1. Faith Baldwin, "Can She Bake a Cherry Pie?" Ladies' Home Journal (December 1941): 23.

2. Michael C. Keeley, "The Economics of Family Formation," Economic Inquiry 15 (1977): 238-250.

3. Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., et al. , "The Life Course of Children of Divorce: Marital Disruption and Parental Contact," American Sociological Review 48 (1983): 656-668; Robert H. Mnookin et al., In the Interest of Children (New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1985).

4. "Never Been Kissed," True Confessions 26 (March 1935): 16.

5. William J. Goode, "The Theoretical Importance of Love," American Sociological Review 24 (1959): 38-47; David M. Schneider and Raymond T. Smith, Class Differences and Sex Roles in American Kinship and Family Structure (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973).

6. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Cardinal Books, 1963 [1962]); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1977 [1963; excerpts were serialized in 1962]).

7. Brown, Sex , 2.

8. Friedan, Feminine Mystique , 351.

9. Brown, Sex , 5.

10. Ibid. , 73.

9. Brown, Sex , 5.

10. Ibid. , 73.

11. Friedan, Feminine Mystique , 40.

12. Sex , 246.

13. "Engagement Jitters," True Love Stories 67 (May 1957): 32.

14. Hannah M. Stone and Abraham Stone, A Marriage Manual (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937), 278-281, and A Marriage Manual , completely rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952), 228-229.

15. Not all intimacy is heterosexual, of course, nor all lasting unions. Nor do I wish to imply that heterosexuality is part of the biological program and homosexuality a perversion. I understand sexual preference to be part of the cultural script. And yet, partly for evidentiary reasons and partly because the choice of sexual preference typically occurs considerably earlier in the life course, I have elected to omit this theoretically relevant aspect of sequential self-definition.

16. Even less precise, but no less real, are the "institutionalized images of social and emotional maturity," expressed within peer groups, continue

that explain the timing and other circumstances of dating , developmentally the earliest of the life course transitions I treat in this book. In a fascinating study, the conclusion of which I quote, Dornbusch et al. have shown that stage in physiological sexual maturity (as of 1966-1970) had no impact on the inception of dating, apart from its correlation with the socially underlined chronological age . Sanford M. Dornbusch et al. , "Social Development, Age, and Dating: A Comparison of Biological and Social Influence upon One Set of Behaviors," Child Development 52 (1981), 179-185.

17. The editors of Bride's Magazine, Bride's Book of Etiquette (3d ed. revised and updated; New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973), 19. See also Marguerite Bentley, Wedding Etiquette (Philadelphia: John C. Winston Company, 1947), vii. And see Barbara Wilson, The Brides' School Complete Book of Engagement and Wedding Etiquette (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1959), and Flora Bryant and Kendall Bryant, It's Your Wedding (New York: Cowles Book Company, 1970).

18. One clergyman in the late 1930s neatly conflated the dimensions at work here: "Most people who have money, and can afford to, are bound by tradition to get married in church. If they are wealthy, they want to. As a matter of fact, they are expected to make a big splurge of it." Ruby Jo Reeves, "Marriages in New Haven Since 1870" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1938), VII-7. See also B. F. Timmons, "The Cost of Weddings," American Sociological Review 4 (1939): 224-233. A national survey in 1953 asked respondents what type of wedding they had had and how much income a young couple needed to get along. There was a strong correlation, both between educational level and type of wedding and within educational level , between type of wedding and the amount of income a young couple was seen to require. Computed from survey AIPO 563, machine-readable data. See Appendix 4 for details on machine-readable data sets.

19. United States National Center for Health Statistics, Vital Statistics of the United States , III, annual, 1960-1975. The exact bibliographical data for these volumes have varied somewhat over this period. These and other references based on Vital Statistics are henceforth abbreviated as USNCHS Vital Statistics . Appendix 3 gives details on abbreviated references.

20. Reeves, "Marriages in New Haven," II-11.

21. Philadelphia Mayor's Report , Report of Division of Vital Statistics, annual.

22. Paul H. Jacobsen, American Marriage and Divorce (New York: Rinehart, 1959), 57.

23. A national survey in 1953 suggests an increase in church wed- soft

dings over the several decades preceding, interrupted perhaps by the Depression and surely by World War II. Home weddings was the category that became less frequent, as more elaborate religious weddings, at church, became more common. AIPO 563, tabulated by age to approximate trends over time.

24. To be sure, wedding notices in newspapers bear on only that subcategory of weddings for which there were newspaper reports, presumably biased toward better-off people and those who marry in conventional fashion.

