5—
War and Its Aftermath

Prosperity and Optimism

Conventional wisdom holds that the frustrations built up during World War II gave rise to pent-up "familistic" motives whose eventual product was the baby boom. And there is some truth to the story. The war surely impinged in multifarious ways on the family-formation process. Yet, in the aggregate, it is hard to detect this. In fact, the dominant lasting effect of the war seems to have been that the economic forces it unleashed, and the personal optimism and sense of efficacy that it engendered, combined with prior preferences to set into being a postwar family-formation schedule that was at once more relaxed about what was seen to constitute adequate prudence, more flexible about both the sources and timing of economic wherewithal, and (perhaps consequently) more insistently early and modal in its timing. The impact of the war on various aspects of the life course was not uniform, sometimes surprisingly great, sometimes surprisingly slight, sometimes long-lasting, sometimes transitory. This chapter will show, for instance, that young people, briefly, reassessed the transition from school to work; that marriage rates fluctuated widely during the war and the years immediately preceding and following it, modifying the immediate context of marriage without modifying the rules of the marriage market; and that, seemingly, the new mechanisms and attitudes permitted over one-tenth of the American population to be called to arms and then returned to and reincorporated in the civilian population with life courses smoothly resumed.

Only when the nation entered World War II had economic optimism fully dissipated the cruel uncertainty that the seem-

ingly endless Depression had engendered. Just months before America entered the war, a national survey found that six in ten of its citizens believed that "after the present war is over," people would receive lower wages than before the war, and a like proportion believed that there would be considerable unemployment. Only 11 percent thought that there would "be jobs for everybody," and fully seven in ten responded that "after the present war is over . . . people will have to work harder . . . [than] before it started."^[1] But only a few months into the war, 46 percent believed that "the average young man will have more opportunity . . . to get ahead than a young man had after the last war," and only 17 percent thought they would have less opportunity. One year further into the war, the proportion expecting young men's postwar opportunities to exceed those at the end of the last war had risen again, to six in ten.^[2]

Between 1935–36 and 1941, incomes had on average increased by a quarter, basically overcoming the effects of the Depression. The distribution of that income shifted somewhat to the advantage of Americans of lower income. The war years exaggerated these trends. For families as a whole, average income increased by 28 percent between 1941 and 1944, with a redistribution that sharply favored those of relatively low income. The mean income of the poorest one-fifth of all families grew by no less than 73 percent in these three years. The next-poorest fifth saw average increases of 52 percent.^[3] Jerome S. Bruner concluded in 1944 that an important feature of the home front during the war was "the almost unconquerable faith of Americans in their own personal futures." Seventy-nine percent of employed men and women queried in March 1943 believed that their present job would continue after the war. Even 50 percent of war workers in eight large cities gave this response. Asked if they would have enough money to tide them over until they found another job, should they lose theirs in reconversion, two-thirds thought that they did. People evidently now believed that the economy was meaningfully changed, and for the better.^[4] Perhaps, too, the war's uniquely widespread sense of economic well-being was amplified by the postponement of spending caused by war shortages and re-

flected in war-bond purchases that included perhaps 40 percent of all families and single consumers in the first three months of 1942 alone.^[5]

Economic well-being, of course, could coexist with a profound sense of being balked in one's most important personal projects, surely during a war that was, predictably but to an unpredictable extent, to draw heavily on the nation's youth. As the leaders and populace of the United States began to contemplate what belligerency was going to demand of just whom, it was not clear whether young men might continue their schooling, whether young women might be in effect drafted into the labor force, whether lovers might be separated by national manpower needs, whether conscientious parenthood might prove difficult in view of competing time commitments and the kind of widespread challenge to morality that wars commonly pose.^[6]

The military effort was to be an enormous one, calling to arms some fifteen million American men, as shown in table 17.

Of these, constituting more than one-tenth the total American population at the beginning of the war, six in ten were provided by the birth cohorts 1918–1927, requiring military service by three in four of all living American men born in these years. Overall, more than one in eight suffered a disability of some sort—generally small—and received monetary compensation from the government.^[7]

Mobilizing Adolescents

No segment of the population felt the war's impact more acutely than did youth, just as they had that of the Depression. For years a problem because unemployed and almost without hope of regular employment, young people were suddenly in heavy demand. This was to have an enormous impact on their life courses. Young people in the Depression had often extended their schooling so as to fill time usefully, but in the early 1940s, the vast enlargement of production began to draw young people from schools. Many of those remaining in school pressed for additional vocational training—echoing an argument made by some educators even before the war—that led in some cases to a reassignment of academic instructors to vocational courses. The national need came to be focused on the here-and-now, and schooling that led to use only through leisurely, indirect pathways caused distress.^[8]

Shortly after Pearl Harbor, state legislatures were approached with proposals to relax child labor standards, but they generally resisted. Soon, however, legislators responded to the state of emergency. In 1943, "sixty-two acts affecting the employment of minors were passed in twenty-seven states. Of these, fifty-four included some backward steps. . . . Most of these statutes apply only for the duration of the war." Already in 1942 the pool of young people eager to enter the labor market was showing signs of wearing thin, so that by 1943, large numbers of young workers at 16 and 17 were taking full-time jobs, leaving part-time employment to those younger.^[9] In industrial Franklin County, Ohio, increases in first-time work permits amounted to 52 percent in 1941, 184 percent in the following year, and 32

percent before they peaked in 1943.^[10] A Census Bureau sample survey in April 1944 indicated that over one in five of schoolboys 14 to 15 were gainfully employed, and over two in five at 16 to 17. By this time, 35 percent had left school altogether and were working. Teenage girls were less prone to both full-time and part-time work, but fully a third had jobs by 16 to 18.^[11] The twentieth-century trend toward an extended period of economic dependency, based on school extension and exclusion from the full-time labor force, had been reversed momentarily.

