6—
The Baby Boom

"Coke for Breakfast"

The prosperity that World War II brought to young people continued into the 1950s, if on somewhat changed terms. The rebuilding of residential America after fifteen years of neglect—often but not exclusively in the form of suburbs—provided them with congenial settings to enjoy their personal prosperity. So, too, did the large consolidated high schools that rapidly appeared in the period. The success of the nation's young men and women in establishing marriages during the war or immediately following its conclusion—if relatively many failed, most succeeded—and of the returning veterans in picking up and improving on the life courses they had left off was apparent. Young people in the postwar were led to a cool assertiveness about their ability to make their own choices, which, challenging no moral precepts, their elders were in no position to deny. As one trashy but perceptive piece of short fiction had it, they could have, "Coke for Breakfast" and still come into their own, in their own time. This chapter explores the rather shallow limits of adult resistance to the modest youth innovation of this period and the operation of the dating system, the classic locus of American youth culture at its most elaborate. Dating, in turn, will be seen in its relationship to marriage and, in particular, to the way that baby boom families organized themselves, temporally and ideologically.

"Coke for Breakfast," published in True Love in 1959, places in mythic high relief the cultural motives that accompanied the baby boom's downward revision of the timetable for family-building.^[1] The story recounts the challenged but ultimately successful efforts of a very young couple to assert the right to be married and still drink Coke for breakfast rather than coffee,

as convention prescribed. "I know. Married couples don't drink Coke for breakfast. They don't stay in bed till noon and they don't party till dawn. . . . That is, other married couples don't. We do."

The marriage of Jill and Pete in "Coke for Breakfast" began a bit too soon but much too impetuously. After the fall Bunny Hop, four long-standing high school couples, on a mutual dare, drove to a Gretna Green to get married. "Buzzy jumped up on the bed, waving his cup and shouting, "Teenagers of the world—unite!' And we all began throwing rice at each other." Parents shortly intervened and brought about the annulment of two of the marriages, the third couple, refusing, was disowned by their parents. Although skeptical, neither Jill's nor Pete's parents forced the issue. Their school allowed them to remain enrolled but expelled them from extracurricular activities.

And Jill and Pete truly loved one another, as sixteen-year-olds sometimes did in the 1950s. Being married seemed to suit them and, of course, it demonstrated a further assumption by adolescents of prerogatives formerly their parents'. "Just think—no one telling us what time we have to come home, no one nagging we see each other too much. . . . And best of all, no more saying no to each other." The marriage was a fulfillment that Jill and Pete had long expected, although not so early.

It seemed like the whole sixteen years of my life had been building to this moment—being Pete Tempest's wife. We'd been steadies since the end of my freshman year and his sophomore year in high, and we hadn't made any secret of how we wanted to be married. Our folks didn't mind—the Tempests liked me and my folks were flipped over Pete—but we got the usual 'wait-till-you-finish-school' routine. And that meant two whole years because I was only a junior. But maybe we'd have stuck it out, if it hadn't been for tonight.

On the whole, marriage proved to agree with the young couple, who worked out home routines that resembled a continuation of going steady, and suited them both—although they were a little unconventional by adult standards.

The problematic aspect of the story was not conflict within the marriage but the adult world's insistence that if they wish

to be accepted as actually married, they must abandon Coke for breakfast, and like childish practices. Pete's young married cousins visit, at parental behest, to instruct Pete and Jill in proper married behavior.

I wondered, too, if maybe our folks weren't right in a way. We didn't act married; we acted like kids on a spree. And the more I looked around at married people I knew, the more different Pete and I seemed. . . . When you got married you followed a different set of rules and you had different friends—not a bunch of high school friends. It didn't matter that we were still in school. Getting married had changed all that; we'd stepped over the line into another world. And as far as I could see Pete and I didn't belong to either world. We were no longer kids and we hadn't become real marrieds yet.

Jill is more torn than Pete, who, naively, defies adult definition of the necessary grimness of their situation by buying a lovable puppy. This act, perhaps because of its blatant family-formation symbolism, irks the Tempests into cutting off all allowance. Pete responds by switching to night school and finding a day job adequate to keep them in Coke and the moderate squalor they choose.

"If not getting their ten dollars a week means not having to listen to their lectures, I can spare it. We can manage without them, and believe me, it'll be good living our own lives!" "That's right—Coke for breakfast!" I said hotly. . . . "Look, if the English eat smoked fish for breakfast, why can't we drink Coke? We're married, for crying out loud!" "Then why don't you act married?" I yelled. "What married people live like we do—always partying, living in a pigsty?"

They "try it," but near-adult sobriety predictably does not suit the marriage. And then, the trial that Jill had most feared: signs (later to be disconfirmed) of pregnancy. To her utter surprise, Pete is delighted. His love is true and of an order to sustain the full baby boom model of the home, indeed, to form and sustain the ideal-type baby boom life course. To Jill's even greater surprise, Pete self-assuredly reasserts his values even as he declares himself comfortable with postponing graduation so that he can

work to support the baby, self-consciously pouring the breakfast coffee down the drain and opening a Coke.

The anger began to rise in me again. 'Pete, how could you be a father and—and drink that for breakfast? How can you run things when you act like a kid?' He sighed. 'I don't know why I married such a thick woman! Look, have we fallen on our faces yet? Have we had to ask your folks to help us out of a jam? Have I ever not gone to work or not done my homework? We're getting along fine—at least where it counts. So what if we want to act crazy the rest of the time? Who's to say how married people act?' . . . So that's what I learned. Maybe Pete and I are just goofy because we're young; maybe we'll settle down, . . . maybe we'll drink Coke for breakfast all our lives. But whatever we do, I know now we're not irresponsible and we're not immature. We have a good marriage—and if we have a ball too—well, like I said in the beginning, some people are born lucky.

They were lucky indeed. Their insistent cultural innovativeness did not drive their parents away—really, they liked their goofy kids quite well, however baffling their choices. Nor did their imprudent timing preclude economic survival. Their surroundings were remarkably kind to them. And so it was in the baby boom.

In the mid-1950s, David Riesman remarked that teen culture, with its focus on the stylish date and proper appearance, especially for girls, was highly materialistic, engaged in consumption patterns that constituted anticipatory socialization for a nice house in the suburbs.^[2] In 1961, a local probability sample of adolescents, 16 to 19, both boys and girls, was asked whose tastes they used to "size up" their own prospective purchases of such items as personal clothing, toiletry, sports equipment, small appliances, insurance policies, and cars and related transportation. For virtually all items, parents provided the "buying frame of reference" more often than did friends, salesclerks, print media, and television.^[3]

That advertisers could now pitch their copy to young people in terms of credit purchases had a cultural significance that pushed beyond the merely economic and spoke to the self-image of the whole generation. Riesman and Howard Rose-

borough argue that "marriage itself, so to speak, is now bought on the installment plan, following the 'anticipatory socialization' of going steady from the seventh grade on. . . . [A child like this] will as a young married person assume as a right many of the items that for his parents were delayed and planned-for luxuries." They characterized these as part of "the capital equipment for domesticity."^[4] The "youth market" discussions found in marketing journals during these years looked at adolescents as more and more numerous, more and more prosperous, and thus able to command the respectful attention of conventional merchandisers, who, if shrewd, would sell to the adolescent a junior version of the kind of thing they soon would be buying as adults, adjusted to their essentially anticipatory life course stage.^[5] Teenage girls, wrote one shrewd student of advertising, "will be interested in knowing things that will help them make a better, happier marriage . . . They respond to appeals that take their problems seriously—that are stated in intense emotional terms."^[6] With self-fulfilling prophesy, advertisers assumed that girls and boys of the middle class (or aspiring thereto) were caught up in the baby boom idealization of the family—"the home"—as the source of affirmation as a competent, independent individual.

Affording Coke for Breakfast

Young people's belief that they could structure their lives ad lib derived significantly from a sense of economic well-being that spread rapidly after an initial period of uncertainty. When World War II ended, doubts—but not gloom—had temporarily replaced the buoyant optimism that had been engendered by the war economy. Seven in ten Americans in February 1946 thought it was "likely" that "we will have a widespread depression within the next ten years." Particularly diagnostic of the momentary mood of the respondents was a pair of questions that asked whether they thought their own "opportunities to succeed" exceeded those of their fathers and whether their sons' opportunities to succeed would exceed their own. Seven in ten thought their own chances were superior to their fathers', and even more believed that their sons' chances were

better than their own. But the trends since 1940 reinforced the point: while the item about own trends showed an upward trend, Americans were no more optimistic than they had been at the end of the Depression about their sons ' opportunities to succeed.^[7]

Evidently, Americans knew how good the war economy had been to them but had serious concerns about whether their sons would find an economy no more reliably vibrant than the one that had followed World War I.^[8] The war's gains, in short, were initially seen as having been highly significant to their own lives, as wiping out the Depression's legacy of personal setback, but as possibly superficial, not structural. In the 1946 poll and to an even greater extent in another similar poll in mid-1947, the overwhelming majority—between eight and nine in ten—of Americans believed that "the prices of most things you buy" had increased in the past six months and a substantial majority—between six and seven in ten—that "compared with six months ago" they were "finding it harder . . . to make both ends meet."^[9] Inflation worry was widespread, even as the public successfully demanded the cessation of price control so as to make the consumer goods after which they lusted the more rapidly available. The kind of individualistic economic and consumption motif that Marshall B. Clinard so acutely recognized in the widely condemned but never-eradicated wartime black market, however, soon found its voice, carrying the people along with a fervor that, rather than being sated, turned into personal optimism, especially among younger couples.^[10] Periodic inquiry into consumer finances (by the Institute of Survey Research at the University of Michigan) shows that in 1946, 41 percent of households headed by persons 20 to 29 years of age anticipated higher income that year than the last. Only 21 percent in the same age group anticipated declines in income. These figures contrast with 19 percent optimists and 26 percent pessimists among those 40 to 49. In 1947, the comparable figures for those 18 to 24 (the age categories had changed) were 38 percent expecting increases compared to just 11 percent anticipating declines. By the next year, anticipated gainers were more common than anticipated losers in every age category under age 65, by three to one among those 25 to 34 and by more than two to one among those 35 to 44.^[11]

Benjamin Caplan has argued that, paradoxically, it was the safe passage through a mild recession in 1948–49 that finally overcame the underlying doubts of Americans about the robustness of their economy.^[12] The early postwar period, consisting in long upswings, short downturns, and gradually rising prices, was as a whole experienced as unique in American history, despite or even because of its cyclicality.