25. The years for which I gathered articles have no special meaning, except in that they permit me to describe trends over time. For the last observation, the newspapers were not so readily available, at the Minnesota Historical Society, as they had been for earlier years. In addition, the St. Paul newspaper had ceased publishing wedding notices by this date, a more prestigious Minneapolis paper having assumed this function. The choice of data from Minnesota—as of many of the locality-based materials used in this book—was based largely on convenience; the ritual patterns, however, are surely essentially national.

26. Bride's Book of Etiquette , 28.

27. Goode, "The Theoretical Importance of Love," 38-47.

28. Automobile ownership registration systems do not compile their data by age, but drivers' licensing systems do and capture adequately the developmental pattern of access to automobiles and the mobility they make possible. These data are published annually in U.S. Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration, Highway Statistics Summary to 1975 (Washington: USGPO, n.d.), 68-80.

29. Data on state drivers' licensing regulations are published annually in the Information Please Almanac .

30. Anne Foner and David Kertzer, "Transitions Over the Life Course: Lessons from Age-Set Societies," American Journal of Sociology 83 (1978): 1081-1104; Joseph F. Kett, Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Talcott Parsons, "Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States," American Sociological Review 7 (1942): 604-616; Michael B. Katz, Michael B. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Harold L. Wilensky, "Orderly Careers and Social Participation in the Middle Mass," American Sociological Review 26 (1961): 521-539.

31. Leonard I. Pearlin, "Discontinuities in the Study of Aging," in Hareven, ed., Aging and Life Course Transitions , 55-74. break

32. Richard B. Freeman and James L. Medoff, The Youth Labor Market Problem: Its Nature, Causes and Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 47.

33. A careful empirical specification of several aspects of this phenomenon, dealing with the late 1950s and 1960s, is Margaret Mooney Marini and Peter J. Hodson, "Effects of the Timing of First Marriage and First Birth on the Timing and Spacing of Subsequent Births," Demography 18 (1981): 529-548. See also Glen H. Elder, Jr., "Role Orientation, Marital Age, and Life Patterns in Adulthood," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development 18 (1972): 3-24.

34. Happiness in Marriage (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1926), 199. For some modest contemporaneous empirical support, see Katherine Bement Davis, Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1929), 49.

35. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1938, 171-173.

36. Evelyn Millis Duvall and Reuben Hill, When You Marry (New York: Association Press, 1949), 302; Robert O. Blood, Jr., and Donald M. Wolfe, Husbands and Wives (New York: The Free Press, 1960), chaps. 5, 8.

37. Norval D. Glenn and Sara McLanahan, "Children and Marital Happiness: A Further Specification of the Relationship," Journal of Marriage and the Family 44 (1982): 71.

38. For a relevant discussion of the changing impact of the transition to parenthood on marital stability, see Elwood Carlson and Kandi Stinson, "Motherhood, Marriage Timing, and Marital Stability: A Research Note," Social Forces 61 (1982): 258-267.

39. John Modell and Tamara K. Hareven, "Transitions: Patterns of Timing," in Hareven, ed., Transitions , 245-270.

40. Alice S. Rossi, "Gender and Parenthood," in Rossi, ed., Gender and the Life Course (New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1985), 162-169.

41. Marian B. Sussman and Lee Burchinal, "Parental Aid to Married Children: Implications for Family Functioning," Marriage and Family Living 24 (1962): 320-322; James A. Davis, Stipends and Spouses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

42. Gunhild O. Hagestad, "The Aging Society as a Context for Family Life," Daedalus 115 (Winter 1986): 126.

43. Norman B. Ryder, "The Cohort as a Concept in the Study of Social Change," American Sociological Review 30 (1965): 843-861.

44. Matilda W. Riley, "Age Strata in Social Systems," in R. H. Binstock and E. Shanas, eds., Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 189-217; Bernice L. continue

Neugarten, J. W. Moore, and J. C. Lowe, "Age Norms, Age Constraints, and Adult Socialization," American Journal of Sociology 70 (1965): 710-717.

45. Paul B. Baltes and K. Warner Schaie, eds., Life-Span Developmental Psychology: Personality and Socialization (New York: Academic Press, 1973).

46. Glen H. Elder, Jr., "Family History and the Life Course," in Tamara K. Hareven, ed., Transitions: The Family and the Life Course in Historical Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 23.

47. David L. Featherman, "Biography, Society, and History: Individual Development as a Population Process," in Aage B. Sorensen, Franz E. Weinert, and Lonnie R. Sherrod, eds., Human Development and the Life Course: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986), 101.

48. Tamara K. Hareven, "The Life Course and Aging in Historical Perspective," in Hareven, ed., Aging and Life Course Transitions: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (New York: The Guilford Press, 1982), 8.