The expansion of manufacturing production explains a fair amount of youth's enlarged work opportunity. In 1940, only one in five employed youths 14 to 19 worked in manufacturing. But by 1944, more than one in four working boys and more than one in three working girls were in manufacturing. In Franklin County, Ohio, this was true even of first-time work permit applicants, previously more likely to find work only in ill-paid (if somehow age-appropriate) service jobs. Manufacturing employment had important implications for the way these children grew up, because the kinds of demands the coordination of manufacturing work made on children's time were different from those in other sectors of the economy, making academic training difficult to maintain.^[12] Even when the United States Employment Service asked local manufacturers to employ part-timers if at all possible so as not to disrupt schooling, the manufacturers, straining to meet defense contract deadlines, gave the request only lip service.^[13]

In the industrial and port city of Duluth, Minnesota, there were signs among boys of increased dropping out of school as early as 1942–43, at ages as young as 14 and 15. Perhaps as many as a quarter more boys than before the war dropped out at 15, a third more at 16. The change in the life course of girls was not so massive, but it too was substantial, especially by age 17. As with boys, changes were apparent from 1942–43. In 1943, the typical grade level of young workers receiving their first regular employment certificates began to drop nationally, as labor demand exceeded available sources of child workers at the higher grades.^[14]

The hours were often demanding by any standard, some-

times illegally so, and even when legal, the combined hours of employment and school of many schoolchildren were excessive.^[15] Young people, however, compared their options with those their older brothers and sisters had enjoyed and responded enthusiastically. During the war, families that had more workers were generally unusually prosperous—more so than had been the case before Pearl Harbor.^[16] A survey of young people in three Michigan high schools in spring 1944 found that the students reported that they found their jobs both educational and enjoyable and that they did not interfere with school.^[17] In fact, boys (but not girls) who had gainful employment received higher grades on average than those who had no jobs. School absences, contrary to prediction, did not increase.^[18] Curricula were massively given over to the perceived needs of wartime morale, and to preparing boys more speedily for military service, favoring especially vocational and civics training.^[19] There was no marked increase in school absences. The usual determinants of educational attainment were somewhat scrambled but in the long run, not the average level of attainment.^[20] The war drew many young people's attention from the schools, but in no long-term way.

As the eventual military outcome became a certainty, educators began to worry that in conceding so much to war exigencies, they had sacrificed the long-standing trend toward increased schooling. The Director of Pupil Personnel and Counseling for the Philadelphia Board of Public Education expressed his anxieties eloquently in 1944, as he looked forward to the postwar. "We can't very well blame children for succumbing to the lure of easy money [during the war]. They have half a notion that it can't last, but it's quite another thing to expect youngsters undergoing all of the uncertainties of adolescence to suddenly and quietly settle down after having known such bonanza days."^[21] Given the go-ahead for a "National Go-to-School Drive" as academic year 1944 began, educators rallied the community to their side.^[22]

Hats off to American boys and girls! They have shown superb readiness and eagerness to share in the work of the war. . . . Mil-

lions of youngsters have taken full-time jobs. Others have added jobs on top of school work. Now the time has come when all of us must scrutinize far more carefully than we have in the first 3 years of the war the use that is being made of the capacities, energies, and time of our teen-age young people. . . . Some work experience may have significant educational value for some young people. For the vast majority of them, however, school provides the greatest opportunity for development, and adults should help them to give school PRIORITY NUMBER ONE now.

Pearlman and Eskin, however, writing at the end of the war, delineated acutely what the lasting impact of the wartime expansion of youthful employment would be. "The number of in-school workers . . . will vary with the level of economic activity. If a high level of employment is maintained, the number of students who take advantage of the opportunities for part time and summer work will probably exceed the number who were in the pre-war labor market."^[23] One of the important schooling reforms of the past generation had been the reduction of the proportion of students who were straggling far behind their fellows, by a combination of exhortation, pressure, and easier promotion. Among boys, the war undid some of this, standard deviations of boys' grades at a given age increasing markedly at all ages during the war. In the years following the war, the trend toward increasing age standardization in school seems to have quickly reasserted itself. As of October 1945, however, the proportion of girls and, even more so, boys in their upper teens who were enrolled in school was still below that in 1940, and the older the youngster, the more pronounced this was.^[24]

A common adult response to the reformulation of aspects of the adolescent life course is to decry "juvenile delinquency," and in this regard, the World War II period was no exception. The conventional wartime view asserted a substantial increase in juvenile delinquency and most particularly in the sexual delinquency of alarmingly young girls who were thought all too often to have "made the mistake of confusing sex with patriotism."^[25] " 'A guy ought to have something to remember when he's facing submarines and death', he said huskily. 'Something more than a few hugs and kisses.' "^[26] The scare reflected the

accurate perception adults had that the war had placed young people in control of aspects of their own lives formerly overseen by parents.^[27]

Some maintained that apparent wartime increases in juvenile delinquency were substantially to be understood not in terms of anything particularly related to moral change or to particularly important shifts in the circumstances of young people but simply to prosperity and to the temptations for forbidden pleasures and objects that were all of a sudden placed before young people.^[28] A U.S. Office of Education pamphlet addressed to counselors considered it "obvious" that there was an "unfortunate effect" of young people's sudden prosperity: their "opportunity to have a good time; to enjoy elaborate food, clothing, automobiles." Counselors were urged to encourage suddenly prosperous youth to buy war bonds or to make other savings, lest they develop tastes the future would not be able to meet.^[29]

The formidably upright Children's Bureau itself pooh-poohed those who thought they detected major moral trends. They did note "a sharp rise in the number of girls' cases [in juvenile courts]," but explained this by enhanced legal vigilance. The police were now raiding places where promiscuity was said to be practiced.^[30] The juvenile court data that are available in comparable form through the early war years give some support to the less alarmed view and certainly argue against signs of an unbridling of youthful sexuality.^[31] Acute youth observers emphasized the "channeling of emotions into one burning feeling of patriotism," which often had no legitimate immediate channel. Because of conventional gender expectations, adolescent girls in particular suffered from this problem. They were permitted, for instance, to join the women's military branches only at age 20, although in adolescence their physical and emotional maturity was farther advanced than boys', and boys could join up at 18. Boys, too, with more money in their pockets and more responsibility by far than they had ever faced, were agitated. "Reports from schools and other sources indicate clearly that restlessness, turbulence, and emotional instability are increasing among adolescents everywhere. There are evidences also of increasing hostility toward adult au-

thority."^[32] But in "Prairie City," the intensively studied adolescent was described by Havighurst and Taba as "down-to-earth and unimaginative," the peer group culture oriented to social participation, group loyalty, and individual achievement and responsibility.^[33]

Accommodating War

At minimum, parents were beginning to feel differently about their children. War anxieties on the part of adults helped crystallize the notion of the age-stratified society, a formulation that was after the war to see full fruition in the functionalist concepts of—and partial concession to—a distinctive youth culture, notions that were reflected in youth policy during the war and afterward.^[34] Although the government supported the war effort by exhorting married women to enter the wartime labor force, at the same time it supported the conventional role structure of the family (and, by intent, soldier morale) by providing dependency allocations for wives of servicemen. D'Ann Campbell points out that although the number of "new" adult women workers recruited to the labor force during the war years was only 2.7 million as compared with 12 million men drawn into military service, "wives continued to switch into and out of paid employment, only going into the job market a little more often than before the war," so that "the number of women with work experience" increased considerably more than would be gleaned from examining numbers at work at any given time.^[35]

