Marriage, a History (72 page)

27
For the whole passage, which includes all quotes used in the following paragraphs, see John Sirjamaki, “Cultural Configurations in the American Family,”
American Journal of Sociology
53 (1948).

28
Claire Duchen,
Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944-1968
(London: Routledge, 1994).

29
For the figures in this and the next several paragraphs, see: Modell,
Into One’s Own;
Kline,
Building a Better Race;
Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat;
Sandra Hofferth, “The American Family: Changes and Challenges,” in Helen Wallace, Gordon Green, and Kenneth Jaros, eds.,
Health and Welfare for Families in the 21
^st
Century
(Sudbury, Mass.: Jones and Bartlett, 2003);
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1975); Jessica Weiss,
To Have and to Hold: Marriage, the Baby Boom and Social Change
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); Braybon and Summerfield,
Out of the Cage;
Gillis,
For Better, for Worse
(see chap. 7, n. 13); William J. Goode,
World Revolution in Family Patterns
(New York: Free Press, 1963); James Ponxetti, ed.,
International Encyclopedia of Marriage and Family
(New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2003).

30
Italy and Switzerland were among the few exceptions. Italian marriage rates dropped after the war and did not begin to rise until late in the 1950s. Switzerland’s marriage rates, which had long been lower than most other regions of Europe, remained so right up through the 1980s. But in both West and East Germany, the rate of marriage rose so much during the 1950s that by the early 1960s even women of the World War II generation, who had experienced the massive loss of men in their age categories during the war, were as likely to be married as women of the same age had been before the war. And younger women were much
more
likely to be married than their prewar counterparts. In France, the marriage rate peaked between 1946 and 1950 and remained at historically high levels until the mid-1960s. Heineman,
What Difference Does a Husband Make?;
Duchen,
Women’s Rights.
For other variations, see Olga Toth and Peter Robert, “Sociological and Historical Aspects of Entry into Marriage,”
Journal of Family History
19 (1994); Pier Paolo Viazza, “Illegitimacy and the European Marriage Pattern,” in Lloyd Bonfield, Richard Smith, and Keith Wrightson, eds.,
The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure
(Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

31
Patrick Festy, “On the New Context of Marriage in Western Europe,”
Population and Development Review
6 (1980); Chiara Saraceno, “The Italian Family: Paradoxes of Privacy,” in Prost and Vincent, eds.,
Riddles of Identity in Modern Times;
Sheila Kamerman and Alfred Kahn,
Family Change and Family Policies in Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States
(Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1997); R. L. Cliquet,
The Second Demographic Transition: Fact or Fiction?
(Strasbourg: Council of Europe Population Studies No. 23, 1991); Michael Young and Peter Willmott,
The Symmetrical Family
(New York: Penguin, 1975); Martine Segalen,
Love and Power in the Peasant Family
(Oxford, U.K.: Basil Blackwell, 1983).

32
Rothman,
Hands and Hearts,
p. 301; Weiss,
To Have and to Hold,
p. 23; Goode,
World Revolution,
p. 48.

33
Weiss,
To Have and to Hold,
p. 23; Modell,
Into One’s Own,
pp. 48-49, 248-49.

34
Weiss,
To Have and to Hold;
Kline,
Building a Better Race,
p. 125; Owram,
Born at the Right Time;
Goode,
World Revolution and Family Patterns;
Jennifer Loehlin,
From Rugs to Riches: Housework, Consumption and Modernity in Germany
(Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1999).

35
Michael Anderson, “The Social Implications of Demographic Change,” in F. M. L. Thompson, ed.,
The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950,
vol. 2:
People and Their Environment,
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Daniel Scott Smith, “Recent Change and the Periodization of American Family History,”
Journal of Family History
20 (1995); Cliquet,
Second Demographic Transition;
M. Nabil El-Khorazaty, “Twentieth-Century Family Life Cycle,”
Journal of Family History
22 (1997).

36
John Modell details this speeding up and converging of life transitions for the United States, in
Into One’s Own,
but it also occurred throughout Western Europe and in Canada. For more on the convergence of marriage patterns across social classes and ethnic groups, see Michael Young and Peter Willmot,
Family and Kinship in East London
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957); John Goldthorpe et al.,
The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1969); Peter Willmott and Michael Young,
Family and Class in a London Suburb
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960); Erica Carter,
How German Is She?: Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Deborah Simonton,
A History of European Women’s Work
(New York: Routledge, 1998); Duchen,
Women’s Rights;
Karen Anderson,
Changing Woman: A History of Racial Ethnic Women in Modern America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Valerie Matsumoto,
Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-1982
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993); Denise Segura, “Working at Motherhood,” in Evelyn Glenn, Grace Chang and Linda Forcey, eds.,
Mothering: Ideology, Experience, and Agency
(New York: Routledge, 1994). Of course, this convergence in marriage behavior and ideals by no means lessened the huge gap between the economic and social options of different social groups or eliminated cultural differences in their interpretation of marriage and gender.

37
Mintz and Kellogg,
Domestic Revolutions;
Goode,
World Revolution and Family Patterns;
Hanna Diamond,
Women and the Second World War in France
(Harlow, U.K.: Longmans, 1999); Simonton,
A History of European Women’s Work;
Owram,
Born at the Right Time
; Melanie Nolan, “A Subversive State?: Domesticity in Dispute in 1950s New Zealand,”
Journal of Family History
27 (2002); Colin Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family: A Reappraisal,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
38 (1996); Donald Hernandez,
America’s Children: Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy
(New York: Russell Sage, 1993); Daphne Spain and Suzanne Bianchi,
Balancing Act: Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American Women
(New York: Russell Sage, 1996).