49. Glen H. Elder, Jr., Children of the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

50. Glen H. Elder, Jr., "Perspectives on the Life Course," in Elder, ed., Life Course Dynamics: Trajectories and Transitions, 1968-1980 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23-27.

51. "The World We Forgot: A Historical Review of the Life Course," in Victor W. Marshall, ed., Later Life: The Social Psychology of Aging (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1986).

52. Susan Littwin, The Postponed Generation: Why America's Grown-up Kids Are Growing Up Later (New York: Morrow, 1986).

53. Ibid. , 16-17.

52. Susan Littwin, The Postponed Generation: Why America's Grown-up Kids Are Growing Up Later (New York: Morrow, 1986).

53. Ibid. , 16-17.

54. Elder, "Perspectives on the Life Course," 29.

55. Deemed a highly encouraging trend by the President's Science Advisory Committee on Youth in 1973, gainful employment by school-children is currently under fierce attack, explicitly because jobs of the fast-food variety are said not to promote the transition to adulthood as once hoped but, rather, "pseudomaturity." See Ellen Greenberger and Laurence Steinberg, When Teenagers Work (New York: Basic Books, 1987).

56. Sandra L. Hofferth, "Updating Children's Life Course," Journal of Marriage and the Family 47 (1985): 93-115.

57. Uhlenberg, "Cohort Variations in Family Life Cycle Experiences of U.S. Females," Journal of Marriage and the Family 36 (1974): 284-292; Uhlenberg, "Changing Configurations of the Life Course," in Hareven, Transitions , 65-97; Uhlenberg, "Death and the Family," continue

Journal of Family History 5 (1980): 313-320. Uhlenberg's methodological and, to an extent, conceptual influence on my present study is evident in John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr., and Theodore Hershberg, "Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective," Journal of Family History 1 (1976): 7-32.

58. Dennis Hogan, Transitions and Social Change (New York: Academic Press, 1981).

59. John Modell, "Levels of Change over Time," Historical Methods Newsletter 8 (1975): 116-127; see also John Modell, "Public Griefs and Personal Problems: An Empirical Inquiry into the Impact of the Great Depression," Social Science History 9 (1985): 399-428. On age-specific contextual effects in the Great Depression, see Howard M. Bell, Youth Tell Their Story (Washington, D.C.: American Council on Education, 1938); Nettie Pauline McGill and Ellen Nathalie Matthews, The Youth of New York City (New York: Macmillan, 1940); Milwaukee Youth Report Their Status (Milwaukee: Milwaukee Vocational School, 1942).

60. John Modell, "Changing Risks, Changing Adaptations: American Families in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," in Allan J. Lichtman and Joan R. Challinor, eds., Kin and Communities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979), 119-144.

61. Modell, Furstenberg, and Hershberg, "Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood"; John Modell, "Normative Aspects of American Marriage Timing Since World War II," Journal of Family History 5 (1980): 210-234.

62. Logically, "aging" processes could have changed, too, but we may assume that they did not for people of the ages in question here.

63. Pascal K. Whelpton, Cohort Fertility: Native White Women in the United States (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).

64. We are, to be sure, dealing with phenomena somewhat different from Whelpton's. By definition, first events (like becoming a parent) are unique in any person's life, whereas the whole of the "fertility schedule" is open-ended, continuing as long as 25 or 30 years beyond initiation. Basically, then, we cannot discuss tempo or quantity, only timing.

65. David Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

66. Remarriage, the study of which is understandably a growth industry among demographers these days, is not treated here.

67. The most obvious "paydirt" on this question is the large empirical study by Ernest W. Burgess and Paul Wallin entitled Engagement and Marriage (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953). But despite this continue

book's title, engagement was largely uninteresting to the authors, except for the "predictive" information that could be collected by themselves during this phase on couples that would in many cases subsequently marry so that they might discern the characteristics associated with happy marriage. They were barely interested in what predicted longer or shorter engagements, or marriage per se . I also examined the questionnaires gathered by Burgess and Wallin in the Ernest W. Burgess Papers, Special Collections, Regenstein Library, University of Chicago, and found that they never had cared much about engagement as such.

68. An excellent example is Harvey J. Locke, Predicting Adjustment in Marriage: A Comparison of a Divorced and a Happily Married Group (New York: Henry Holt, 1951), 91-96.

69. Susan Cotts Watkins, "On Measuring Transitions and Turning Points," Historical Methods 13 (1980): 181-187.

70. Herbert H. Hyman, Secondary Analysis of Survey Data (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1972).

71. Appendix 4 describes machine-readable materials used in my research and the mode of citation I employ.

72. Short-form references to national census materials are listed in Appendix 2. Like listings to national vital statistics materials are listed in Appendix 3.