The best quantitative data on the relationship of women's labor-force behavior during the war to their family-formation patterns is contained in the 1944 Current Population Survey commissioned by the Women's Bureau. Retabulated slightly, table 18 indicates that whatever the pressures, whatever the opportunities for attractive or rewarding gainful employment during the war, marriage and particularly parenthood still militated heavily against employment. Women who were single in 1944 and had already been employed in December 1941, as had most single women not in school, usually remained in the labor force. But among women single and employed in 1941 who had married by 1944, large numbers had left the work

force during the war, even when they had worked for a period of time to get the marriage soundly on foot. Wives in 1944 whose husbands were at home were, however, fairly likely to be gainfully employed if they had been before the war—and this was only slightly truer for wives whose husbands were away in the military. A considerably greater difference in 1944 labor-force participation rates was the product of women's 1941 work pattern rather than the stage of family formation . Only a small proportion of wives whose husbands were at home and who were not already in the labor force as of Pearl Harbor were induced into gainful employment by 1944. This proportion was considerably higher when these wives' husbands were off fighting the war. But in a sense the most striking finding here is the fact that only

about a third of wives with husbands away in the armed forces were in the labor force as of March 1944. (One in five of these had a child under 10, a proportion considerably lower than the proportion of working wives whose husbands were not under arms who had young children.)^[36] The rest—surprisingly many of whom had already entered parenthood—were supported by their husbands' military allotments or in other ways.

As of May 1945, armed forces pay and allotments amounted to about one-third of the total family income among all families who received any such income, and because pay was higher for non-commissioned and especially commissioned officers, this proportion was roughly constant from relatively poor to relatively well-off families.^[37] Military compensation amounted to approximately $900, almost identical to the average annual income at that time for gainfully employed women and about half the average annual income of all families headed by women, which often included military and dependency pay. The average income of these female-headed families, in turn, was about three-quarters that of families headed by men, a ratio that exceeded the comparable figure for 1939 and would not be equaled by the regularly declining ratios after the war ended.^[38] To be sure, the proportion of single women who entered gainful employment during the war was not much higher, although these women did not have soldier's allotments as a source of income. It was preeminently the working wives of soldiers who did not share in the widespread wish of wartime women workers to continue work after the war was over.^[39]

War and Marriage

As it turned out, the approach of war, and even much of the war period itself, actually promoted marriage. As the wartime marriage boom peaked, a family sociologist remarked, quite correctly, that "the function of war marriages is wider than that of marriages consummated in normal times" and cautioned marriage counselors that the basis for "success" in war marriages had become no less various.^[40] An index of this is offered by a tabulation for the period 1940 to 1946 of the monthly totals of marriage licenses (which reflect impulse more directly than actual marriages) issued in thirty-four cities with popula-

Figure 13.
Marriage Licenses Issued Monthly, 1940–1946

tions of over 100,000.^[41] These are shown in figure 13. As international rearmament brought increasing prosperity to the nation, the impulse to marry trended upward. Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, considerably changed matters, with a deluge of marriage licenses being taken out. If some of these represented snap decisions on marriage partners, most were probably decisions between persons long embarked on courtship and fearful of the war's interruption of their plans. After a settling-in period, the pace of marriage picked up again by 1943. By mid-1945, the war in Europe and then in the Pacific was won, and the pace of marriage began to pick up once again. The real outburst of marriages awaited November and December 1945. This pace continued into mid-1946, reaching a peak in June.

So successful had young people been in marrying during the war that a higher proportion of women under age 20 was actually married in February 1944 than in 1940, fully three in four of them married to men away in the armed forces. For women 20 to 24 years of age, marriage probabilities also increased during the war: 58 percent were married in 1944 as compared to 51 percent in 1940. Almost one in three of their husbands were living away from home because of military service. For wives

Figure 14.
Wartime Family Formation, 1941–1945

aged 25 to 34, 13 percent of whose husbands were away serving their country, however, marriage patterns had fallen behind the 1940 pace.^[42] Some fascinating estimates by Paul C. Glick of the special factors that contributed one way or another to the wartime household-formation rate provide an initial view of how the family fared in World War II. A condensation of these is presented in figure 14, where the source-specific contributions to the rate are shown as percentages of the approximate rate of household formation that would likely have occurred had there been no war. Aggregating Glick's estimates for the five years during which the nation was at war, we can say that overall a mere 400,000 or so fewer households came into exis-

tence than perhaps might have had the nation not been at war—a tiny number compared with the millions of new households that actually did form over the period.

Fundamentally, the wartime household-formation rate during the rearmament year and the first year of American involvement was a composite of the early and huge increase in the marriage rate and the inability of many of these new couples to find separate housing for themselves, or their reluctance to do so in view of impending induction. By 1943 (the dates in the estimates are for activity from July 1 of the preceding year through June 30 of the named year), actual draft calls were accounting for about as much delay in household formation as was postponement of uncoupling by newly married couples, and these each were weighing about as heavily as the now-declining marriage rate. Adding to the overall decline in household formation by this time was a growing number of divorces, products of wartime stresses, but more than offsetting this in a statistical sense was a rapidly growing number of what Glick calls "wartime families," couples or fragments of couples who in ordinary times would still be living with parents or otherwise nonindependently but who had found independent housing because of the recoupling of soldier families or who had found so much prosperity on account of war employment that they uncoupled early, or actually maintained two households, one of them in a city to which temporary labor opportunities called them.

In 1944, military requirements peaked and moved deeply into the ranks of the married, uncoupling many families, a number no longer even remotely offset by war marriages. By this time, the number of war dead who had been household heads came to be large enough to be registered in these estimates—but its impact was small. And in 1945, as the war wound down, family formation startlingly resembled the ordinary.

