Marriage, a History

by Stephanie Coontz

  Governments also used positive measures to shore up male breadwinner marriages. In the United States women as well as men benefited from New Deal programs such as the Social Security Act of 1935. But Social Security’s safety net had a large hole: Agricultural and seasonal workers, who were disproportionately African American and Latino, were exempted. New Deal policies also codified a two-tier form of social welfare assistance: Government aid to working men and their families was an “entitlement,” while aid to unmarried women and widows was available only through means-tested “charity” programs, which offered lower levels of assistance.10

  In 1939 the Social Security Act was amended to provide survivors’ benefits for the wives and minor children of men who died before age sixty-five, though these benefits were forfeited if wives remarried. The 1939 reforms also increased a married man’s retirement benefit by 50 percent once his wife reached age sixty-five, even if she had never held a paid job. Policy makers recognized that single male workers and all female workers were being overtaxed to support married couples. But this was seen as a good thing because it increased a man’s incentive to marry and decreased his wife’s incentive to take paid work.11

  European governments also experimented with social programs to encourage male breadwinner families but reacted in more diverse ways to the 1930s plunge in birthrates. In Germany, the Nazis launched a two-prong approach. They went on an aggressive campaign to sterilize the “unfit”—drunkards, deaf-mutes, epileptics, mentally ill individuals, and the like. Historian Gisela Bock estimates that four hundred thousand individuals were sterilized in the course of this campaign. But the Nazis also banned the birth control groups that had emerged during the 1920s, in order to ensure that “Aryan” women produced as many children as possible for the “master race.”12

  In the United States, by contrast, legislators were as eager as most individual families to avoid having “too many mouths to feed.” The federal government relaxed prohibitions on birth control and even funded contraceptive programs. Southern states, hoping to limit the growth of their already substantial African American populations, were pioneers in providing birth control services. But most states soon joined the trend, and many also promoted forced sterilization, although on a much smaller scale than in Germany. In this way, birth control lost its earlier association with women’s autonomy and became centered on population control.13

  “You Are Now the Husband of a Career Woman”

  The onset of World War II reversed many of the Depression-era trends in marriage. A “marriage fever” swept most countries in the early years of the conflict. In Europe the coming of the war turned attention away from the marriage counseling programs of the 1920s. In the United States, however, marriage counselors and educators argued that the war made it all the more imperative to educate young people about the value of marriage.

  One teacher of a course on marriage and family life reported to the National Council on Family Relations how she had buoyed up her female students after the announcement that war had been declared. Many of the girls, she reported, put their heads down on their desks in fear and despair. But she sternly instructed them to get hold of themselves. If you react this way “when dangers are yet at a distance,” she quoted herself as saying, “what will you do in the face of emergencies in marriage—when John may say that he does not like your cooking and is going home to Mother?” This challenge to their womanly resolve, she said, did the trick. “Heads lifted and faces became set with determination.”14

  When John actually went off to war, however, many wives decided that improving their cooking was less urgent than contributing something more tangible to the war effort. Married women poured into the workforce during World War II, on a much more financially rewarding and culturally approved basis than in the past. The female labor force increased by almost 60 percent in the United States between 1940 and 1945, and three-fourths of the new women workers were married. More than 350,000 women enlisted in the Woman’s Army Corps and the nursing units of the army and navy, although the U.S. military set a 2 percent cap on the proportion of women in the armed forces.15

  As part of the war effort, women worked in jobs that had previously been unthinkable for their sex. They became pipe fitters, mechanics, welders, carpenters, and shipfitters. They not only did “men’s jobs” but earned “men’s wages.” The feeling of empowerment this generated radiates from the excited letter one American woman wrote to her soldier husband on June 12, 1944: “Darlin’: You are now the husband of a career woman—just call me your Little Ship Yard Babe. . . . Opening my little checking account too and it’s a grand and a glorious feeling to write a check all your own and not have to ask for one.”16

  The war opened unprecedented opportunities for African American women. Most had already worked all their adult lives, but unlike white women, they had remained pigeonholed in menial and domestic work during the economic expansion of the 1920s. Suddenly, many were able to get higher-paid manufacturing or white-collar jobs. Decades later a black woman commented that it was really Hitler, not Lincoln, who had freed the slaves!17

  In contrast with the Depression years, the government encouraged paid work for women, married as well as single, during the war years. Public service ads warned that soldiers would die unless women took over the production lines that the men had left behind. The lovely face and well-muscled arms of the fictional “Rosie the Riveter” graced the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and thousands of posters. A song about Rosie came out in 1942. “She’s making history,/Working for victory,” went the lyrics. “Keeps a sharp lookout for sabotage,/Sitting up there on the fuselage. That little girl will do more than a male will do.” The songwriters were careful to note that Rosie had a boyfriend: “Charlie, he’s a Marine./Rosie is protecting Charlie,/ Working overtime on the riveting machine.”

