The greatest recent social changes have been in the lives of women. During the twentieth century there has been a remarkable shortening of the proportion of a woman's life spent in caring for the children. A woman marrying at the end of the nineteenth century would probably have been in her middle twenties, and would be likely to have seven or eight children, four or five of whom lived till they were five years old. By the time the youngest was fifteen, the mother would have been in her early fifties and would expect to live a further twenty years, during which health made it unusual for her to get paid work. Today women marry younger and have fewer children. Usually a woman's youngest child will be fifteen when she is forty-five years and can be expected to live another thirty-five years and is likely to take paid work until retirement at sixty. Even while she has to take care of children, her work is lightened by modern living conditions. This important change in women's life-patterns has only recently begun to have its full effect on women's economic position. Even a few years ago most girls took a full-time job after they left school. However, when they married, they usually left work at once and never returned to it. Today the school- leaving age is sixteen; many girls stay at school after that age, and though women usually marry older, more married women stay at work at least until shortly before their first child is born. Many more afterwards return to full-or-part-time work. Such changes have led to a new relationship in marriage, with the husband accepting a greater share of the duties and satisfactions of family life, and with both husband and wife sharing more equally in providing the money, and running the home, according to the abilities and interests of each of them. At what age did most women marry around the 1890 according to the passage?
At about twenty-five In their earl fifties At the age of fifteen At any age from fifteen to forty-five