Many contemporary observers did not see wartime marriage as benign. Sociologist Constantine Panunzio remarked that

the very movement of a considerable number of young people from the country districts and small centers to the large cities, the stimulation of city life, their being suddenly thrown together with persons of the opposite sex in boarding houses, shops, and restau-

rants, their need for intimate companionship to compensate for ordinary 'homesickness' and . . . [the] sudden possession of ready money in fairly good quantity—all of these no doubt contributed to the great increase of marriage in the larger cities.^[43]

A religiously oriented marriage counselor wrote in 1945 that the war had powerfully exacerbated the tendency already in the American marriage system to elevate romance above other considerations in marriage. "Romantic marriage was society's attempt to recognize and protect the right to personal satisfaction and romantic happiness in marriage and its resulting parenthood." In wartime, personal satisfaction can hardly be had other than by lightning courtships and marriages.^[44] Some contemporaries—including some marriage counselors seeking to enhance the felt need for their services—saw the rush as being led by women who feared that military casualties would spoil their chances of ever marrying.^[45] The several phases of war-induced marriage patterns affected different age groups differently. That the impact of the war on marriage was extremely age specific is hardly surprising in view of the age specificity of military service. Prewar economic recovery most potently improved marriage chances at the more modal marriage ages, for both men and women. The beginnings of the draft, in contrast, produced a marriage rush that was quite focused in age among younger men (many of whom no doubt hoped to avoid military service through family deferment) but not quite so focused among women. War itself produced a dramatic surge of relatively young marriage—again more so for men than for women—followed by a dearth most apparent in the ages of army service. When the war began to stop moving young men about, they once again started to marry. Again, it was especially those in the very cohort—otherwise modally situated for marriage—that had been the most often denied timely marriages during the war who were the most affected. The women they married were characteristically of the ages deemed appropriate for such men, and this forced some younger men out of the marriage market—but not very many. As the impact of the wartime marriage deficit let up—and this occurred rather quickly—relatively young men and women seemed prone

to try to keep up the marriage boom, but this could not be sustained on such slim residues of marriageable people. Nevertheless, marriage timing was becoming more modal, and younger, as a result of the new patterns of marriage developed with the postwar stabilization of the wartime marriage market.

New York State data are deployed in table 19, showing for the years 1939–1946 the trends in numbers of men and women marrying for the first time at ages that were relatively young (20 for men, 17 for women), roughly modal (24 for men, 21 for women), and on the old side (27 for men, 24 for women). Among males, a deformation of the age structure of marriage was adumbrated already by 1941, as younger marriage became especially common. By 1942, the tendency had become more pronounced, as many men somewhat older were already in uniform. The overall deficit of marriages in 1943 and, to a lesser extent, 1944, yet again shifted the age structure of marriage downward. By the last year of the war, older men, undoubtedly including large numbers of returned veterans, were marrying. For older people, the enormous postwar marriage boom began promptly. By 1946, all age groups were participating heavily, postponed marriages in part accounting for the excess of the

modal-age marriage increase over the quite huge one for the young men and women. But just as apparently, the postwar marriage boom affected all ages.

Whites and blacks differed somewhat in their nuptial responses to the rapidly changing circumstances of World War II. Blacks apparently were a bit slower in intensifying their pace of marriage as the Depression faded—and the Depression really did not fade for blacks quite so rapidly.^[46] By 1941–42, at any rate, blacks were moving even more smartly into marriage than were whites. Thereafter, blacks were somewhat more reluctant than whites to reduce their nuptiality in the mid-war period and, correspondingly, a little less explosive in their late-war and postwar marriage booms. Subject to severe constraints in their family-formation patterns during the especially long economic depression they suffered, blacks seemed to be even more reluctant than whites to hold back from transforming their newfound prosperity into marriage during the war.

Given the immensity of the personal upheavals promoted by the war and the tremendous annual variations in the raw number of persons marrying, the marriage market continued to function astonishingly smoothly, the widespread economic wherewithal proving able to conquer all in the presence of love.^[47] The highly detailed New York data show that the age distribution of those in the marriage market varied greatly from year to year, as one would assume in view of the changing, age-specific nature of the draft call. One might anticipate that because the numbers of men who had access to the marriage market varied in an age-specific fashion, as that of women did not, the women theoretically available for men of different ages to marry would change over the war years.^[48] Courtship patterns are structured by ascriptive characteristics, of which in the American system age is a most important one, as is also prior marital status. If there were a restructuring of the timing of marriage, a shuffling of age-related courtship patterns would be a likely concomitant. If younger women were most highly prized, for instance, one might anticipate that in a year like 1943, when relatively few men were present for marriage and in which the numbers of marriages was reduced accordingly, those men who did marry would marry relatively younger

women. But this did not happen. Massachusetts registration data on age at first marriage of both partners in new unions indicate that the marriage booms, both during and immediately after the war, were achieved without much altering the relationships of age of bride and groom.^[49] That is, the data suggest that young men and women sought—and found—mates whose age bore roughly the same relationship to their own age as in the late Depression. First-time grooms were over time just a little more prone to marry young in the wartime marriage market than they had been before the war, but somewhat surprisingly, the same shift was apparent among first-time brides.^[50]

There was, however, a tendency during the war for first-time grooms to marry previously married persons more readily than they had previously. But, on closer inspection, this too represents not a shift in market patterns but simply the fact that there were increasing proportions of once-married people in the marriage market during these years, as there were to be subsequently. Indeed, separate examination of the previously married shows that when one takes the number and proportion of all marrying people into consideration, they became just slightly less likely than before the war to join in marriages with persons who had never before married. The marriage market held remarkably firm: cultural preferences were being maintained through the war, despite circumstances that led to the shifts in the timing of many marriages. Youthful marriage was youthful for both partners. Even the marriage of veterans would be accomplished without any particular upsetting of the age structure of marriage, despite the dramatic "time out" that had seemingly been introduced into their search for a mate. Youthful girls were not snapped up by the returning heroes. Rather, the veterans apparently picked up where and with much the same age group as they had left off.

The marriage market itself held up in a surprisingly orderly fashion through the war, in the face of the remarkable bursts of nuptial energy documented earlier in this chapter. In figure 15, we shift our angle to a longitudinal one, examining the single-year marriage probabilities at given ages of three birth cohorts of men, those born about 1916, 1920, and 1924, tracking each cohort through the war years. The retrospective data

Figure 15.
Percent of Single Men Marrying, for Three Birth Cohorts

used to construct the graph indicate that Americans only advanced or suspended marriage schedules during the war; they did not abandon them. And much of the change that took place was incorporated into a longer-term tendency to earlier marriage. Easily the largest part of the proportion of eligibles marrying at any given age as always was a reflection of the ordinary age curve of marriage. The 1924 birth cohort provides a nice example. The 4 percent of the single men of this cohort who married at 18 in the first full year of the war was way above the 2.7 percent of like eligibles who, four years before, had married at 18 but for all that, only 4 percent married , less than the proportion who married three years earlier at 19 at the end of the Depression, and less also than the single 19-year-old men in the very midst of the Depression.

