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 half way 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 100.
In 1900 they were only nine in every 100.
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