1
Owram,
Born at the Right Time,
p. 22 (see chap. 13 n. 20); Elaine Tyler May,
Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
(New York: Basic Books, 1988); Barbara Ehrenreich,
The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment
(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1983), pp. 14-28; Douglas Miller and Marson Nowak,
The Fifties: The Way We Really Were
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1977), p. 154; Duchen,
Women’s Rights
(see chap. 13, n. 28); Marjorie Ferguson,
Forever Feminine: Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity
(London: Heinemann, 1983); Moeller,
Protecting Motherhood
(see chap. 13, n. 22); Martine Segalen, “The Family in the Industrial Revolution,” in Burguière et al., p. 401 (see chap. 8, n. 2).

2
Daniel Yankelovich,
New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down
(New York: Random House, 1981); Lois Gordon and Alan Gordon,
American Chronicle: Seven Decades in American Life, 1920-1989
(New York: Crown, 1990).

3
Coffin et al.,
Western Civilizations
(see chap. 10, n. 29); Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were
(New York; Basic Books, 1992); Andrew Hurley,
Diners, Bowling Alleys and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture
(New York: Basic Books, 2001) William Chafe,
The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

4
Ferguson,
Forever Feminine,
p. 31.

5
I remember watching this show once when I was twelve and sobbing because all the women deserved to win. My mother was furious at the whole concept. “They’re using other people’s poverty to advertise their goods to the rest of us,” she fumed. For a detailed analysis of the show, confirming my mother’s instincts, see Georganne Scheiner, “Would You Like to Be Queen for a Day?,”
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
23 (2003).

6
Alan Ehrenhalt,
The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s
(New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. 233; modernity quote from the French woman’s magazine
Marie-Claire,
in Duchen,
Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives,
p. 73 (see chap. 13, n. 28).

7
Quoted in Ruth Rosen,
The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America
(New York: Viking, 2000), p. 44.

8
Coontz,
The Way We Never Were,
p. 25; Rosenteur, quoted in Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat,
p. 76 (see chap. 12, n. 11).

9
Martha Wolfenstein, “Fun Morality” [1955], in Warren Susman, ed.,
Culture and Commitment, 1929-1945
(New York: George Braziller, 1973), pp. 84, 90; Coontz,
The Way We Never Were,
p. 171.

10
Ernest Burgess and Harvey Locke,
The Family: From Institution to Companionship
(New York: American Book Company, 1960), pp. 479, 985, 538.

11
Molly Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA,”
Gender & History
13 (2001), pp. 312, 318.

12
Nisbet, quoted in John Scanzoni, “From the Normal Family to Alternate Families to the Quest for Diversity with Interdependence,”
Journal of Family Issues
22 (2001); Mirra Komarovsky,
Women in the Modern World: Their Education and Their Dilemmas
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1953).

13
Talcott Parsons, “The Kinship System of the United States” in Parsons,
Essays in Sociological Theory
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954); Parsons and Robert Bales,
Family, Socialization, and Interaction Processes
(Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1955).

14
Ladd-Taylor, “Eugenics.”

15
Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to the Present
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975); Sheila Tobias and Lisa Anderson, “What Really Happened to Rosie the Riveter,”
Mss Modular Publications
9 (1973).

16
Ruth Pierson,
“They’re Still Women After All”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood
(Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986); Penny Summerfield, “Women in Britain Since 1945,” in James Obelkevich and Peter Catterall, eds.,
Understanding Post-War British Society
(London: Routledge, 1994); Loehlin,
From Rugs to Riches
(see chap. 13, n. 34); Eva Kolinsky,
Women in Contemporary Germany
(Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1989);
United Nations Demographic Yearbooks
(New York: United Nations, 1953, 1962, 1968).

17
Beth Bailey, “Scientific Truth . . . and Love: The Marriage Education Movement in the United States,”
Journal of Social History
20 (1987).

18
Steven D. McLaughlin et al.,
The Changing Lives of American Women
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1988); William Chafe,
The Paradox of Change: American Women in the Twentieth Century
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

19
M. Therese Seibert, Mark Fossett, and Dawn Baunach, “Trends in MaleFemale Inequality, 1940-1990,”
Social Science Research
26 (1997).

20
Rosen,
World Split Open,
pp. 41-42, 26; Myra Strober and Agnes Miling Kaneko Chan,
The Road Winds Uphill All the Way: Gender, Work, and Family in the United States and Japan
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 16-17; Mintz and Kellogg,
Domestic Revolutions,
p. 181 (see chap. 13, n. 2).

21
Craig Heinicke, “One Step Forward: African-American Married Women in the South, 1950-1960,”
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
31 (2000); Bart Landry,
Black Working Wives: Pioneers of the American Family Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

22
Miller and Nowak,
The Fifties,
pp. 164-65; Weiss,
To Have and to Hold,
p. 19 (see chap. 13, n. 29); Rosen,
World Split Open,
p. 41.

23
Glenna Mathews,
“Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Betty Friedan,
The Feminine Mystique
(New York: Dell, 1963).

24
Bailey,
From Front Porch to Back Seat,
p. 111.

25
Mirra Komarovsky,
Blue-Collar Marriage
(New Haven: Vintage, 1962), p. 331. Mintz and Kellogg,
Domestic Revolutions,
p. 194; Norval Glenn, “Marital Quality,” in David Levinson, ed.,
Encyclopedia of Marriage and the Family
(New York: Macmillan, 1995), vol. 2, p. 449.