The dominant pattern among the three birth cohorts of men in fact was not that induced immediately by the war but rather the secular trend toward increasingly earlier marriage. For all the distortions of the war, subsequent cohorts did not abandon under strain of war the "gains" in more rapid wedlock that previous cohorts had adopted. And shortfalls were made up quickly by those cohorts whose marriages had been temporarily postponed. In fact, among men, the retrospective data indicate

that the most dramatic single-year shifts occurred in the huge marriage boom after the war. And yet, these shifts were general enough that they too were considerably outweighed in their effect on the age structure of marriage by the secular trend downward in marriage age.

When a mid-1946 survey asked a representative sample of Americans what they thought was the ideal age for men and women to marry, it found that the then-current youthful patterns were closely embraced by the majority.^[51] In fact, ideal ages produced a high degree of consensus—a considerably higher degree of consensus than the actual behavior at the time. The norms, moreover, were more uniformly held than they would be even at the height of the baby boom. As a result, the wartime-marriage cohort—despite the distortions in detail produced by the war—was more likely than either the marriage cohort of the Depression or those preceding cohorts to endorse their own marriage timing as roughly the ideal, and this was so for both men and women. In the war-marriage cohort, neither veterans of World War II nor working wives nor husbands of working wives—those respondents whose own marriage timing had most likely been affected in the complex development of the preceding half decade—differed significantly from others in their ideals of marriage timing.

Burgess, concerned about the predictably fragile quality of wartime marriages, set up for his students an extensive interview protocol and in about 1945 directed them each to interview a handful of married women who had been separated from their husbands by the latter's wartime duty. The questions probed into the circumstances of the marriage, the strains of the separation and modes of handling strains by both partners, sexual jealousies and concerns, letter-writing, and plans, hopes, and anxieties about the reunion that would soon take place. The sample was inevitably weighted toward the kinds of women who would be acquaintances of University of Chicago students, but many of the novice interviewers were at pains to contact a variety of respondents. Selected quotations provide a sense of the riskiness of life course formation in wartime, combined with a shared belief in the inevitability of the sequencing that made sense of these events for the women.

Rare were interviewees who worried that their marriages had been contracted in haste, or too young.

Although we liked the same things, and we were very much in love with each other, I can't really say that we had a chance to know each other too well. Our marriage was a continuation of our relationship except for the sexual aspect: we lead a transitory life.^[52]

More commonly than not, those who were troubled by the unusual circumstances under which they had married still expressed satisfaction. Marriages thus contracted nevertheless met what the war so clearly had already revealed to be the basic American standard: love.

There are going to be lots of cases like this. You get married and you don't have enough time to really learn to know each other. . . . But I'm not sorry I married him, and I wouldn't tell other girls not to marry like I did. I loved him and we were happy while we were together. It seems it was just meant to be like this. . . . Bill and I talked and laughed a lot, but when I stop to think of it, I guess mostly what we talked about was sort of superficial.^[53]

Some even expressed a sense of a challenge met (even before postwar reunion with their husbands).

We decided to get married when he was alerted for overseas duty. We hadn't thought he'd leave so soon. We hadn't talked about getting married until we decided to. . . . We didn't know each other very well, but I'm a good judge of character. It was clear to us both that we were going to be married sooner or later and thought it had better be now, as he was going overseas and we wouldn't get another change for perhaps two or three years. . . . There was some difficulty in not knowing each other too well—it's hard catching up on two whole lifetimes in two weeks. It was the best two weeks of my life, and he writes that we'll always be glad we made such a sudden decision.^[54]

Separation, of course, was typically discussed in negative terms, but most commonly the interviewees spoke of initial difficulties, inevitable but manageable with time.

I don't think of myself as something separate from him anymore. If there is any important decision to be made I always think of the two of us doing it, instead of something apart from him.^[55]

I felt sort of numb after Bernie left for service, but I kept busy and that helped. . . . The lonesomeness hits the hardest when you see other couples go out having a good time. My closest friends all have their husbands here.^[56]

My adjustment, on the whole is all right. I'm lonesome, of course, but it would have been foolish not to adjust myself because there's nothing I can do about the situation.^[57]

One of the questions that propelled Burgess's inquiry, and about which he seemed to receive exclusively comforting replies, was whether war wives were dating other men while their husbands were away. Several of his respondents remarked that they missed male companionship, and handled this (often with their husbands' explicit approval) by going out in mixed groups or in settings defined in such a way that they did not threaten the faithfulness of the wives. Strong social pressures upheld propriety. When a Roper poll asked men and women in August 1945 whether "a woman whose husband is overseas should accept dates with other men" and whether "servicemen's wives" whose husbands were overseas should accept dates, it recorded an overwhelming consensus: 83 percent of the men and 87 percent of the wives said that they should not accept dates. One "Midwest" wife spoke eloquently of her circumstance and that of other servicemen's wives: "You can't go dancing, because in a town like this it would cause too much comment. And I do love to dance."^[58] Without exception, respondents denied that their own sexual desires constituted a problem that could not be handled. In the early 1940s, sexual longing was in a sense a fitting way for young women to feel, without submitting to it.

There has been some difficulty in suppressing sexual inclinations but we sublimated them in several ways.^[59]

I miss my husband. I'm a very affectionate person and I miss having someone caress me and kiss me and make love to me. You get used to not having this after a while, but sometimes I have terrific dreams my husband is making love to me.^[60]

The dominant theme in the interviews is neither fear nor anxiety nor exhilaration but a sense of relief at the nearing of the end of a surprisingly undramatic challenge.

Now after being away, he realizes how much home and family mean to a man and considers his financial problems insignificant in comparison. He knows it would be possible to manage somehow.^[61]

The wives did not portray theirs as a heroic challenge but instead as an intensification of the kinds of problems that young men and women in love characteristically faced: probably the most commonly mentioned affect (loneliness apart) was irritation at parents or parents-in-law for poorly managed co-residence or other cooperative response to the absence of the husband. And many women reported a pleasing growth of autonomy in their husbands' absence, although contemporary ideology did not lead them to trumpet this.

