Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/482

478 to marry at all, and intentional prevention of children. It is the shame of the twentieth century in the richest nation of the world, that for the great majority of Americans the big, happy, old-fashioned family of six to twelve children has become a luxury, which is absolutely beyond their means.

Our third factor in reducing the birth rate was the common ambition among our working and middle class people to give their children better advantages of all sorts, to enable them to rise in the social scale. This is surely the leading motive with a great many ambitious parents for intentionally limiting themselves to two or three children. They could afford to feed, clothe and shelter four to six children and send them to the public schools, but they could not give the boys a college education and a start in business or a profession, and send the girls to college or a finishing school, and also enable them to come out properly. Hence they have only two children, and try to give them all these social advantages. This motive for limiting births is probably the chief reason why immigrant families in the United States usually show a markedly lower birth rate in the second and third generations. In the old country escape from the working class was never dreamed of; but in democratic America they soon learned that thousands of other working people, foreign-born or of foreign-born parents, had raised themselves by industry, self denial, and prudence (usually combined with luck and shrewdness) to wealth and social position. "What wonder that they aspire to do likewise, and that they find prudence absolutely demands a small family?

The same desire to give their children every possible advantage to enable them to keep their social position is perhaps much more operative among the middle class as a reason for limitation of children. The fear among middle-class parents of seeing their children sink into the proletariat is probably a stronger motive than the desire of the working-class parents to see their children rise out of it. Witness the fact that the birth rate among the professional class is only one half that of the industrial class.

We come now to the fourth economic factor in the birth rate: the entrance of women into all sorts of trades and professions, in short the whole modern woman's movement. This is extremely interesting in its relation to eugenics. Let us first consider the effect of the higher education of women. I can find no statistics to prove it. but most authorities, including Dr. J. W. Ballantyne, seem to agree that college women not only marry later, as a rule, but have smaller chances of marrying at all than their less educated sisters. Dr. Ballantyne has also pointed out that the higher education of women in America has had a distinct influence in diminishing the birth rate, and that the college-trained girl has certainly not been the mother of many children. As I have already stated, late marriages are always less fertile on the average