Marriage, a History (42 page)

The postwar enthusiasm for marriage was not unique to the United States. Across Europe and Scandinavia, and in Australia and New Zealand too, the age of marriage fell, the rate of marriage rose, and the divorce rate dipped. In France and Australia the percentage of twenty-four-year-old men who were married in the early 1950s was twice as high as fifty years earlier.

The unprecedented surge in marriage was not just a temporary readjustment to the backlog of postponed marriages that had built up during the Depression and the war. The marriage bandwagon rolled along in North America and Western Europe for fifteen amazing years, producing what some historians call the long decade of the 1950s. In the United States the long decade began in 1947 and lasted until the early 1960s. In Europe, it took longer to overcome the severe disruptions of the war, so European marriage patterns didn’t stabilize until the early to mid-1950s. But once they did, the newly established norms of early marriage and male breadwinner families also lasted longer. I would date the European long decade from 1952, the year wartime rationing finally ended in Britain, until the late 1960s.
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This long decade was, without question, the golden age of marriage in the West. By the 1960s marriage had become nearly universal in North America and Western Europe, with 95 percent of all persons marrying. In addition, as people married younger, life spans lengthened, and divorce rates fell or held steady, individuals were spending much more of their lives in marriage than ever before or since. In England the marriage of a woman born in 1850 lasted, on average, twenty-nine years before the death of her husband. The marriage of a woman born in 1950 was likely to last forty-five years. The same pattern was seen in France, where the average marriage lasted twenty-eight years in the 1860s and forty-two years in the 1960s.
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In this unique period in Western history, marriage provided the context for just about every piece of most people’s lives. Marriage was how practically everyone embarked on his or her “real” life. It was the institution that moved you through life’s stages. And it was where you expected to be when your life ended.

No longer did people postpone marriage until they could establish their economic independence, as had been the case for the middle classes in Western Europe and North America up to the late nineteenth century. Nor was marriage, as had been the case in so many peasant villages, something you entered only after a woman had gotten pregnant and showed that she could produce children to work on the family farm. Certainly it was not something you entered to set up a joint business enterprise, as had been the case for many craftsmen and artisans in the past. Nor was it an informal arrangement scarcely distinguishable from just living together, as it had been among many lower-class individuals of earlier days, of whom their neighbors often said they were “married, but not churched.”

Marriage in the long decade of the 1950s was simply the be-all and end-all of life. In a remarkable reversal of the past, it even became the stepping-off point for adulthood rather than a sign that adulthood had already been established. Advice columnists at the
Ladies’ Home Journal
encouraged parents to help finance early marriages, even for teens, if their children seemed mature enough. A common saying in Germany prior to World War II had been
Ein Student verlocht sich nicht
—“A student does not get engaged.” But across Europe and North America, marriages between college students became much more common during the 1950s, and universities built married students’ housing to accommodate them.
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The norm of youthful marriage was so predominant during the 1950s that an unmarried woman as young as twenty-one might worry that she would end up an “old maid.” American psychiatrist Sidonie Gruenberg was probably exaggerating when she wrote in 1953 that “a girl who hasn’t a man in sight by the time she is 20 is not altogether wrong in fearing that she may never get married.” But, says historian John Modell, in the 1950s “the ‘sorting’ of women into the marriageable and the future spinsters occurred early and vigorously.” The small, and suspect, minority of women who did not marry at the same age as their peers had less chance of
ever
getting married than their counterparts a hundred years earlier. They were what the Japanese called Christmas cake, likely to stay on the shelf after the twenty-fifth.
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Young couples also had babies at much higher rates than their parents and grandparents. After falling for most of the previous hundred years, the birthrate of married couples soared during the 1950s. By 1957, the peak of the U.S. baby boom, the fertility rate in the United States was 123 births per thousand women, compared with only 79.5 per thousand in 1940. The baby boom peaked later in Western Europe, but was just as dramatic. The birthrate for twenty-one-year-old West German women rose from 92.2 per thousand in 1950, to 120 per thousand in 1961, and then to 133.8 per thousand in 1969.
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But even as women, on average, were having more babies, there was a continuing decline in the number of
very
large families in the 1950s. The postwar baby boom was produced by a decrease in childless or one-child families and an uptick in the number of three-child families, so the ideal of the small, couple-oriented family continued to spread. Moreover, because women had their children younger and completed their child rearing at an earlier age, the proportion of a couple’s marriage that was devoted to childbearing and child rearing kept dropping.
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Remarkably, the golden age of marriage crossed socioeconomic and ethnic lines. In earlier centuries there had been huge class differences in the timing and organization of marriage and childbearing. Not so in the postwar era. People from all walks of life were moving, almost in lockstep, through a rapid sequence of transitions in the space of just a few years: Leave the parental home for work or school, get married in a more elaborate ceremony than ever, move into a home of one’s own, and have a baby.
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The ideal of the male breadwinner marriage had already spread beyond the middle classes by the 1920s. But that ideal was still unattainable for many families involved in farming or running family businesses and for the majority of workers whose wages were too low to support a family: As late as 1929, after more than a decade of unprecedented economic growth, more than half of American families lived at or below the minimum standard of subsistence. But from the 1940s through the 1960s, real wages rose rapidly across the population, fastest of all in the bottom half. More families than ever before could achieve a decent, if modest, standard of living on the wages of a single male breadwinner. In 1950 only 16 percent of children in the United States had mothers who earned income outside the home, and because child labor had been abolished in the 1930s, a higher percentage of children were growing up in one-earner families during the long decade of the 1950s than ever before or since.
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This unprecedented marriage system was the climax of almost two hundred years of continuous tinkering with the male protector love-based marital model invented in the late eighteenth century. That process culminated in the 1950s in the short-lived pattern that people have since come to think of as traditional marriage. So in the 1970s, when the inherent instability of the love-based marriage reasserted itself, millions of people were taken completely by surprise. Having lost any collective memory of the convulsions that occurred when the love match was first introduced and the crisis that followed its modernization in the 1920s, they could not understand why this kind of marriage, which they thought had prevailed for thousands of years, was being abandoned by the younger generation.