I think I am more domestic than I was, take more of an interest in the home as a center of our life—more than I had expected or done before. I also feel that I have become more independent and dominating than when he was here.^[62]

Most conflicts were dealt with by a variety of compromises that reinforced conventional role definitions within the family institution.^[63] Havighurst's study of returning veterans noted that because of this situation, "the husband's return very often precipitated confusion if not outright conflict."^[64] On the whole, domesticity had triumphed over frustration, just as the urge to marry had triumphed over the threat to the marriage market posed by the military effort. Reuben Hill's detailed study of the adjustment to wartime separation (among families with children) showed powerfully that while neither circumstances of marriage nor particular military experience much affected the family's ability to weather separation and then reunion smoothly, the preexisting smooth functioning of the family unit as well as an adequate material basis did.^[65] Karen Anderson concludes correctly that "despite the temporary changes of the war period, the war did not promote a long-term revision of sexual values or conduct." The revised double standard of post-Victorian America persisted despite superficial strains caused by war-created circumstances.^[66] Partly, Anderson argues, this reflected the "considerable anxiety" one can detect in contemporary documents "over the continuation of a marriage

and family system predicated on the willingness of women to subordinate their needs and aspirations to those of others."^[67] Thus, James H. Bossard, one of the preeminent contemporary sociological students of the family, writing primarily for women, declared in 1945 that "it is vitally important to bring to American womanhood a white glow of appreciation of the role of the homemaker in our rapidly changing society."^[68]

Military Service and Marriage

American family formation appears to have been remarkably undisturbed by the military effort of World War II; indeed, it was given a boost. While many of the nation's youngest and healthiest men were called into military service during the period, both government policy and public sentiment reflected the desire to protect the American family. This meant both the preservation of existing families and the encouragement of unmarried servicemen to act much as they might have in the absence of war—namely, to enter into marriage and subsequent parenthood. The continuity of preferred nuptiality patterns into the war, an implicit component of national policy on manpower and morale, was achieved with tonic effectiveness.

The draft had begun (before Pearl Harbor) with exclusions for married men. When military calls pressed on manpower pools, the draft age for the unmarried was first extended downward, and efforts were made to enlist physically and educationally less well qualified men, who had previously been rejected by the services. General Lewis B. Hershey, director of Selective Service, argued several months into the war that "it is in the interest of the government to maintain, if possible, the family as the basic social unit" by retaining a deferment for fathers. Although, gradually, occupational deferment became predominant in the minds of the more powerful planners of the war, public pressure to relieve fathers from the draft was not without effect, achieving first a Selective Service directive to local boards and then a Congressional enactment stating that each hold back fathers from service wherever possible.^[69]

Because it proved impossible to defer married men, the U.S. government materially underlined its concern for the stability

of servicemen's family lives by providing in early 1942 a family allotment, prorated according to family size and structure. "The effectiveness of war operations depends in large part upon civilian and military morale. A vital factor in upholding this morale is some reasonable maintenance of families of men engaged in military service."^[70] The sum paid was in part contributory and in part a flat government allowance. The soldier's contribution was fixed at $22, the government's share expanding according to a schedule of needs based on family composition. No distinction was made between family obligations contracted before the military's call and since.^[71] Since allotments were not needs-tested, they must have provided a rather substantial incentive for marriage during the war: not only were servicemen's wives able when they wished to find jobs that often paid substantial semiskilled wages and not only were they applauded for doing thereby their patriotic duties in the absence of their husbands, but on top of this they received a hearty bonus, more than half of which was provided by the government. Indeed, the creation of a folk category, the "Allotment Annie," expressed a concern that some unscrupulous women would marry lonely soldiers for mercenary reasons, perhaps even hoping for widow's benefits before long. As early as 1943, a guide to wartime marriage noted that the fresh material resources provided to young couples in the war had put together what the Depression had rent asunder. "Men were everywhere and able to get married, subsidized by a government with a nest egg of pay. And because work for women was everywhere available and the girl could add to the man's government allowance, the couple was able to marry when they wanted to, young and ardent."^[72] Just before America entered the war, True Romances had proclaimed that "Love Is Worth Waiting For,"^[73] ennobling self by denying both the intense drive of lust and the deep emotional needs to which immediate marriage would speak—upbuilding thus the usual sense of the relationship among marriage, passion, and long-term mutual knowledge. But headier expressions carried the day, essentially concluding that being in love was—as it had long been—the prime basis for a good marriage, that even in war lust was a poor but recognizable counterfeit, and that most marriages would survive, even if many

failed. Evelyn Duvall at nearly this same time counseled Doris and Fred, who had already been engaged for a year and a half, when Fred's draft status introduced a note of doubt into their movement toward the altar. They decided to postpone setting a marriage date until Fred's assignment became definite, but the military was typically oracular. Three months later, his training and subsequent assignment still not set and the couple no longer sure that they could wait with appropriate ennobling self-restraint, they decided to marry immediately, just as soon as the military's whim set a date and place for Fred's training. "The biggest mistake I've ever made," Fred wrote Duvall, "was not to get married before I left for [temporary training] here. It would have been much simpler to arrange everything."^[74]

Others learned from examples like Fred's. The usually staid Saturday Evening Post published a passionate story of wartime marriage that proposed that the nature of love and life was actually clarified by the intensity of the times.

Everything grows very simple. Big things are big, and little things are little, and presently the shape of everything comes clear—life and sorrow and happiness and fear and faith—and peace. We'll be married in the morning, Mary Jo. For two months we shall be happy. We shall be unhappy afterwards. But we shall hold the shape of peace whole between us.^[75]

For its part, True Love and Romance set out a debate between conventional sentiment—beautiful but unfortunately inappropriate to the moment—and the deeper love that war sometimes promoted. A girl in love resents war's intrusion.

I don't want all the beauty and wonder that should be spread out through the years to be crowded into a few hours, as it must be for my friends who are rushing into marriage. . . . I want as nearly normal a life as a girl can hope for, in these troubled times. I want love to come to me, breathlessly, but tiptoeing out of a dream. I don't want it to sweep down on me and carry me off to Paradise for a few hours, a few days of rapture—to be followed by endless waiting, praying, hoping.

But she is persuaded by her soldier-lover, who reasons that "we'll . . . crowd all the times we can't do into that one time; then

tomorrow evening, we'll be about—let's see, ten months deep in our romance. Our wartime, can't-be-ordinary romance."^[76] A mid-1942 poll of Woman's Home Companion "reader-reporters" gave a 63 percent endorsement to prompt marriage when asked "Is it right or wrong for men in the armed forces to marry," even if not optimal. Companion readers were concerned about too-hasty marriages—that is, marriages contracted on too-short acquaintance, but the quotation the article used as a lead was said by the author to have "leaped into our eager fingers all by itself": "What in the world would be the use of fighting a war if people are not to be allowed to decide whether or not they should marry or have a child?"^[77] An advice book for prospective brides captured another aspect of the central position marriage assumed in time of war:

The man is going off to war, and the only thing that is real and eternal to him is the present moment. The girl he loves becomes the symbol of all life, the life that he is fighting for and expects to come back to. . . . She represents the home he will forego for the present, the security he will dream of, the children he will hope for. She is everything to him, and he cannot wait to marry her. . . . Any consideration that might have influenced a young couple to delay in peacetime . . . is submerged in the great tide of emotions that sweeps over the youth of a nation in wartime.^[78]

Those of age 20 to 26 were most prone to induction into the military, following Selective Service policy during much of the war. The proportion of inductees who were single at induction was to a great extent a simple function of age rather than being related to their age-group's draft-proneness. Thus, the proportion of young men still single when inducted into the army at 18 through 20 was still well over nine in ten, but this proportion dropped to three in four by age 23 and to one in three by age 27.^[79] In contrast to the general population in 1940, single army inductees were only slightly more likely to have been chosen from among the single population when at the younger ages—when relatively fewer had children. But among older inductees, a far greater proportion was single than in the general population; this ratio was roughly double at 25 to 29 and even higher for men in their thirties.