Postwar psychological attitudes also fostered prosperity. Successful prosecution of the war, and the production feats which contributed so much to that success, had swept away the prewar pessimism about the viability of the economy. . . . [With short-term gains repeated over time] the foundation for continuing prosperity was strengthened by focusing attention on the underlying real prospects for expansion instead of the latent potential for depression.^[13]

The government's basically Keynesian behavior, coupled with an astonishingly rapid growth of installment credit throughout the latter half of the 1940s, kept the economy moving rapidly enough that even if inflation—initially fearsome—was present, it became an expected part of the economic environment, and not a cause for individual economic actors to be alarmed. "A principal reason for the continued inflation of the postwar years, then, is that depression has been avoided. . . . To a large extent, the inflationary bias exhibited by the postwar economy has been merely another aspect of its expansionary bias."^[14] Spending patterns changed.

Not irrelevant to Americans' expanding expression of material well-being was the huge savings that had been accumulated during the war, while the government held down consumer purchases so as to enlarge war production and hold back inflation.^[15] The contrast of this situation with the shattered economic resources of the Depression spoke eloquently. Most consumers in early 1946 did not expect to use much of their liquid assets in the coming year, but numbers who actually did so grew remarkably from 1945 to 1946, with particularly rapid increases seen in the youngest groups, even where these households had high incomes .^[16] But for a majority of American families in 1946, a certain amount of dissaving was pursued even to meet "general living expenses," as Americans became accustomed to living higher, in a material sense, than they had before. War

bonds were held widely, and Americans commonly allowed these to mature without renewing them: they were, after all, war bonds. Some even cashed them in before they matured.^[17] Not without some reversals, acute fears of inflation abated in the later 1940s, the sense of "good times" spread, and Americans began regularly to define themselves as better off than they had been in the previous year. In the minds of Americans, regularly increased wages outweighed the regularly increased prices: "making more money seems to be associated with the feeling that one is better off."^[18] One year into the Korean War, somewhat more people believed that the economic effect of the war would on balance be bad for the civilian economy, but by the end of 1952, almost three times as many thought that the war was good for domestic business.^[19] Commitment to the cold war paid off domestically. In 1953, consumers expected that prices would shortly decline again but that their incomes would continue to climb, so the war's end was accompanied by a decline in consumer confidence. But when the inflation fear proved nugatory, consumer confidence soared to a new high by mid-1955.^[20] From 1956 through the end of the decade, about one-third of consumers expected their economic situation to improve during the next year, and at all points except mid-1958 (where it reached 10 percent) fewer than one in ten expected that their economic situation might worsen.^[21] Not only had consumers developed a robust faith in the beneficence of the American economy but their personal economic optimism had come to depend less on their assessment of short-term trends.^[22] Between 1950 and 1960, optimistic and acquisitive consumers nearly doubled the ratio of outstanding credit to disposable income—a rise from 7 to 12 percent. As the future came to seem more certain in its material attributes, one could—and families and their creditors did—increasingly make advances on it: during the period, the mean length of installment-credit contracts increased by 40 percent for automobile loans and 18 percent for other durables. By 1956, consumer debt (apart from mortgages) was a part of the financial situation of two-thirds of American households in which the head was under 35. Between 1951 and 1956, the proportion of families with some consumer debt increased for all life-cycle stages, but it

increased the most often, both absolutely and relatively, among young families . The highest increase was among young married couples with children .^[23]

The suburbs burgeoned, making available relatively excellent, spacious, inviting housing prices that young couples could afford. Mortgage lending, aided by government guarantees, gave young people of the middle classes and sometimes the stable working class the credit they needed. To be sure, the suburbs were not the exclusive habitat of young married couples, but the popular association of the phenomena had an empirical basis. No less than 18 percent of the owner-occupied housing added to the stock between 1950 and 1956 went to families in which the husband was under 35 years of age. Sixty-three percent of metropolitan housing occupied by the young families between 1945 and 1950 was in the suburbs, 69 percent of that occupied in the first half of the 1950s, and 76 percent of that occupied between 1954 and 1956. Fully 44 percent of the houses owned by those under 35 were in the suburbs. The under-35 families had the 50 percent ownership mark in sight by 1956, and even the absolute number of renters under 35 decreased.^[24]

The increase in women's labor force participation in the 1950s was large and foretold major social change. By 1960, the overall rate of female labor-force participation exceeded its World War II maximum, and thoughtful bureaucrats, labor union officials, and women's advocates began to sense a new social trend.^[25] Young women just out of school and presumably in most cases ready for marriage did not increase their propensity to work for pay. But young wives and even young mothers did . The availability of part-time and, even more important, part-year work contributed to this trend, especially among wives with young children. Between 1948 and 1960, the proportion of wives with no children under 18 who were at work rose only from 28 percent to 31 percent. Over the same period, the proportion of wives with children between 6 and 18 who worked rose from 21 percent to 36 percent, and those with children under 6 rose from 11 percent to 23 percent.^[26] These patterns ran contrary to the initial response at the end of the temporary World War II demand for women's labor,

when "family-building" ideology clashed sharply with gainful employment.^[27] Almost three in eight wives at the height of the baby boom were working at about two years into their marriages—a great proportion of all those who had not yet borne children. The pattern was most prevalent among wives of white-collar husbands (a product of the higher earning capacity of many women who married such men, complementing their relatively delayed fertility) and most prevalent among women married to men working in sales, whose toehold in the middle classes was the least secure.^[28] The integration of marriage, fertility, and gainful employment was already in the 1950s taking on a startling new tenor. At the same time as the 1950s stressed domesticity, and the unique role of mothers in the care of their children, more and more young mothers were working. Growing proportions of teens, correspondingly, were less closely supervised.

The Perversity of Youth

In a world like this, however, money in the pocket sometimes seemed to threaten destructive temptations as much as to offer positive options. The family as well as the school and other social institutions often seemed to be weakened, age and gender roles to be in flux. Inevitably, many children must grow up too fast, and bad. Concern over the sexual delinquency of girls with soldiers had ended with the war, but in about 1953 "juvenile delinquency" once again became a hot topic, with a new focus.^[29] In 1954, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover listed no fewer than nine major causes of juvenile delinquency, including a lack of religion and growing permissiveness. His list also included sub-categories, four variants of failure within the school system and ten within the family.^[30] Converging surprisingly with this ideological theme was another that stressed the importance of "loyalty" to a solidary if pluralist school body. In furtherance of this theme, school officials pressed hard against such blunt instances of teenage particularism as high school fraternities and sororities, ethnic- and neighborhood-based groupings whose exclusionary behavior toward other students goaded officials who sought loyalty to the democratic whole.^[31]

A generalized concern over juvenile delinquency evokes the sense of ill-chosen innovation such as Coke for breakfast which haunted the period. Not very deep below the surface lay the fear of a youth culture with distinctive values—about the restraint of impulse and sexuality more particularly—and a deep resentment of that portion of adult commercial culture that pandered directly to the developing distinctive tastes of youth. Once before, commercial entertainment had been brought to heel—in the depth of the Depression, the Breen Office had an effect on the overt content of motion pictures. In the 1950s, the danger seemed everywhere. Feeding on this concern was a continuing three-year Senate hearing on aspects of juvenile delinquency. Senator Estes Kefauver here mixed together a somewhat forced view of children as innocents and revulsion at the culturally revolutionary possibilities of commercial culture, and young people's tendency to respond to the winds of change far faster than did public educational agencies. The star witness of these hearings was a psychiatrist, Frederic Wertham, who feared the disaffiliation of a whole generation.

