Personality traits are rarely if ever desirable or undesirable in an absolute and universal sense. As we mentioned, each group has its own norms of desirability which its members come to look upon as absolute and imperative. Then, too, every person, through his unique personal-social experiences in areas of behavior which are not culturally standardized, develops subjective ideals, standards, and tastes with regard to what he deems desirable in a mate. The degree to which any of these standards operates, however, depends on whether members of the opposite sex who would qualify under such standards are available.
You will not really choose a mate from all the members of the opposite sex in America who happen to fit your consciously or unconsciously held standards. You will, rather, be forced to select your marriage partner from among those with whom you come in contact. Briefly this means that we must now consider what effects occupational contiguity, residential propinquity, and social contacts have on mate selection, for these are obviously of prime importance to the question of availability of potentially suitable mates. Crosscutting these factors is that of the sex ratio in any particular grouping. We shall first consider in detail this problem of the sex ratio as it affects marriage.
How many of each sex are there in each group in which you participate? This is an important question for a number of reasons. A young man will be, generally speaking, less “choosy” if there are more young men than young women in the group from which he must choose a mate, and a young woman in the same group will tend to be more particular in her choice. This means that the size of a courtship group and the sex ratio (usually expressed in number of males per 100 females) have to be considered in connection with any evaluation of the importance of desirable personality traits.
The sex ratio undoubtedly has an important effect upon the number of marriages in any given group. Even at birth the number of males per 100 females is not exactly equal; there are ordinarily 104 males born for every 100 females. The most serious imbalance in the sex ratio exists between three different types of population: (1) geographical divisions, (2) ruralurban divisions, and (3) divisions between socioeconomic classes.
Cities attract young women from the country to a much greater degree than they attract young men. Thus while the young woman residing in a city has, generally speaking, less chance of marrying than does the young woman on a farm, obviously some cities are better supplied with men than are others.
There is a low sex ratio among the upper socioeconomic classes and a high one among the lower classes. This is borne out by comparing the sex ratios of working-class residential districts with those of upper-class residential districts. Rapid shifts in economic opportunity give rise to a large semifloating population of unattached workingmen. Young women normally engage in teaching, nursing, or other occupations in which there are few men, and they tend to move up the socioeconomic ladder. Those young women born at the top of the ladder tend to remain at home, while the young men of that class frequently must leave in order to enter business.
Actually, the sex ratio impinges on one’s fate with respect to marriage only in terms of his own little social world, which is never coextensive with a region, a city, or an economic class. In a primitive society, the young men designated as eligible to marry a particular young lady are often clearly defined. In our highly mobile society (from both a vicinal and a social stand. point), such definitions are at best hazy and highly elastic.
Frequently a young woman, because of her particular vocation or because of her participation in certain types of leisure-time activities, may have several times as many potential and actual young men friends as her equally attractive sister who had chosen a vocation and/or avocation in which there are very few men. In this instance, neither region nor rural-urban difference nor socioeconomic class has anything directly to do with the difference between the sex ratios of the respective social worlds of the sisters.
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