'A princely gift indeed': Agricultural opportunity and marriage in the United States, 1850--1920

This dissertation analyzes and explains the gradual rise in rural marriage age in the United States in the last half of the nineteenth century. During this period the average age of marriage in the United States rose to a peak near the turn of the century, and then began a marked decline. The decline has been attributed to the increasing availability of well-paying wage labor jobs that made it possible for young adults to marry and start a family earlier. Poor opportunity in agriculture---the opposite of a high wage job---is examined to see if it can explain why rural marriage age rose before declining. Two key variables denoting agricultural opportunity, the average price of a farm and the average level of farm mechanization in the county of residence, are found to be important causes of increasing rural marriage age between 1850 and the turn of the century. Both factors raised the cost of entry into farming, and the latter variable, mechanization, may have played a role in devaluing the perceived need for a farm wife and children. As a result, more and more would-be farmers spent longer periods of time single at the bottom of the agricultural ladder as farm laborers before acquiring a farm of their own and marrying.;By 1920, agricultural opportunity variables prove less able to explain change in rural marriage behavior. This is likely due to the fact that agriculture was declining in relative importance to the nation's economy and wage labor jobs were becoming increasingly available in rural areas.;Secondarily, in addition to using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), this dissertation offers for public use a new dataset containing linked population and agricultural data from the 1880 U.S. decennial census. There are 23,806 individuals in the dataset; 10,715 of them are linked to an agricultural manuscript census schedule, either directly or through family connections. Metadata for the linked sample is included in an appendix in the form of an XML-tagged codebook compatible with Version 1.0 of the Data Documentation Initiative's Data Type Definition (DDI DTD).