There is a school in a town in New York State where there has been a great deal of stealing. Some time ago some boys attacked another boy and they twisted his arm so viciously that it broke in two places, and, just like in a comic book, the bone came through the skin. . . . In this same high school in 1 year 26 girls became pregnant. The score this year, I think, is eight. Maybe it is nine by now. . . . Here is a general moral confusion and I think that these girls are seduced mentally long before they are seduced physically, and, of course, all those people there are very, very great—not all of them, but most of them, are very great comic book readers, have been and are. As a remedy they have suggested a formal course of sex instruction in this school.^[32]

Even adolescents recognized these tensions, as, for example, in the realm of sexual expressiveness. Thus, in 1949, a national sample of high schoolers was asked whether they considered it "all right for young people to pet or 'neck' when they are out on dates," and whether their mother and their father thought so. Only 10 percent of boys thought it was always wrong to do so, but 39 percent thought their mother thought so, and 26

percent thought their father thought so. Among girls, considerably more—26 percent—thought it was never right to pet or neck, but even more—59 percent—thought their mothers believed this. And, consistent with gender-differentiated parental roles, 65 percent thought their fathers would prohibit all petting, if they could. Between 1950 and 1961, the plurality of comparable national samples of high school students who agreed that "intimate petting should be delayed until after marriage" grew slightly.^[33]

The subtle interpenetration of adult and nonadult criteria is neatly reflected in two lesser institutions identified with the period: teen magazines and parent-teen codes. The former, first produced in the 1950s, have had the reputation of being empty froth. The parent-teen codes, an older notion that grew to fleeting prominence in response to the juvenile delinquency scare of the 1950s, seemed to be merely joint communiqués of no binding force whatever. Both the magazines and the codes were adult inventions that depended on taking seriously teenagers' definitions of their own situations, each attempting to set limits to the scope of the youth culture's moral innovations, especially in the realms of sex and courtship. Each conceded seriousness to teenagers' self-supervised courtship institutions, while seeking to co-opt the youth culture to draw physically safe and morally unexceptionable lines around these and other practices.

Charles H. Brown's perspicuous analysis lays out the content and function of such texts as Teen World, Modern Teen , and Teen Parade . "The basic format is double-barreled: it has a confessional aspect and a cultic aspect. . . . The articles deal with the most intimate of matters. . . . The world of the teen-type magazine is the world as it looks to the teen-ager, and it often has a threatening or sinister aspect to the mothers of its readers."^[34] Throughout, the teen magazines "are edited in a way to protect the girl who is not ready for the advances of boys while at the same time not alienating the girl who is."^[35] The message, repeatedly, is autonomy of the individual, the need for each girl (or boy) to know herself and not to be ruled by exaggerated perceptions of the requirements for meeting peer pressure, particularly in the realm of sex. "The teenage magazines rec-

ognize that the absence of fixed and rigorously enforced codes puts a terrible burden on the unawakened girl. . . . The magazines' insistence on autonomy, therefore, is meant to furnish the same kind of protection to girls as that once supplied by the mores."^[36]

The movement to produce written voluntary compacts between groups of teenagers (typically presenting themselves as the whole teenage community) and parents (also presenting themselves corporatively) had its origins in the breakdown of the chaperonage system a generation before, but it spread widely only after World War II, particularly in the mid-1950s. Codes were typically drafted by committees of well-qualified, responsible youth and modified and ratified by parents. They characteristically addressed themselves to adolescents' responsibilities to their own parents, delineated proper and improper social behavior at parties and in dating, and established definite parental responsibilities for supporting legitimate adolescent activities. Allowances, transportation, and, most critically although most diffusely, a properly respectful attitude toward the self-conscious age group were offered.^[37]

As in earlier decades, the high school provided the main context for the evolution of adolescent perspectives on their own development. Large numbers of new students posed a challenge to educators. New facilities were required, and, especially in suburban jurisdictions demographically most nearly exclusively given over to childbearing, these were provided by taxpayers with an exceptional openhandedness. The comprehensive high school, offering a choice of both vocational training and college preparatory courses to virtually an entire age cohort, was viewed as a source of pride and provided a curricular goal to focus the consolidation of rural districts.^[38] Twenty-eight thousand high schools held the nation's high school students in 1950; but by 1960, only 2,000 new schools had been added—on net—to accommodate all the new students.^[39] The average number of students per public secondary school increased by nearly one-half between 1946 and 1960.

Part of the reason for the greatly accelerated flow through secondary education was its increased articulation with a much enlarged higher education system. The pace of change here

was especially impressive: around 1950, 41 percent of high school graduates went on to college, but a decade later, the percentage was up to 53 percent. Grade retardation was once again reduced. Where 25 percent of 14-year-old school enrollees were "too old" for their grade according to the figures in the 1950 census, by 1960, only 14 percent of 14-year-olds were "too old." In 1950, 77 percent of high schoolers were 14 to 17; in 1960, 82 percent were.^[40] The early postwar period was characterized by one particularly dramatic effort on the part of adults to segregate adolescents from younger children—the junior high school, an institution begun decades before to cater to the particular needs of the pre-adolescents, as that stage of development came to be defined. In the first session after the end of World War II, only 35 percent of secondary school students were attending a school that was a separate junior or senior high school, neither combining them nor lumping them with the elementary grades. Within six years, this proportion had climbed to 40 percent, and by the end of the 1950s, the proportion was up to 56 percent.^[41]

The schools came to provide virtually all adolescents with several years in a setting where, insulated from children of other ages and divided from the adults present by the formal and increasingly bureaucratic authority wielded by the latter, adolescents set powerful local norms, and devised polynucleated social structures that would enforce these on the children.^[42] The system, from one perspective, was better cut to the needs of the children within it, but at the same time, the children subjected to an institution so structured surely became more acutely aware of the normatively created need to keep up with the standard pace. The impact of the markedly increased age homogenization of the setting in which adolescents found themselves surely was substantial in itself, quite apart from explicit goals of educators, which, as Graebner argues, included the inculcation of a "vision of a democratic and therefore homogeneous student body."^[43]

Talcott Parsons, describing "the school class" of the late 1950s, saw the large, variegated high school as a field in which youth sorted themselves out according to a pattern fitted to adult role requirements but with the details of the patterns

overseen by the youth themselves. Large comprehensive high schools mixed many more categories of student than had the neighborhood-based schools that preceded them; and by the 1950s, high schools were replete with extracurricular activities. Students might distinguish themselves favorably either according to the intellectual criteria indicated by marks or according to criteria erected by the students themselves, like "personality." For Parsons, talents along the former lines suggested "specific-function" careers, "more or less technical ones."^[44] By contrast, students who were socially outstanding—"popular"—and prospered in semi-autonomous youth culture headed toward expressive "human relations" careers. Since reputation was assigned within the youth culture according to diverse criteria, cliques promoting particular variants and particular individuals were perhaps even more prominent in the 1950s than in earlier decades.

The Elaboration of the Dating System

The emotionally charged atmosphere of World War II, the lessened supervision of adolescents by their parents entailed by war absences and war work, and the much increased amounts of money available to adolescents had persuaded virtually the last shy boy to give dating a try and had spread the teen institution into every nook and cranny. A statewide Minnesota Juvenile Poll asked teenagers in 1946, "At what age do you think boys and girls should start having dates?" Less than one percent of both boys and girls said that they should not start having dates at all, and only 22 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls named an age as old as 17. A Minnesota State poll in the following year asked young people whether they "believe[d] that a boy or girl should consult his or her parents before making or accepting dates." On the whole, about two-thirds of the adolescents (12 to 17 years old) who expressed an opinion thought they should, girls to a considerably greater degree than boys. Neither socioeconomic variables nor religiosity nor rurality explained the variation within gender; what did , was a highly generalized compliance with authority, whether national or intrafamilial.^[45] By the late 1940s, to judge from Lowrie's several

high-school samples, dating was virtually universal by the end of high school.^[46]

From the perspective of the youth themselves, and, as it developed, from a life course perspective as well, dating was a key chore and opportunity.^[47] Some sense of how well understood and well accepted dating had become by the baby boom period can be derived by comparing girls' replies to a 1939 youth poll with a 1956 poll of adolescent girls, both asking about sources of conflict with parents. Disagreements over boy friends had afflicted 30 percent of the girls in 1939; only 7 percent so reported two decades later. How often to date, or appropriate places to go, brought half of the girls into disagreement with their parents before the war; but in 1956, only one in nine reported such conflict. And whereas almost three in four girls and their parents had struggled over how late it was appropriate to stay out on a date in 1939, only one-sixth of the girls in the baby boom period had not achieved a smooth entente with their parents on this touchy point. Perhaps these numbers overstate the change, but they do not belie the fact that what less than a generation earlier had been a common matter of contention between parents and daughters no longer was, now that parents had themselves grown up under the dating system.^[48] If dating in the 1920s had represented an aggrandizement of authority on the part of adolescents, parents by the 1950s agreed that dating constituted an arena within which adolescents learned values and even behaviors that were thoroughly, conventionally adult.^[49]

In his closely reasoned empirical analysis of 1950s high schools, James S. Coleman denies that the baby boom high school career constituted a moratorium phase during which adult-world criteria were suspended; nor was it the point at which a new generation remade its status system de novo . Rather, these were part of a social order in which mixed criteria were used to locate, evaluate, and pair up with one another for diverse enterprises. When Coleman inquired into the bases of regard among high schoolers, he found that the athletic stars were the most universally admired boys but that for girls, the single attribute that best explained prestige was popularity with boys. The valued characteristic was in each case significantly

dependent on personal, individual achievement, influenced only slightly by family background. Each was overseen by the adolescents themselves.^[50]

