Source: XKCD. Click for larger image.

So here’s an intriguing lead paragraph from Erik Eckholm of The New York Times (emphasis mine)

The United States crossed an important marital threshold in 2009, with the number of young adults who have never married surpassing, for the first time in more than a century, the number who were married.

He said it here.

So… since I happen to know the Census Bureau’s been tracking married vs. single young people since at least 1860 I’m curious what circumstances were like when previous records were set more than a century ago.

Any American History or Gender Studies whizzes who read this should feel free to chime in.

There’s a possibility that Eckholm’s “more than a century” remark was more of a rhetorical flourish than a comparable fact. The Population Reference Bureau report he cites merely says

Among the total population ages 18 and older, the proportion married dropped from 57 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2009. This is the lowest percentage recorded since information on marital status was first collected by the U.S. Census Bureau more than 100 years ago.

Oh well. While was unable to quickly search marriage rates from the 19th Century I did find a chart for the 20th Century on the website Coffee Grounds that shows marriage rates weren’t much higher at the bottom of the Great Depression.

(This is going even deeper in apples-and-oranges territory but the same chart shows that marriage rates dropped fairly precipitously in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but that could be explained by the incredible… and also historically anomalous… spike in marriages, and especially younger marriages, between roughly 1945 and 1950. With everyone already married it might have taken years to replenish the supply of eligible marriage partners.)

One possibility for the recent decline, which seems to have only been accelerated by the recent economic crisis, might paradoxically be the appropriation of marriage as a political symbol of intolerance and conservatism.

Or it could have something to do with commercialization of weddings and the corresponding increase in cost to do it “right.” Back in 2007 the average price was trending rapidly towards $30,000! (Hint: That would be roughly equivalent to the average college student-load debt.)

Note: there’s no evidence that all long-term heterosexual domestic partnerships is in decline, just the percentage where the couples are married. Considering that roughly half of all marriages end before the average loan for a $30,000 wedding would be paid off that’s probably not actually a bad thing.

After that big digression, though, I’m still curious about my original question: were marriage rates more than a century ago ever lower than they are today?