Many people chose to delay marriages in Alberta during the Great Depression, this reality is represented in the Marriage Rate graph below. This information comes from the vital statistic reports of Alberta which were then charted in the graph below. There is a clear dip in the marriage rate in Alberta during the 1930s, which shows the delay in marriages and is evidence that the decision to marry was made more complicated by the events of the Great Depression.

One factor that played into this dip was clearly the economic condition that many Albertans found themselves in personally due to the wide spread economic decline of the 1930s. Katrina Srigley in “Breadwinning Daughters” said that “Marriage rates plummeted during the Depression more drastically than during any other decade in the twentieth century, as young workers found themselves forced to choose between employment and marriage. This put young women in difficult situations.” Srigley’s book focuses on urban women in eastern Canada during the Great Depression, and as such as a different focus than my research. However, this quote demonstrates the wide sweeping difficulty the 1930s put on young people in Canada heading towards marriage.