Not everybody in high school was outstanding in any particular characteristic, achieved or ascribed, youth dictated or adult prescribed. Because high schools were typically so large that some kind of categorization was necessary so that students could comfortably understand the social constellation that related directly to themselves, cliques were even more the order of the day in the 1950s than earlier—formations directed to not necessarily clearly formed special interest or talent but overtly to assigning and maintaining clear social positions within the school. In Coleman's schools, clique structure was founded on the very important dimension of grade level, plus two variably interrelated elements: socioeconomic background and (in essence) attitude toward the officially sanctioned activities of the school as opposed to one or another way of having a good time in ways designated by the teenagers themselves.^[51]

Cliques generally defined both the proper range of partners and the proper behavior on dates, and through gossip and other means of practical mutual regulation, cliques facilitated dating by reducing the very considerable uncertainty the practitioners might hold. And while frequency of dating was not in a simple way a function of clique membership, nothing made more difference to a girl's popularity with boys (that standard of value on the dating market) than being known as a member of "the leading crowd," composed of students who dressed well and knew it, who could project that self-confidence so rare among adolescents, who excelled in the organized social life of their schools.^[52] Insofar as dating and thus "popularity" had become a proximate step on the way to marriage, then, neither ascriptive criteria nor adult-defined criteria of achievement now dominated this part of the courtship process. Instead, what dominated were social structures endemic to the high school itself . A follow-up examination of marriage timing of the students whom Coleman studied in 1957–58 shows that for both girls and boys high school experiences contributed more to the explanation of marriage timing than did measured IQ, family socioeconomic background, educational expectations, or enroll-

ment in a college-preparatory curriculum. Dating frequency was strongly associated with prompt marriage. Higher grades were associated with later marriage.^[53]

Arthur Stinchcombe's acute study of the uneasy accommodation to adulthoods of only modest prospects among students at a primarily working-class high school shows how dating could still play a role in "rebellion" but in a different sense from a generation before. Stinchcombe found that many of the students he studied were alienated from the formal expectations of the school and, in search of symbolic expression of their alienation, arrogated as many markers of adulthood to themselves as they could. Smoking and driving were among these markers, and so was young marriage . Girls and (especially) boys who spurned the officially defined right behaviors were markedly more likely to claim these rights. They were also considerably more likely to date frequently.^[54]

The press toward marriage was particularly acute in the case of those girls who—unlike most—simply could not accommodate to school.

The ascriptive symbols of adulthood for girls tend not to require active claims. Adolescence for girls is a period of waiting until someone asks them to get married. . . . The substitution of the marriage market for the labor market [as in the case of boys] reduces rebellion among girls by providing symbols of coming adulthood which are not compatible with current adolescent status.^[55]

Havighurst discussed the same phenomenon in his 1950s investigation of a medium-sized midwestern city. There, some girls

followed marriage rather than school as a pathway to adulthood. . . . As they felt their way toward adulthood, they found the school to be an obstacle, a confusing, baffling situation, while it seemed just natural for them to quit school and get married. . . . Marriage is the only constructive behavior of which this type of girl is capable. Too often, she cannot support this role effectively, and no one is there to help her. But it works frequently enough.^[56]

Commonly enough, the respectable if somehow deviating early-marriage path to adulthood in fact turned out to provide young wives (and young husbands) with the structure they needed in

which to build psychological strengths.^[57] A life course could include Coke for breakfast when so many attendant structures led in just that direction and when Coke, in the end, was just another consumer product, ultimately assimilable to marriage and adulthood.

High school newspapers by the 1950s covered the dating scene assiduously. Under a variety of rubrics, the papers published lists of couples currently in being, clucked over the couples recently broken up, prodded more not-yet-formed couples into publishing their intentions, and built guessing games around such material. The Saint Paul Central High School Times even regularly published—evidently from official sources—a list of all the couples attending the climactic Junior-Senior Prom, until, in 1954, "since over 350 couples signed up for the Junior-Senior Prom, it is impossible for the Times to run the complete J.S. guest list."^[58]

Responses to a more or less representative national sample of high school students indicate a slight movement toward consensus that fourteen or fifteen is "the approximate age at which you think teen-agers should have their first date." (There was a like tendency to agree on preferred age at marriage.) The sexual content of dates also became more uniformly understood: in 1950, a minority of 35 percent had rejected the idea of a dating couple kissing on their first date, but eleven years later this minority was reduced to 25 percent. At the same time, the decade saw a substantial shift toward gender asymmetry in the structure of the date. The minority who agreed that "it would be a good thing if girls could be as free as boys in asking for dates" declined from 37 percent to 26 percent, and the majority who considered it "a good thing if girls would pay half the expense of dates" declined from 25 percent to 18 percent.^[59]

A national sample of high school youth, interviewed in 1960, indicates that by the freshman year in high school, a very considerable majority of girls and only slightly fewer boys had begun dating, at least occasionally. For both boys and girls, dating typically began in a sporadic fashion, after each had, according to self-perception, been "in love" and had had a "girlfriend" or "boy friend" but before they really had any clear notion of reproductive biology. (A year, on the average, would pass before

the first "special" kiss, to be sure.)^[60] Table 29 indicates the proportions who had dated among members of each high school class, categorized by the students' fathers' occupational type. The results demonstrate the almost complete ubiquity of the institution at this time, although there is a small reminder at the early grades of the middle-class origins of dating.^[61]

While the general outlines of the institution of dating were by this time common to both whites and blacks, black boys seem to have begun their engagement in the dating system somewhat earlier and black girls at the same age. Broderick's study of children from 10 to 17 in a single Pennsylvania city revealed that "Negro boys . . . showed none of the heterosexual reserve of the white boys, . . . and, in fact, showed a higher level of heterosexual interaction at 12–13 than the girls did." Broderick speculated that "the pattern of social-sexual development in the Negro subculture may differ markedly from that of the dominant culture."^[62] For present purposes, however, what is most notable is the extent that dating among blacks resembled that among whites by this time, in view of the very considerable racial differences in marriage patterns, and the slight development of the dating institution among black youth a generation earlier.

The first date for both boys and girls was a moment of considerable anxiety, a real hurdle in growing up. About two-

thirds of a sample of seniors, both boys and girls, in a southern urban high school in 1954 agreed that on their first dates they "felt pretty scared that I'd say or do something wrong."^[63] A large but nonrepresentative survey of high school students in the mid-1950s found that "dating" was an item of extremely widespread "interest" to freshmen and sophomores—boys slightly more than girls—outstripping among them even "normal sex relations" and "demands of the opposite sex." By junior and senior year, however, interest in dating per se had dropped slightly, so that the other two subjects exceeded them in breadth of interest, particularly among girls, for whom subjects relating directly to marriage were also highly salient.^[64] A representative national survey in 1963 revealed that half of high school freshmen worried about how seldom they had dates, a proportion that gradually declined to one in three by senior year.^[65]

Median dates per week grew rather steadily throughout high school, for both boys and girls, of white-collar, blue-collar, and farm backgrounds. The age that boys and girls had begun dating continued to matter throughout high school: those who had entered the dating market relatively early were the more frequent daters at subsequent ages. By the junior and senior years (even omitting those who had never dated), the differences in dating frequency between early daters and later daters amounted to almost double for boys.^[66]

Going Steady

Going steady became the linchpin of the whole system of developing adolescent heterosexual relationships in the 1950s. The "steady" arrangement added a strong, institutionalized node in the career that led from early heterosexual sociability to early marriage and extended downward into the high school years some of the emotional comforts of marriage. Going steady was by no means a brand-new postwar phenomenon, as we have earlier seen, but was rather one whose prevalence and particularly importance in organizing the feelings and behaviors of adolescents grew markedly in the baby boom period.^[67] The proportions of boys and girls whose dating included at least episodes of going steady advanced grade by grade, girls

always somewhat more prone to going steady than boys. Steady dating was closely integrated with frequent dating; indeed, one is almost tempted to say that only those who were prepared to commit themselves at least sometimes to a steady relationship were likely to prosper in the dating system, at least as it was practiced in most places during the baby boom.^[68] Even in the early years of high school, serious daters went steady, as table 30 shows. Essentially, the trends visible there are as true for boys as for girls, but not only were girls at any given grade level more often experienced in steady dating than boys at the same grade (one might characterize girls as just about one grade ahead of boys in this regard) but girls enjoyed a greater "premium" in dates for going steady at given ages than did boys. The reason that this was so, furthermore, was not that boys who had not gone steady were especially penalized in dates but rather that girls who had had steadies dated much more than others.

While dating was comfortably accepted by parents in the 1950s, going steady was considerably more alarming. In 1955 and again in 1963, over two-thirds of adults queried by the Roper Organization said that they thought that "boys and girls in high school" should not be permitted to go steady but should

instead date different boys and girls.^[69] To adult observers, going steady seemed—as had dating itself a generation earlier—to propose an unfathomable developmental sequence, to offer youth premature liberties, dominated by a code of alien design. "Teenagers were trying to do the unthinkable—to factor competition out of the equation. Adults were appalled. To them, going steady, with its extreme rejection of competition in favor of temporary security," so characteristic of prewar dating, "represented all the faults of the new generation."^[70] Writers in Parents urged their readers to recognize that "going steady is here to stay" but that it no longer had the meaning it once had: "to the boys and girls who are engaged in it, going steady doesn't mean anything like being engaged. . . . Where we read marital implications, they read popularity and security."^[71] Young people expected to go steady a good deal, but they also expected to change "steadies" quite frequently, seeking not dangerous intimacy but a calm friendship of a sort that the more competitive dating setting precluded.