One of the reasons that nuptiality prospered in wartime was that in surprisingly large numbers men entered the army and then married. Data exist which allow us to develop this surprising story in some detail.^[80] The surveys I primarily employ here include white and black soldiers (surveyed separately, as befits a racially segregated army) who at the time were stationed in the United States.^[81] Respondents were asked their ages, how long they had been in the army, whether they were married and had children, and whether their marriages had preceded or followed their induction. For each, information on branch of the army, rank, and whether conscript or volunteer was recorded, along with a variety of questions about attitudes toward the army and plans for after the war.

Did being in the army slow down the movement of young men into marriage? We can translate this question by asking whether years elapsed since induction "counted" as much as did years elapsed before induction. Would a 21-year-old unmarried inductee who then served for two years be as likely to be married at age 23 as would a soldier inducted single at 20, who then served three years in the army? The data offer an unequivocal answer, a schematic presentation of which is offered in figure 16.^[82] The figure models separately the progress into the married state of white and black members of the 1944 army samples who were inducted at relatively young and at somewhat older ages. Annually after induction, an additional approximately 15 percent of single soldiers, whether white or black, married. Soldiers older at induction were more likely to be married at any term of service, but the difference a year of age attained outside the army made was less than a year passed in the army, especially for younger black soldiers. The search for a mate either became more urgent on induction or could be pursued then with greater success, so that at age 23, as the graph shows, soldiers who had served for several years were more commonly married than those who had entered more recently, having spent the years between 1941 to 1943 as civilians. Of course, it might be the case that almost all young men, as they approached induction, married their girls, if they had girls. In that case, in a sense, age at induction would be essentially irrelevant to marriage timing. Were this so, the search for

Figure 16.
Percent of American Who Married, 1944

a mate by soldiers would have been among a subset of young people who were on equal footing with one another; and the age of the vast majority of soldiers was neither so young nor so old that marriage in a year or two was out of the question for reasons of age.

Considerations of timing alone did not explain the differing propensity of civilian men to marry, and neither were various other factors irrelevant to the course to marriage of soldiers during World War II. Civilian men of higher socioeconomic status and extended formal education had long tended to marry older. The set of factors explaining these peacetime patterns involves the longer time required to attain favored occupational positions and the direct and opportunity costs of extended education and, possibly, subcultural values. But among World War II soldiers, the pattern was more complex. The survey shows that those whose civilian jobs were either white collar or skilled were more marriage prone than others, all else held equal statistically, while by contrast, soldiers with more favored

educational backgrounds were less likely to marry between induction and 1944, all else held equal statistically.

Treating the 1940 proportions married as a reference point, we see that in the most general terms, even in 1944, well into the war, the fact of almost universal military induction did not actually deter marriage by these young men. Up to about age 25, the proportions married at induction were just about as great as one would anticipate in the white male population as a whole, although somewhat lower for blacks. This must have represented two countervailing tendencies—the deferment from military service of some proportion of those already married, particularly fathers, and the speeding up of marriages as induction approached. And if we consider both those married before induction and those married since induction, once again the age pattern of nuptiality of soldiers considerably resembles that for the population as a whole in 1940, all the way into the late twenties. Economic conditions were so much better in the period 1942–1944 when these soldiers entered the army than they had been a few years earlier that these young men were able to marry when they wanted to. Although military service was no doubt considered an awful job, it was a certain one, and soldiers' allotments, while not princely, were an appropriate basis on which to begin a family. Service may also have promoted a kind of reaching out for adult security in a world about to be rendered personally quite fearsome. The men who married during their time in the army acted out of a deeply felt optimism. Among the army sample, younger soldiers were more likely than others to answer that they thought that "things will be better . . . for you personally after the war than they were before the war."^[83] This optimistic position was considerably more common among black soldiers than whites, especially among black soldiers from the rural South. Among whites, it was somewhat more common among younger soldiers. At every age, white soldiers who had married since induction were one-third again as likely as single soldiers to expect that things would get better after the war. Conversely, at almost every age, white men—but not black men—who had entered the army already married were even less optimistic about their postwar prospects than the singles.

The American Soldier observes that along a number of dimen-

sions of morale, married soldiers tended to be more displeased with their situation than were unmarried soldiers. Stouffer and his associates, for instance, comment that "the very fact that draft boards were more liberal with married than single men provided numerous examples to the drafted married man of others in his shoes who got relatively better breaks than he did. Comparing himself with his unmarried associates in the army, he could feel that induction demanded greater sacrifice from him than from them."^[84] Reanalysis indicates that when the soldier married—whether before or after induction—mattered very greatly, which fits with certain other insights scattered through but not developed systematically in The American Soldier .

The proportion of soldiers drafted, by race, age, and marital status as of the 1944 survey, is shown in table 20. Blacks, we note, relatively rarely volunteered—understandably, in view of their unequal treatment in the military as outside it. At virtually every age, while a majority of all soldiers were conscripted, the proportion of volunteers was much the lowest among those married before their entry into the army. More intriguing, it is much the highest among those who were to marry after their induction, even among blacks. Among white 21-year-olds, to give an example, while 15 percent of those who had been drafted when single had married since entering the army, 32 percent of those who had enlisted single had done so.

Attitude toward service obviously influenced and was influenced by marriage. So also with promotion. Each step up in rank increased by about 10 percent the proportion of whites subsequently married among those entering the army single, even taking into consideration age at entry to army and years since entry, prior occupation and educational background, and type of assignment within the army. Table 21 shows how well soldiers who married since entering the army prospered there.^[85] Whites and blacks, it will appear, experienced quite the same process here, although blacks, as usual, paid a "price" for being black in terms of slower promotion at every level and age.