  Initially, women saw their work as “just for the duration,” an emergency measure undertaken for patriotism, not personal fulfillment. Most expected to leave the workforce when the war ended. A June 1944 Ladies’ Home Journal article on women workers assured readers that women would happily give up their jobs after the war. “If the American woman can find a man she wants to marry, who can support her, a job fades into insignificance beside the vital business of staying at home and raising a family,” the author wrote.18

  But many women came to enjoy the work they did during the wartime emergency, as well as its economic benefits, and wanted to remain at their jobs after the war. As production was scaled back in late 1945, women in many cities protested the layoffs they faced, and a few unions went to bat for them. The protests had little effect. Women, especially those in well-paid, unionized jobs, were ushered out of the labor force in droves between 1944 and 1947.

  Most women agreed the veterans should get their old jobs back, but many felt a searing sense of loss. A former servicewoman wrote in the April 1945 issue of the Canadian Home Journal that sending women back to the home was “like putting a chick back in the shell—it cannot be done without destroying spirit, heart or mind.”19

  By associating women’s work with men’s economic failure, the Depression had reinforced the appeal of the male breadwinner family. World War II, by contrast, left a much more positive image of working women. For years afterward women spoke nostalgically about their wartime work experiences, and many sought to rejoin the workforce in the 1950s. But the end of the war also brought a renewed enthusiasm for marriage, female homemaking, and the male breadwinner family.

  In part this was a reaction to the deprivation of the war years. The United States and Canada did not suffer the same privations and physical destruction as Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan during the war, but even in North America, the years of separation, worry, and material shortages had taken their toll. Consumer goods and housing had become scarce as the economy concentrated on war production. Couples who married during the war often had to live with one set of parents. Canadian historian Doug Owram argues that a “romanticize
d and idealized vision of family was a natural reaction to years of disruption.”20

  Marriage experts of the day worried, however, that while the men were off at war, women had gotten too used to being in charge of the house and the checkbook. “He’s head man again,” the American magazine House Beautiful reminded its female readers. “Your part . . . is to fit his home to him, understanding why he wants it this way, forgetting your own preferences.” In 1945, James Bossard, a leading family sociologist in the United States, declared that women’s hearts had to be stoked to “a white glow of appreciation” for their role as homemakers. To prepare female students for their future as wives and mothers, the head of marriage and family life courses at the University of Illinois in 1947 exempted them from doing a term paper if they did six hours of babysitting during the term.21

  Postwar social welfare states in Europe and North America provided more substantive incentives for men and women to embrace the male breadwinner /female homemaker model of marriage. In America, the GI Bill paid full tuition and a living stipend for veterans who enrolled in college. Veterans with families got extra money, and none of the money had to be repaid.22

  The GI Bill was, hands down, the most successful affirmative action program in American history. By the end of the 1940s returning veterans made up nearly half the student bodies of most colleges and universities. The government also made very cheap mortgages available to veterans. These federal subsidies moved millions of working-class Americans into middle-class occupations and lifestyles in the 1950s. People who had never even expected to finish high school became engineers, accountants, teachers, physicians, dentists, and bank officers.

  However, this affirmative action policy primarily benefited white men. African American veterans faced such widespread discrimination in housing and education that their ability to reap the full benefits of the GI Bill was limited, while women, only 2 percent of all veterans to begin with, got fewer benefits than their male counterparts. A female veteran who attended college got a smaller allowance for her spouse than a male veteran. Sometimes female veterans had to prove that they were not being supported by a male wage earner. There was no such requirement for male veterans, many of whose wives were working to supplement the GI Bill’s living stipends.23

  In 1948 even the U.S. federal income tax was changed to favor married couples who had one primary earner. Married couples could now file jointly and split their income. Joint filing allowed the high earner in the family to attribute half his income to his wife even if she earned little or nothing, which moved the family into a lower tax bracket. A man who supported a nonemployed wife often paid only half the taxes of a single man making the same amount of money.24 (This tax provision still gives a bonus to male breadwinner families, but it has become known as the marriage tax because in two-earner couples, now the majority of marriages, each has to pay the higher rate.)