But to other adult observers—and they were the more correct—going steady was rather an early stage in a courtship sequence that youth had begun to form out of the inchoate independence left from the war period. A study conducted in an Iowa high school in 1958 suggested that middle-class youth, perhaps because they usually did not anticipate marriage soon, had a considerably cooler view of going steady than did working-class adolescents: they changed steadies more often and were less likely to define any given steady as an "in love" relationship.^[72] One observer noted no fewer than three additional steps after going steady but before formal engagement: lavaliering, pinning, and (wrist-)watching. A more raffish step was proposed in Personal Romances in 1959: "Macel said, 'Dickie and I are changing pillows tonight.' 'Changing pillows. . . . ?' I still didn't understand. 'You see,' Macel explained, 'when steadies exchange pillows that is the next thing to actually sleeping with each other.' "^[73] Analytically, pillow-exchange differs from, say, lavaliering only in its open reference to sexuality, the exercise of which, however, is in theory no less postponed. Each proposes a youth-controlled, ritually solemnized sequence of stages of commitment, ideally eventuating in marriage, but

with a discontinuity at the engagement stage. At varying points in the sequence, but in the spirit of the era quite early, would come a (private or public) commitment of love, the expression that "in our culture implies one is thinking about a commitment to marry."^[74]

Going steady did often seem to incorporate a sexual progression along with the more overt components, although usually not coitus. Young people in the baby boom era often felt as uncertain about this as did their parents. Crist found that a majority of the high schoolers he talked to in 1950 who were going steady "said that they did not think it was a good idea. They said they believed those who went steady 'too much' became moony and sappy, that they might become too emotionally involved."^[75] A high school senior, speaking to another investigator in 1950, was even more explicit about the too-close tie of going steady and sexual-emotional commitment.

When a boy goes steady with a girl, you automatically are letting yourself in for a lot of troubles that will come up. If you both have good strong morals, I think you can sort of get through everything. . . . Some kids think that they're in love. Leaves a lot of hard feelings, and there's a lot of resentment, and there's a lot of 'Why did I do this?' . . . I don't think that there's very many people in high school that are really sure that they're in love.^[76]

A national survey of adolescent girls in 1956 found that many more girls were negative about going steady than were positive, and the negative responses rose sharply with age.^[77]

But socially—despite considerable instance-to-instance variation of just what the practice involved—going steady made sense to youth, although boys and girls disagreed sharply about how much petting going steady should entail.^[78] Ira Reiss argued that going steady in high school pushed toward—as behavior and as norm—"heavy petting with affection." Neither abandoned nor simply sensual, heavy petting with affection was mutual, expressive, and moral at core: "high school couples who are going steady . . . feel it is proper to engage in heavy petting, . . . the justification being that they are in love or at least extremely fond of each other."^[79] The importance and meaning of a boyfriend or girlfriend shifted decisively from the highly externalized rating marker described by Waller in the

1930s to a surprisingly deeper inner meaning, attached to the search for one's self.^[80]The Times of St. Paul Central High was "glad to see that Mary Jane Witt and Ray Nelson have patched things up," three months later reporting of Mary Jane and Ray that "after a date, you'll find them in their favorite restaurant listening to 'Anytime' and eating another favorite, spare ribs."^[81] The breezy tone is exactly to the point. The same treatment was accorded students briefly profiled in the context of particular achievements or honors. Going steady was a characteristic event in the life that the high school newspaper chronicled and helped to diffuse. "I imagine that most of you have noticed some of the girls in Junior High are wearing dog collars on their ankles. Let's get together on which ankle to wear them. If you have a guy please wear it on the left ankle and if you don't, buckle it on the right. Okay?"^[82]

The classical dating relationship, as devised a generation before, employed girl solidarity to put safe bounds to the bargaining between boys and girls. For boys, the arrangement had clear advantages over the prior regime, but by the 1950s the power of girls' gossip irked boys, who no longer could see its compensating advantages. Boys had to propose; girls who said no could also tell their friends. The fear of being told no—especially for younger boys at the beginning of their dating careers—was a specter many dreaded, since girl gossip might record the concurrent loss of face for all the school to see.

A boy feels like a sap if he asks a girl and she says, "I'm busy tonight." And the next time he calls her up and she says, "I'm busy tonight." And it's the girl's place to show that—I don't know, that—I don't know—just how she feels. A fellow depends on a girl all his life, and he's not used to making up his own mind.^[83]

To this, a perspicuous girl answered, "I know that's one reason why a whole lot of people do go steady. At least, you're sure a fellow doesn't have to get his courage up to ask for a date. When a dance comes along, he just says, 'Let's go.' "^[84] Surveys revealed that in the 1950s, boys more than girls worried about being clumsy with the opposite sex generally and about their inability to be comfortable dating. They also worried a good deal more about sex.

For boys, going steady was more comfortable, often far more

comfortable, than dating. If dating had been the innovation of girls, going steady responded to the special exigencies in boys' life courses. It was a haven from anxiety for boys who were insecure of their reputations: "when it is well-known and advertised, there is definitely prestige in it." It was less expensive, and it promoted heightened but safe sexuality. "Lots of the fellows won't go out with a girl unless they can go steady."^[85] Girls more than boys worried about whether to go steady, their focal concern of marriage rendering that institution especially portentous.^[86] From the girls' standpoint, the loss in circulation among pleasing partners and the added risk of sexual transgression was compensated by the added emotional intimacy available in steady dates, for masculine swagger and bravado were minimized in such a relationship. "It doesn't mean a steady date at all. It's just liking someone and it's better going out with him than anyone else. I don't know, it's a feeling, I guess, that someone's always there and you always have someone to turn to."^[87]

You have a period in adolescence in which there is a terrific confusion or something. No one seems to know exactly where he is going. The girl begins worrying about boys. The boy has a hard time getting up his nerve to ask the girl out, and the girl is wondering if he is going to ask her out. When you pass that stage, and a boy and girl can like each other and can head toward each other and would like to be with each other, they have achieved a maturity.^[88]

Many, varied dates were important when adolescents had counted on dating to signify in a very public way one's participation in the recently emerged youth culture. But now, a generation later, such participation was taken for granted.^[89] The pursuit of warmth and intimacy, always present, now emerged.

The sharp downward shift in the marriage age drew girls into going steady, despite their reasons for ambivalence. Among girls 16 to 18 in 1955, those who were going steady more than those merely dating and even more than those not dating at all believed that popularity depended on one's sensitivity and understanding and that popularity with boys depended on the same inner qualities. Merely external social skills seemed no-

tably less important to girls who were going steady; so, too, was appearance. Going steady was evidently congruent with a view of the adolescent social world that emphasized the qualities of persons commonly thought central to modern marriage.^[90] Going steady was no trial marriage, but it was a trial on relatively familiar ground of some of the sentiments and qualities one sought in marriage. The "home" found a junior counterpart in the steady couple.

The external signs of these kinds of relationships fit nicely the requirements of a socially coherent high school student body and were, accordingly, celebrated not only in the halls but in more official quarters. Thus, when the St. Paul Central High School Times published their lists of those in attendance at the junior-senior proms, the names were not segregated by gender but were published by couple, alphabetically by boys' family name. The publication of such lists of affiliation served to reinforce the strength of going steady as an institution and perhaps encouraged longer relationships. To lay two successive lists side by side is to discover that where boys (juniors, evidently) returned for a second prom, about half returned with the same girl, and half with another. Private, and to a degree ad hoc in its behavioral aspects, the steady relationship became in a sense the property of the mainstream of the high school community, an enactment of the capacity of that community to promote and protect an area of privacy for mutual support in growing up amid a highly institutionalized and sometimes troubling social environment.

A late 1950s Connecticut study examined the "courtship progress" of high school students. Going steady was very widespread, as table 31 suggests. Boys and girls were about equally likely to have gone steady at some time, with less ambitious and less accomplished students somewhat more likely than scholars to have steadies. Engagement (among steadies) had a more differentiated distribution than did going steady per se , for its prevalence was more closely related to just where the students were in their life course. But the two patterns also showed obvious parallels. Seniors who had gone steady were three times more likely than freshmen who had also gone steady to have become engaged. Girls were twice as prone to engagement than

were boys, and they married younger. Particularly striking is the very substantial increase in overt commitment to marrying one's steady among those who had definitely ruled college out.^[91]

By strong contrast, with surprisingly little variation from category to category, an additional six in ten of those who had at some time gone steady but had made no commitment to marry had given thought to marrying their steady.^[92] Not only

was going steady a ubiquitous form of social relationship in 1950s high schools but it was a relationship that in the minds of the participants had some resonance with thoughts of marriage. "He was in my class in high school, and we went together to practically everything. He wrote, too, while he was in the Army. . . . Of course, I thought that someday we'd be married. Oh, I didn't tell anyone that—least of all, Bernie—but I thought about it a lot."^[93] The likely explanation is also the one that fearful parents of the day expressed: the kind of comfortable intimacy going steady provided also encouraged thoughts of extending this intimacy into a marriage, soon, although its relationship to marriage was ambiguous rather than explicit.^[94] Going steady was not a functional substitute for engagement; it looked outward to the youth peer group rather than to the older members of the family, and the relationship of steady to steady's parents was casual. A popular boy at Roosevelt High in Minneapolis "has dark brown hair and blue eyes and rates Mrs. Lampstad's chocolate cake and beef tenderloin steaks as his favorite food. [He] works at Vic's Drive-In as a cook and spends-most of his spare time with Ann Lampstad."^[95] It nevertheless now served as the transition point at which the level and nature of premarital physical intimacy was defined.

