40
Some points stand out from this table. The first is confirmation of the fact deduced from the general population statistics, that less than half of people born lived to the age of marriage. Here it shows that under half of recorded males did in fact marry, although about two-thirds of recorded women did, because of the earlier age of marriage of women. If account is taken of un-reported youngsters, the percentage of those who survived to marry would be markedly less.
Another interesting fact is that, despite heavy infant mortality, the average age of marriage was not particularly young, particularly for men. In both 1911 and 1921, the average age of marriage seems to have been about 23-24 for men, and for women some 5 or 7 years younger. In the Islands in 1921, the average age of marriage was several years later than in Northern District, particularly among the large numbers of temporarily resident immigrants there, although it does seem that the boat people married later than the land people generally. These temporarily resident immigrants clearly, in at least some cases, deferred marriage until they returned to their native place, and thus boosted the numbers of single men recorded in Southern District. The Northern District was a centre of emigration rather than immigration, and this may well be the reason why many of the men in Northern District did not marry until their forties. These are probably emigrants from the area who married on their return to the native village. Table 15 gives the details from the 1921 Census of age of marriage, and Table 16 the same information in graph form.
The percentage of widows and widowers is given in both censuses. For men and land population women, the figure is similar in both censuses - about 5-6% for men in both Northern and Southern Districts (in Southern District for both the land and the floating populations), but for women 15-16% among the land people in both Northern and Southern Districts, but about 12% among the boat people. While the higher rate of widows as compared with widowers may, to some degree, reflect the greater longevity of women, it seems probable that it reflects to a greater degree the Chinese unwillingness to permit women to remarry after the death of their husbands, but to accept remarriage among men.
These findings are more clearly shown in Tables 15 and 16. These show that very few people married before the age of 15 (less than 10%).