T
he long decade of the 1950s, stretching from 1947 to the early 1960s in the United States and from 1952 to the late 1960s in Western Europe, was a unique moment in the history of marriage. Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households. Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. And never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was “normal.”

The cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. By the end of the 1950s even people who had grown up in completely different family systems had come to believe that universal marriage at a young age into a male breadwinner family was the traditional and permanent form of marriage.

In Canada, says historian Doug Owram, “every magazine, every marriage manual, every advertisement . . . assumed the family was based on the . . . male wage-earner and the child-rearing, home-managing housewife.” In the United States, marriage was seen as the only culturally acceptable route to adulthood and independence. Men who chose to remain bachelors were branded “narcissistic,” “deviant,” “infantile,” or “pathological.” Family advice expert Paul Landes argued that practically everyone, “except for the sick, the badly crippled, the deformed, the emotionally warped and the mentally defective,” ought to marry. French anthropologist Martine Segalen writes that in Europe the postwar period was characterized by the overwhelming “weight of a single family model.” Any departure from this model—whether it was late marriage, nonmarriage, divorce, single motherhood, or even delayed childbearing—was considered deviant. Everywhere psychiatrists agreed and the mass media affirmed that if a woman did not find her ultimate fulfillment in homemaking, it was a sign of serious psychological problems.
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A 1957 survey in the United States reported that four out of five people believed that anyone who preferred to remain single was “sick,” “neurotic,” or “immoral.” Even larger majorities agreed that once married, the husband should be the breadwinner and the wife should stay home. As late as 1961, one survey of young women found that almost all expected to be married by age twenty-two, most hoped to have four children, and all expected to quit work permanently when the first child was born.
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During the 1950s even women who had once been political activists, labor radicals, or feminists—people like my own mother, still proud of her work to free the Scottsboro Boys from legal lynching in the 1930s and her job in the shipyards during the 1940s—threw themselves into homemaking. It’s hard for anyone under the age of sixty to realize how profoundly people’s hunger for marriage and domesticity during the 1950s was shaped by their huge relief that two decades of depression and war were finally over and by their amazed delight at the benefits of the first real mass consumer economy in history. “It was like a miracle,” my mother once told me, to see so many improvements, so quickly, in the quality of everyday life.

Up until 1950 most families’ discretionary income did not cover much more than an occasional meal away from home; a beer or two after work; a weekly trip to the movies, amusement park, or beach; and perhaps a yearly vacation, usually spent at the home of relatives. Few households had washing machines and dryers. Refrigerators had only tiny spaces for freezing ice and had to be defrosted at least once a week. Few houses had separate bedrooms for all the children.

But starting in the late 1940s, millions of new houses were built and furnished with conveniences and comforts that would have been unimaginable ten years earlier. Separate bedrooms suddenly became the norm. The number of Americans with discretionary income, money left over after the basic bills were paid, doubled during the 1950s. By the mid-1950s nearly 60 percent of the population had “middle-class” income levels, compared with only 31 percent in the “prosperous twenties.” By 1960 nearly two-thirds of all American families owned their own homes, 87 percent had televisions, and 75 percent owned cars.
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Progress was slower in war-ravaged Europe, but there too each year brought measurable gains in families’ living standards and conveniences.

This was the first chance many people had to try to live out the romanticized dream of a private family, happily ensconced in its own nest. They studied how the cheery husbands and wives on their favorite television programs organized their families (and where the crabby ones went wrong). They devoured articles and books on how to get the most out of marriage and their sex lives. They were even interested in advertisements that showed them how to use home appliances to make their family lives better.

I like to show my students an hourlong film put out by General Electric in 1956. In this long advertisement for electricity, mom discovers that her new clothes dryer gives her the chance to bond with her daughter and pick up some of the “groovy” slang of the expanding teen pop culture. Mom then shows her daughter how to use the family’s new freezer and self-timing oven to make a meal that will impress the cute roommate her older son has brought home from college. The visitor likes his oven-baked ham, frozen orange juice, and electrically whipped dessert so much that he skips the dreary lecture he’d planned to attend and takes the ecstatic daughter dancing. All this was achieved by living better electrically.