How closely dating and going steady were tied to the transition to marriage during the baby boom is revealed by an analysis of data from Project Talent. Students were asked, "How old do you expect to be when you get married?" Their responses indicate that those who were more deeply entwined in the dating-and-steady system had already adjusted their expectations to earlier marriage, were prepared emotionally for interpersonal intimacy but also believed that their "search" for a desirable mate had already accomplished something. In table 32, boys who expected to marry before age 23 and girls who expected to marry before age 21 will be considered "early" in this regard. For girls, their success or lack of success in the dating system inevitably served as a gauge to them of their progress toward marriage. For boys, this relationship was revealed only gradually, over the course of high school, but by their senior years, boys' anticipation of marriage hinged almost as much on dating frequency and going steady as did girls'. For boys, a his-

tory of having gone steady was from an early age more closely tied to marriage expectations than was mere dating frequency, although its relevance, too, emerged over the course of high school. For girls, going steady, as with dating, mattered consistently throughout high school, and it mattered a lot.^[96]

Nor were these anticipations off the mark, in part, as Bayer has shown, because the anticipations themselves predisposed the young people toward subsequent lines of action that fulfilled the prophecies they embodied.^[97] The high school students whose late-1950s dating behavior we are discussing were reinterviewed eleven years later, by which time most of them had married. Table 33 demonstrates that in the baby boom success in the dating system very distinctly did in fact predict prompt marriage and, whatever their prior thoughts on the matter, no less so for boys than for girls. Dating and going steady, then, constituted parts of a system that was consequential not only in that it altered expectations but also in that it set up thereby long-lasting patterns of behavior . An openness to sexual exploration, too, seems to have hinged in part on the early readiness for the social exploration that dating represented.^[98]

Marrying

In the counseling idiom then current, one married a mate who supplied those particular kinds of supports one felt one required and who needed of one just what one could, in turn, give; that is, there was "need complementarity." Robert F. Winch's classic formulation of this notion tells us much about the ideology of marriage in the 1950s. His 1958 treatise seeks to express "in concise, naturalistic terms what is meant by love," for in America "we marry for love," drawing attention to the sometimes mysterious attraction of opposites remarked at length by Plato.^[99] The centrality of this contemporary formulation can be gauged from the breadth of its popularization. Personal Romances thus advised its readers that "in the perfect marriage one mate supplies the talents or virtues the other lacks, and vice versa. . . . There is no greater declaration of enduring love than the three simple words, 'I need you.' "^[100]

The essence of Winch's work is the psychological rating of

both partners on such qualities as assertiveness, receptivity, and self-deprecation and an empirical inquiry into what kind of a person, thus defined, marries what kind of person. There was a right mate to be found but not a universal best mate. One finds one's best mate by being oneself, and thereby one discovers "the personality contours of a prospective mate . . . not in general but rather with specific reference to" one's own traits. Submissive people made dominant ones feel good and, in turn, were gratified by the opportunity to submit. "We love those persons . . . who provide gratification of our needs and thereby bring us pleasure."^[101] Life course decisions in the 1950s were psychologically relativistic, even when not following Winch's formula. "Maturity," psychologically defined, was a common criterion. "If you're crazy in love with a man, you may not stop to consider if he's emotionally mature enough to make a good husband and father. After all, isn't love all that really matters?"^[102]True Love Stories' hortation follows up with a list of ten practical indicators of maturity, which amount to moderation, considerateness, and commitment to the marriage, qualities that, like those supplying complementary needs, could be found—indeed were found—among relatively young people.

Figures 18 and 19 show actual first-marriage rates for the period 1945 to 1959 for white and nonwhite single women for small age groups. These rates were paralleled by men's rates, except where draft age influenced men's marriage probabilities. We may take 1949, a relatively low point following the accomplishment of most of the marriages "postponed" by World War II, yet before the impact of Korea, as our starting point. The very youngest group shown—14 to 17—and the oldest—30 to 34—both had markedly parallel histories of marriage rates during this period, each tending on the whole downward. Those 18 to 19 and 22 to 24 also show quite parallel trends, but these two age groups both show a gradual increase after the midpoint of the Korean War until 1955 and a marked increase for the next two years, followed by a slight decline. The most popular ages for young women to marry were 20 and 21, and these ages, increasingly popular during the period, peaked at 1957. Whites and nonwhites basically shared the same temporal patterns, although the two had different age schedules of mar-

Figure 18.
Annual First-Marriage Rates for White Single Women, 1945–1959

riage, with nonwhites' timing throughout the era less uniform than whites'.^[103] Black age patterns shifted slightly during the decade, perhaps as the result of rural-to-urban migrations. A smaller proportion of black women came to marry very young, while, contrariwise, the likelihood of marriage by relatively old single black women grew.

Korea seems to have marked a decisive change in the relationship between the way men as compared with women experienced the age structure of the marriage market. Prior to Korea, men's and women's marriages for a given "pair" of ages pretty much paralleled each other, year by year. But in the 1950s, what amounted to devaluation of older women in the marriage market came to operate more effectively, year after year. Women, thus, experienced the 1950s shift in the marriage-timing schedule more abruptly than did men. The pres-

Figure 19.
Annual First-Marriage Rates for Nonwhite Single Women, 1945–1959

sure to marry felt by young unmarried women was to play a part in subsequent developments.

A particularly acute form of sanctioning occurred in a common phrase, "old maid." Old maids were not figures of abhorrence so much as they were objects of condescending pity.^[104] The pity depended on the secure, unquestioned knowledge that such a position was not seen by any but deviants as a valid alternative to marriage and motherhood. An even more central belief was that the satisfactions of the" home" would be denied old maids, who would be lonely, bored, unloved, joyless. "Well, you want to marry like other girls do. You can't look forward to being an old maid. It's a woman's place to marry and have a family."^[105]

Over the 1950s, average income levels increased, permitting a higher proportion of young people to marry and then to have children. Income levels grew over this decade at a pace that

kept the standard of living of newly formed families in a very steady relationship to that of older families at the same time, and also to people of the same age who had not yet married or not yet had children.^[106] Subjective material minimal requirements for becoming parents enlarged along with incomes. A repeated question on Gallup polls indicates a basically constant ratio of "the smallest amount of money a family of four (husband, wife, and two children) needs each week to get along on in this community" to actual average income. Prosperity was shared by the young couples contemplating marriage or parenthood, but they took out only a portion of their "dividend" directly in family formation, the balance going to increased home ownership and a variety of related appurtenances. Thus, in this era of devotion to the family, family life became, in a material sense, richer.^[107]

Tastes for marriage , however, moved with income in a somewhat different way in the decades after World War II. We have, first, a comparison of prewar and postwar poll data on economic sufficiency targets for marriage. In 1938, women's median targets of adequate incomes on which to marry—no doubt these included cushions against future unemployment not considered so necessary after the war—were about 2.6 times median current disposable income per capita. By 1946, however, the ratio had fallen to 1.8 times: immediate marriage was, on the average, much more feasible.^[108] Peter Lindert's elaborate state-level regression analysis of American age at marriage shows that in 1930 and 1940, aspects of population composition—percentage foreign born and sex ratio in particular—were the major variables that statistically explained why women married younger in some states than in others. Insofar as average current income from employment played a role (as it did in 1930 and 1940), it was a negative role: states with higher average incomes were states where women married older. In 1950 and even more so in 1960, however, the positive relationship of income and marriage timing was strong enough to suggest that sufficiency targets were regularly exceeded by burgeoning current income. Young people now responded positively to high local average income.^[109] As has been argued elsewhere, after World War II "the basis for 'decision' about marriage timing

has changed, then, from involuntary to preferential, from a structurally constrained to an individually determined basis."^[110]

Overall, then, the 1950s not only saw earlier marriage but a falling off of marriage probabilities for those who did not marry as promptly as current standards proposed they should. In a behavioral sense, marriage between about 18 and 24 became highly normative during the baby boom, aided by a widespread diffusion after World War II of parentally subsidized marriage and even subsidized parenthood.^[111] Women had to get on the with the task of getting married at a rather brisk pace or see their chances to marry at all actually decline—in a period of heightened nuptiality and marriage-consciousness. The tensions built into this new scheduling eventually came to affect the way that women, traditionally younger at marriage than men, understood their ability to achieve emotionally satisfying marriages, even to contract the marriage with the feeling of certainty called for by the folk knowledge that governed behavior.

