Marriage and agricultural structure

This paper utilizes Plutzer's (1986) model of fertility variation within rural areas to examine the implications of agricultural structure for rural marriage at the turn of the century. Multilevel data from the 1900 US Census are analyzed to assess whether the availability and cost of farmland, the mechanization of agriculture, and the prevalence of various tenurial arrangements affected the likelihood of early entry into marriage. The findings provide support for the thesis that agricultural structure influenced rural marriage behavior, and suggest that future studies of links between rural social organization and fertility would benefit from explicit consideration of the marriage process. -Author