
ought to lecture them for prolonging their mental and financial
infancy.

The big, impersonal, unlectureable industrial reasons for the modern
prolongation of infancy were glanced at in chapter one of this book.
In the present chapter we shall glance at them again, more closely.
Just now, however, for a moment, we must revert to the Census, and we
must take one final look at the amount of marriage-postponement now
existing in this country.

It was in the United States as a whole that the census man found 275
out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine age-period
unmarried. But the United States consists of developed and of
undeveloped regions. The cities are the high points of development.
Look at the cities:

In Chicago, out of every 1,000 women in the age-period from
twenty-five to twenty-nine, there were 314 who were unmarried. In
Denver there were 331. In Manhattan and the Bronx there were 356. In
Minneapolis there were 369. In Philadelphia there were 387.

Southern New England, however, is the most industrially developed part
of the United States, the part in which social conditions like those
of the older countries of the world are most nearly reached.

In Fall River, out of every 1,000 women in the twenty-five-to-twenty-nine
age-period, the unmarried were 391. In New Haven they were 393. In
Boston they were 452.

Therefore:

If, in educating girls, we educate them only for the probability of
ultimate marriage and not also for the probability of protracted
singleness, we are doing them a demonstrably g