MATRIMONY

Evening Star, Issue 16625, 7 January 1918, Page 6

MATRIMONY

IS NOT THE GOAL OF THE TRAINED NURSE". Whenever a nurse and her patient marry the newspapers seize upon the incident as a romance, and the reading public, forgetting that it is the unusual that is chronicled, have come to regard matrimony as the natural goal of the trained nurse. As a matter of fact, the reverse i 8 true, ac : cording to a recent investigation made by the ' Journal of Heredity,' which finds that less than half of the graduates of the best training schools marry. The lowest percentage is reported from the training school of the Washington University as 21, while the highest (52) is recorded at the school connected with St. Luke's Hospital, in New York. The writer thus sums up: No amount of optimism can bring one to conclude that the marriage rate of trained nurses—or at least of the graduates of the best training schools—is even reasonably high. On the whole, the education of a nurse fits her admirably for home-making and mothercraft. It might be supposed that such women would be in great demand as wives. The fact that they marry to such a small extent may indicate : That men do not use good judgment in selecting wivesi (this criticism has been heard more than once from graduates of women's colleges), or that there is something in a nurse's education to which men object. That the nurses prefer to remain single. Many of them doubtless are set on a career, but evidently not all, for of the living unmarried graduates of Bellevue who have left school, but whose whereabouts are known, 16 per cent, are not following their profession, but have apparently given it up and are living all home. It is doubtless true that nurses, having careers offering abundant employment and good pay, can be and are much more exacting in their requirements of a suitor than are girls who have no future in sight except matrimony. Their celibacy cannot be very largely due to lack of opportunities to meet men, for their opportunities in this respect are notably good. Any attempt to analyse the causes of this Tow marriage rate must be futile until some data are available, for the factors involved are doubtless mostly complex psychological influences. But there is one simpler cause that may be suspected—age. Ten or fifteen years ago the age of admission to good training schools was from 21 td 25 years. The average age of girls at graduation was certainly not less than 25. The nurses who graduated from the four large schools in classes prior to 1902 were therefore 'well toward the end of the most marriageable period in a woman's life at the time of their graduation. Lately the age standards of training schools have been steadily reduced, 20 perhaps being an average minimum, although many schools will now admit pupils at the age of 19. The average age of graduates is therefore now about 23, according to those who are in a position to form an intelligent opinion. This decrease of age alone should tend to increase the marriage rate of the more recent graduates as compaxed with those of a decade or two ago.