Out of it all I faced the fact that I didn't love George at all. I didn't love George any more than Gracie loved her husband or Penny loved Bill. . . . How would I end up? Loving a split level and a car, or simply loving the idea of marriage? How? Not happy certainly? . . . What was I settling for? Marriage before I was nineteen, with my picture in the paper[?] . . .^[112]

She splits with George. "For the first time since I'd known George, I felt like me—Florence Mackenzie. . . . Now I will wait for a man to love who will love me—until I am twenty-seven if necessary—until I am forty, if it has to be." But, statistically, Florence was making a mistake, if she was really determined to marry. Florence's divorce occurred in the year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique .

There is evidence that initial postwar ideals of marriage timing more or less resembled those that preceded it.^[113] But they did not survive long thereafter, as the prosperity and evolving courtship mechanisms of the baby boom era made early marriage more attainable. As more individuals were enabled to marry according to or ahead of their schedules, normative age schedules shifted toward younger marriage. Ideal marriage age closely paralleled behavioral trends. Table 34 documents this,

comparing ideals derived from representative national polls taken in 1946 and 1957 with actual marriage timing for those same dates.

At both dates and for both sexes, the median of the ideal marriage age was somewhat above that for contemporaneous behavior.^[114] At the same time, the means of marriage behavior generally were above the means of ideal age at marriage. The distribution of ideal ages of marriage at any given time has consistently been more uniform than that of actual marriage. Unintended pregnancy, of course, explains many younger-than-ideal marriages, and lack of timely opportunity many that were older than ideal. Ideals of marriage age were subject to periodic revision and the 1950s were a period of noteworthy downward revision. This was no less true for older married people than for young people still contemplating their own transitions to the married state. Baby boom youth were eager to get on with "family-building" and drew from their elders a set of values that situated this earnest desire squarely within their common notion of the good life. Ideals and behavior had different distributions, but they also changed together , moving up to the peak of the baby boom. They shortly were to reverse together.

Hogan shows that median age at leaving school increased by over a year among young men from the 1937 birth cohort as compared with those born a decade earlier. In the 1927 birth cohort, the average young man completed his education at age 17.8 and married at age 23.3—five and a half years later. The cohort born in 1937, on average, married at 23.0, after having finished school at 19.0, their wait having shrunk on average a year and a half in a decade. Among those who did not serve in the military, the decline was especially sharp, but even among those who served, the average hiatus between leaving school and marrying was reduced. The transition time to adulthood was thus compressed sharply in the baby boom decade. Yet despite the difficulties inevitably posed often by the exacting new scheduling, Hogan is able to show that atypically sequenced transitions occurred only somewhat more often in the baby boom, rising from about 20 percent for the 1927 birth cohort to a peak of about 25 percent for the 1932 cohort (marrying, on average, about 1955) and settling back to a level of 23 percent for the 1937 cohort. This increase is distinctly less than one would expect if—in view of the way average school-leaving and marriage ages were moving toward one another—young men and women were not making an increasingly strenuous effort to keep their life courses "normative."^[115]

An important component in the new nuptiality regime was the large peacetime army to which the nation was committed. Even though young men who served married a little later, in those years when the military made particularly severe demands on the manpower pool, overall age at marriage declined . In Hogan's calculations, based on single-year time-series analysis, variations in military demand had about as much effect on nuptiality as did variations in unemployment rates but, of course, in the opposite direction. In the aggregate, military demand encouraged single men, especially those relatively older, to take the plunge. The effect of military demand was in fact strikingly direct and prompt. Stanley Lebergott puts it nicely: "The brassy brilliant call of country leads young people to marry not only until—but before death do them part. Perhaps in more halcyon times, or climes, the rate of time discount might not be so formidable." Rate of first inductions explained

about half the quarter-year-to-quarter-year variation in marriage rates.^[116]

Proximate reminders of the possibility of the interruption of one's course to adulthood by a stint in the army, for the most part, seems to have occasioned the wish to be on with it, to hasten marriage.

We were sophomores in high school when we started to go steady, and by the time we were seniors, we knew we wanted to get married. . . . Ted's draft notice came in May and instead of giving me my engagement ring for Christmas like he'd planned, I got it that July before he left.^[117]

Fathers were not drafted at this time, and husbands were drafted only rarely. Student deferments declined fairly steadily after 1952, and from this same date, Type IIIA deferrals (registrant with a child or children and registrant deferred by reason of dependents) increased regularly as a ratio to inductees and enlistees.^[118] For young men, the existence of conscription nevertheless legitimated youthful marriage—old enough to fight, old enough to be responsible for a wife—and also provided a practical reason for quickly achieving it as well as a potential backup job in case of unemployment. As "juvenile delinquency" stereotyped the younger part of male youth as threatening and disorganized, the army stereotyped the older part as manly and responsible.

For those who served in peacetime, the military offered a sharply age-graded experience, of limited duration, during which both emotional and human capital were accumulated, and sometimes tangible capital. In the baby boom period, one anticipating being drafted did not necessarily do himself a disservice by marrying and indeed may have thereby mitigated some of the rigors of army life. Many postings during this period were domestic; other men, stationed in Europe, could with the aid of the PX provide a level of family living not inimical to most wives. For the men, marriage posed a way of escaping group quarters and the constant military superintendence that implied. As peacetime military service became more institutionalized during the decade, the proportions of those in service

who were married increased, despite increasing dependency deferral. Indeed, the shift to young marriage during the decade was sharper among those in the military than among civilians. By 1960, more of those age 18 or 19 in service were actually married than were civilians at the same ages; and only a ten-percentage-point difference (it had been nineteen points in 1950) separated civilians from soldiers in proportions married at ages 20 to 24. Much as was college and even high school education, so also army life was accommodated to the enhanced drive toward youthful marriage so apparent during the decade.^[119]

Parenthood and Fulfillment

The baby boom ideology of "family-building" understood the family to a surprising degree in terms of parenthood as the cement to marriage, as goal for marriage, as link with God, or destiny, or prescribed gender role. What exactly to make of marriage without the goal of proximate childbearing was a foreign notion to young people in the 1950s. The transition into parenthood during the baby boom in fact followed much the same path as that into marriage, except among those who, in defiance of the trend of the times, married on the late side. For women closer to the modal first-birth ages, however, just as for those marrying at the peak marriage ages, the baby boom was extremely pronounced. The marriage boom of 1950, a product of the Korean War, led to a very marked jump in first births in 1951, and for those of typical marriage age the trend to prompt parenthood did not cease but continued . The strongest and most pronounced first-birth surge was among women at 23 to 25, a few years older than the peak first-marriage group, and for them the end of the Korean conflict sparked an even more dramatic rise in first-birth probabilities. The birth schedule became more focused as it moved downward, with the marriage schedule. Women who had not yet had their first child by the time they approached their mid-twenties hastened to do so.

Demographer Norman B. Ryder decomposes completed fertility into a number of analytically separable decisions, of which

completed fertility is the result. In twentieth-century America, according to Ryder, how early women began childbearing is as predictive of overall childbearing as is how effectively they prevented those births they wished to prevent. The baby boom, in his account, was produced by a group eager and able to begin marriage and childbearing in a rush and, in addition , rather careless about preventing fertility in excess of the rather modest targets they had established. In a powerful piece of analysis based on birth registration data, Ryder argues that "most of the baby boom would have occurred without any change whatsoever in the numbers of births per woman. . . . Of the two components of those changes [that did occur, in the tempo of childbearing], the dominant element has been changes in ages at first birth."^[120] And in a highly technical and rather speculative analysis of retrospective survey data, the quickening of the fertility tempo in the baby boom is further analyzed into a number of contributing factors.

During the phase of rising fertility, commonly known as the baby boom, it is approximately correct to say that there was no change in the mean number of intended births. There was, however, a deterioration in the effectiveness with which unintended fertility was prevented . . . [amounting to]a substantial decline in the length of intended delay [before the first child] accompanied by substantial decline in the ability to achieve that intended delay.^[121]

The complicated patterns of the parenthood transition in the baby boom are displayed in table 35. The rates shown are monthly probabilities of becoming a parent for those married but as yet childless, for specified periods within their marriages. In the aggregate, initial-fertility probabilities declined substantially the more remote from marriage one was, for those who married younger and those who married older, for the less educated and for the more educated. But in the years 1945 to 1949, this was truer for the less educated and for those who married younger, whereas by 1955 to 1959 it was truer for those who married older and who were more educated . This means that the baby boom was a period in which the groups that were once known for moving relatively slowly and cautiously from marriage to parenthood reversed their pattern of behavior. Nor-

mative structures—a certain regard for what was once considered prudence—that had governed the parenthood transition for the middle class had changed. What was now normative was to have a child promptly once marriage was contracted, to have a family, a home .