  Yet it was not clear that even the combined strength of all these marriage-friendly measures could counteract the social disruption and family instability that had marked the war years. The United States saw a sharp rise in unwed births during the war, and the end of the conflict brought a huge jump in divorce. By 1946 more than one in every three marriages was ending in divorce. Even when couples stayed together, tensions often simmered beneath the surface. A study of young families after the war found that four times as many veterans reported painful, even traumatic reunions as remembered joyful ones.25

  Once again the “crisis” of marriage and gender roles became a huge public concern. In their best-selling 1947 book The Modern Woman: The Lost Sex, American authors Marynia Farnham and Ferdinand Lundberg accused career women of symbolically castrating their husbands. The only thing worse than a married career woman, in their view, was an unmarried one. They argued that “all spinsters be barred by law from having anything to do with the teaching of children on the ground of . . . emotional incompetence.” Feminism, they said, was a “deep illness,” caused by modern women’s neurotic desire to be like men, and it posed a massive threat to the family.26

  A more optimistic school of thought held that male-female roles had stabilized since the war and marriage was regaining its appeal. In 1948 sociologist John Sirjamaki claimed that modern Americans were well-nigh unanimous in their values about marriage and family life. His description of these values included many of the very same features that had worried observers in the 1920s. But Sirjamaki, unlike his predecessors, did not perceive them as a serious threat.27

  Sirjamaki declared that marriage was now universally seen as “the normal and desirable” condition for all adults. People chose their mates on the basis of affection, and all agreed that the mark of a successful marriage was “the personal happiness of husband and wife.” Americans now embraced “individual, not familial, values,” so that in a reversal of the past, “the family exists for its members rather than the members [existing] for the family.” He also pointed to two other features of “modern” marriage: the crucial importance of a satisfying sexual relationship and women’s tremendous advance toward legal equality.

  But Sirjamaki did not believe these elements were a threat to the establishment of lasting marriages. He expressed no worry that the pursuit of personal happiness might collide with the preservation of marital stability. Although sex “exploded” in importance once a couple married, the new emphasis on sexuality would not create alternatives to marriage, he contended, because most people frowned on sex outside wedlock. And even though women had attained “near equality” with men in public life, this did not threaten the male provider family, because Americans still thought that marital roles “should be based on a sexual division of labor, . . . with the male status being superior.”

  So as the 1940s came to an end, popular opinion and scholarly thought were divided about what the 1950s would bring. One school of thought held that the modern values of individualism, the “pleasure principle,” sexual expressiveness, and women’s rights would destabilize marriage. The other school believed that the male breadwinner marriage would remain the cultural norm, with sex safely contained inside it.

  The Dawn of Marriage’s Golden Age

  The early 1950s seemed to confirm the optimistic view about the stability of postwar marriage and gender roles. Women around the world seemed happy to leave their wartime experiences behind and embrace their role as homemakers and mothers. No 1950s version of the New Woman arose to flout convention or celebrate the single life. Nor was there any sign of a resurrected feminist movement. It’s true that in France, Simone de Beauvoir’s 1949 book The Second Sex, which criticized marriage and domesticity, sold twenty-two thousand copies in its first week. But response from critics and most of the reading public was hostile.28

  Despite wartime sexual experimentation at home and on the front, with the end of the war most men and women rushed to marry and start families. In most of Europe and all across North America, the age of marriage fell and the rates of marriage rose. By 1950 American women were marrying at a younger age than any time in the past half century, and later in the decade the age of marriage reached an all-time low. By 1959 almost half of all women were married by age nineteen, and 70 percent were married by twenty-four. Men were also marrying younger and in greater numbers. In 1900, only 22 percent of American males between twenty and twenty-four were married, but in 1950 more than 40 percent of that age-group had tied the knot. Meanwhile, divorce rates were dropping from their postwar peak. By 1958 the divorce rate was less than half as high as it had been in 1947.29

  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 ha
d 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.30

  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.31

  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.