Parenthood probabilities generally increased during this period but by no means uniformly so. Table 35 makes clear that changes in the parenthood transition in the first part of the 1950s barely foreshadowed what was to come in the height of the baby boom. The first part of the decade seemingly was a period of overall modest increase over the postwar half-decade, itself the composite of postponed "family-building" and the slow emergence of the new patterns that were to characterize the baby boom. These modest increases were very varied in the points of the family histories that they showed up, from group to group. In the second half of the decade, the focus of initial-fertility increase shifted toward the early months of marriage, quite generally. Over the whole decade, the most pronounced rearrangement of the path from marriage to parenthood was among the kind of women, themselves becoming less common, who postponed marriage.^[122]

Marriage, emotionally the climax of the life course as recently as World War II, was less climactic in the 1950s. We can discern this in the decline of marital childlessness to near the biological minimum, in a corresponding decline among those for whom childlessness was seen as desirable,^[123] and, correspondingly, in an increase in the number of adoptions.^[124] In a curious fashion, the very ease—and earliness—of marriage now marked it out as less the moment of entry to the status of adult than as a continuation of the prior stages along that road. In "Coke for Breakfast," Pete proves himself a real (adult) husband by responding eagerly and "maturely" to the idea of becoming a parent. An emergent norm of parental underwriting of young marriage may even have somewhat undercut the independence formerly announced by the marriage transition. What women came to focus on at any rate was the establishment of the "home"; and that meant children.^[125] For young women in the mid-1950s, this word expressed the natural and unquestioningly desired location of family life, and, indeed, the affective life more generally. Young men's beliefs, less well

documented, seem to have resembled young women's but to have been less vivid. In a 1953 survey, it was women considerably more often than men who looked to the experience of marriage, and presumably parenthood, as something not to be missed.^[126] With very few exceptions, the home was seen as the central point of the life of young wives, from which they would emerge to take part in occasional entertainment, in voluntary association and religion, and, perhaps at a later age, in gainful employment but to which all these activities must conduce. "It's the whole purpose of marriage. There wouldn't be any children if people didn't marry, life wouldn't exist if people didn't have children. If I couldn't have children, I'd go crazy. Home isn't a home without children."^[127] The master symbol of the "home" often expressed the affective as well as the locational side of the family institution. In many cases, it connoted also "woman's sphere."

The young woman who established a home was fulfilling a very high purpose, although home was sometimes seen as instinct, sometimes duty, sometimes joy, and sometimes simply an assumed part of the world. That children "bind together" a family was a notion offered again and again by single women, reflecting often the overarching ideology of the "home." In the 1953 survey, when asked to explain what was important to them about marriage, both single and married women mentioned specific child-rearing goals more commonly than anything else, by a good bit. For men, this goal was fairly common but less so than were several others. In numbers of the texts gathered in the 1955 single women's survey, marriage itself is portrayed as either a fragile affair or one of relatively low salience. "It [child rearing] is the thing that holds the family together. Because a home is not complete without children. Children are the center of any family and the reason for marriage."^[128] Children bind it together by giving the parents something in common to care for but, even more, something to look forward to. "Work together" was a common phrase, suggesting that for at least some of these women the substantial role segregation of 1950s marriage suggested a weak marriage could in some cases be overcome by the common effort wife and husband would expend on their children.

Children benefited marriages, too, because husband and

wife "can grow up with" their children. The ideology is consistent with the brief periods preceding "maturity" and "adjustment": one did one's own growing up with the developing home if one was a young woman in the 1950s. Because other aspects of personal growth were often considered selfish, to build one's family early so that one would be young enough to "grow up" with one's children made sense.

Table 36 offers the detailed breakdown of the proportion of all the 1955 single women respondents who volunteered given marriage and parenthood ideologies in the course of their interviews. The difference between the two columns is instructive, as is the common emphases of the two. Children were much more salient to these young women than was marriage. The average young woman offered 1.41 different justifications for marriage (excluding demurrers); she gave 2.16 in behalf of children. The young women often expressed "ontological" justifications—that marriage or childbearing was simply in the nature of things . No sanctions, material or moral, were mentioned, for none was needed, since to be a wife or parent was simply "natural." The 1953 survey reveals that this kind of answer was almost exclusive to women, hardly ever shared by men. Closely related were a variety of de-ontological or should answers. These were more common and came in several varieties.

Although "should" still might be a part of the sense conveyed, the largest number of these were those respondents for whom wifehood or motherhood meant self-fulfillment . That one owed it to oneself was the dominant tone among the replies arguing self fulfillment, as distinct from replies in which one owed it to the proper fulfillment of one's role: one acted out of a wish, not out of an obligation. Distinct once again were a large set of bases that proposed some specific pleasure or reward in return for being wife or mother. In citing love (or some variant of it), these young women were ideologically locating the reason for their future demographic choices in a reward to be pleasurably experienced by themselves. Formally, ontological ideologies treated the woman as though will and feeling were irrelevant. De-ontological ideologies implied that the woman acted out of will but (here) without regard to feeling. "Self-

development" ideologies emphasized will and feeling but did not distinguish pleasure in particular. And "hedonistic" ideologies focused on pleasurable return to the woman herself.

Hedonistic ideologies, surprisingly rarely appealed to on the whole, were remarkably rarely used to explain why marriage in particular was important. The importance of children, however, was sometimes said to rest in the "fun" or pleasure they offered their parents. Love, a bit more common (though surprisingly rare in view of our expectations), was likewise conspicuously rarer with respect to marriage than to childbearing. The related notion of companionship outweighed love as ap-

plied to marriage, while the reverse was the case when respondents were talking about parenthood; the two summed were 30 percent more common in explaining childbearing than in explaining marriage. In the 1953 study, companionship was the most common reason for marriage nominated by single men and one of the most common among married men, but it was rather rare among women, both single and married. Almost nobody proposed love as an explanation for the importance of marriage. Enjoyment, midway between the least and the most emotionally freighted of the more hedonistic responses, was also the most common. Three times the proportion of young women explained the importance of childbirth in these terms as spoke this way of marriage. Was marriage no pleasure to these baby boom women?

Childbearing, in contrast, was deeply linked into these young women's sense of self-fulfillment—an ideological justification that was much the most common. The line separating self-fulfillment from the obligation to become all one can or, alternatively, the goal or obligation of becoming what one should be is no doubt a fine one to make in just a few words, depending no doubt on linguistic quirks or verbal clichés of the day. And yet the evidence in table 36 does surely seem to indicate a predominance of an expansive sense of goal-seeking self-fulfillment at the very heart of the baby boom ideology, achieved through becoming a mother. Such a sense of expansive voluntary self-fulfillment, too, most often justified marriage ideologically, but the gap between its application to the two aspects of family formation is large and eloquent.

Noteworthy also is the far higher component of obligation when the young women came to explain why they felt that marriage was important. Thus, two and one-half times as many of the young women said that voluntary self-development was the reason for childbearing as said this about marriage. But only one and one-third as many said the duty of self-development explained childbearing as explained marriage in this way. Relatively few respondents justified family formation in terms of voluntary assumption of women's roles. Of these, however, more were found among the ideologies of parenthood than of wifehood, and this was truest among those women who said

they thought these roles were important to take on for reasons of obligation. God's duty was only occasionally invoked here, but when it was, it was as likely to refer to marriage as to childbearing. And the unexplored assumption that family formation was in the nature of things far more often referred to marriage than to parenthood. To be a mother was very much more vivid, important, thought-about, and valued at the height of the baby boom than to be a wife.

As early marriage came to be in some tension with a declining romantic motive, and childbearing became correspondingly more focal to marriages, a contradiction developed between the felt economic needs of the young couple and the wish to become parents. A fair amount of the growing consumer prosperity of the postwar had been premised on the capacity of young wives to earn second incomes. Young wives were encouraged to work, but they were culturally expected to be full-time mothers when children came. Blood and Wolfe present data showing a drop from 62 to 16 percent in the labor force participation of wives with husbands' incomes below $5,000 when children entered the family, and from 43 to 3 percent for wives whose husbands earned more than this.^[129] When children came quickly, they often pressed parents into a very trying phase in the marriage, as wives' roles shifted rapidly and family incomes were slowly constricted by the loss of wives' earnings and the demands of the new baby. Both in families with husbands bringing in a relatively large amount of money and those less fortunate in this regard, "satisfaction with the standard of living declines with the onslaught of children, ebbing still further as they acquire school-age appetites and wardrobes."^[130] The trend in the 1950s was toward heavier participation in the paid labor force for wives with young children (11.9 percent of those with children under six in 1950), growing rapidly during the Korean conflict but continuing to climb in the latter part of the decade, attaining 18.7 percent in 1959.^[131] The trend ran steadily against the very definitions of parenthood according to which childbirth was the climactic, confirmatory, central event of the youth-to-adult portion of the life course. The drama of young people's family formation sequence in the baby boom thus often ended with a most ambiguous curtain.

The youthful life course of the baby boom embodied a paradox: highly "traditional" satisfactions were dependent on highly asymmetrical gender roles, accomplished through an unprecedented translation into young individuals' hands of the material resources they required to accomplish their volition. The baby boom era was ushered in by a cresting wave of economic optimism, especially prominent along a cohort of young people that was relatively small and thus relatively favored. It could not last, and it did not. By the late 1960s, the national economy was in the throes of a gnawing inflation, and the first children of the much-enlarged postwar birth cohorts were coming of age, no longer confronting rapidly or surely growing material resources.^[132] At the same time, ideological critique found pervasive flaws in the gender asymmetries and individualistic materialism that underlay the baby boom life course. In the era that was to follow, such characteristic baby boom institutions as dating, early marriage, and parenthood promptly after marriage were to fall into disuse.