Soldiers who had married since entering the army were clearly advantaged in promotion, and those who had married prior to entering were just as clearly disadvantaged . In part, this can be seen as the product of other, common correlates of early

marriage, especially lesser educational attainment. But at the same time, we suspect an attitudinal difference, a different kind of integration into army life, between those who married before entering and those who were to marry afterward. This attitudinal difference was a mirror of the way that those responsible for granting promotions saw things. There had been something of a rush toward marriage prior to induction, especially for the younger inductees. Entry into the army constituted something of an event that in effect segregated the population into those who already had reasonably well-advanced courtships and those essentially nowhere on the path to matrimony. But perhaps it was also the case that those who married before entry and those who married afterward were quite different kinds of people.

The army itself was divided into different branches (and of course the army was different from the navy, itself subdivided), in which careers—both military and personal—

diverged sharply and were related significantly to prior background.^[86] I limit my discussion here to the two branches that were by far the most heavily represented in the 1944 survey: the infantry and the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF; subsequently an independent service). As we shall see, the latter was a particularly favored branch, while the former was, simply, the infantry.

Over time, the army developed a series of mechanisms to place new men—new white men, anyhow—more nearly rationally within the service, attempting to fill a shifting series of military purposes. This would tie the nature of military service strikingly to marriage. The superb account by Palmer, Wiley,

and Keast^[87] shows how on average these mechanisms tended to distribute the men most likely to succeed—in the military or out of it—to the air forces and those least likely to succeed to the infantry. The initial mechanism—assignment by prior occupation—produced this tendency. So did assignment by general-aptitude tests, the next approach the army tried. An attempt to upgrade the infantry by assigning according to physical capacity, with the ground combat arms receiving the best-qualified men, failed to accomplish its end, partly because it came too late to make much difference but also because adequate physical examinations could not be conducted.^[88] Thus, the infantry drew heavily on draftees, often relatively uneducated. The AAF, by contrast, was staffed to an unusual degree by volunteers and by the well educated.^[89] The infantrymen characteristically said that their army jobs were less interesting than did most others in the sample, and air corpsmen thought that their jobs were more interesting. Those in the AAF had considerably higher than average rank; those in the infantry somewhat lower than average rank. In the AAF, 61 percent who had served between 1 1/2 years and 2 1/2 years had made corporal. In the rest of the army, 46 percent had.^[90] And AAF men, after the usual initial hesitation, married more readily than infantrymen of comparable age and length of service, as table 22 shows. A like pattern, however, did not obtain for black soldiers, as table 22 also demonstrates.^[91]

A component of "success" for whites, then, was getting into the right branch, where the job was interesting and prospects for advancement great. How are we to explain the linkage of all this to high morale and to marriage? We can do this only speculatively. The army, as an institution, did not simply enlist such enthusiasm (including but not exclusively for the military task at hand) but channeled it as well, by providing superior and inferior vehicles for the reward of the right stuff. Immediately, the superior branch was more interesting and generally safer. In the longer run, the job skills in the superior branch transferred more readily to the peacetime economy, for whites. A veteran of the infantry—everything else being equal—might well see minimal continuity between his military career and peacetime pursuits. The opposite would likely have been true

of white AAF veterans—when those veterans could realistically hope for a career in which the achievements of a prior phase could be counted on to have weight at a next phase.^[92] Blacks could not count on this in their transitions from military to civilian role, as in other aspects of their life courses.

Marriage was very much on the minds of most soldiers. Another American Soldier survey, gathered in Italy in August 1945, asked those not yet married: "Before you left for overseas, was there any girl back in the states that you expected to marry after the war?" Those who had a girl were asked how sure they were that she had "stayed loyal" while they were away.^[93] Neither age nor length of military service deterred the soldiers from

maintaining such liaisons with girls back home: roughly six in ten whites and roughly four in five blacks did, at all ages and durations of military service. Most men believed that their girls were loyal to them—but this varied by both race and time since induction, intriguingly so. For white soldiers, the proportion of girls back home who seemed entirely to be trusted varied inversely with their men's time in service, declining from about six in ten to slightly under half for men who had been in the army for more than three years. For black soldiers, by contrast, the motive to have a girl to look forward to—stronger than among whites in the first place, to judge from the higher proportion overall who were in this sense "engaged"—seemingly influenced their beliefs about the loyalty of their girls, for the proportion thought to be loyal actually increased with time in service from four in ten to slightly over half.^[94] Clearly, to judge from the patterns by branch, there was a compensatory element in the attachments some of the men claimed. Thus, among younger soldiers (where the differences were the strongest), almost three in four of the still-unmarried men serving in the ground combat arms (most prominently the infantry) had girls back home (of which almost four in five were thought loyal). By comparison, only six in ten of their AAF counterparts had girls they thought of marrying, and of these, three in ten seemed to be of uncertain loyalty. The branch most conducive to wartime marriage was, then, the least conducive to dreaming about marriage. And yet, most AAF men dreamed, too, and felt generally secure in doing so.

Among younger soldiers, those of lower rank were somewhat more likely to claim girls back home they planned to marry. Rank did not command more (or less) loyalty among the girls to whom the men aspired to return. Nor did combat discourage men from making some kind of an emotional commitment for the postwar. If anything, soldiers who had seen combat were somewhat more likely to give thought to marrying and were slightly less likely to worry that their girls were unfaithful to them while they were away. Overall, and most clearly for the youngest unmarried soldiers, those with more education were less prone to commit themselves emotionally to particular girls back home. The pattern, like the related pattern for

branch, is complementary to the greater marriage-proneness among more-educated soldiers seen in the 1944 survey. The survey showed no particular differences in perceived loyalty by educational level.

The near-fiancée waiting back home—or the thought of one—mattered a good deal to the men. In most of the morale-related items on the 1945 survey, the soldiers who had a girl back home of whose loyalty they were sure were the most pleased with their current situations, a pattern true for both whites and blacks. Among whites, those with a loyal girl back home were more likely to think their war job both important and satisfying than either those with a girl of uncertain loyalty or no girl at all. The latter were somewhat more likely to find their job important than were the married. Among blacks, the married were by far the most disillusioned, and those claiming a loyal girl back home who they intended to marry were the most persuaded that what they were doing in the war was important. Those who looked forward to marrying a particular girl were both most likely to believe that they were well liked by their fellow soldiers and to enjoy working with them. For the soldiers, the anticipation of marriage was an element of continuity that fit the men for their current distasteful duty.

One reason that military duty interfered so little with courtship and marriage was that a double standard of sexual conduct allowed the men to slake their sexual drives on prostitutes and loose or distressed women without particular qualms and without a sense that this rendered them less appropriate marriage partners and at the same time protected the interests that most of them no doubt had in the virginity of their girls back home. This position was reinforced by literature that "stressed that wartime circumstances had made servicemen's infidelity understandable and forgivable."^[95] The double standard, in effect, was reinforced. The 1945 survey asked the soldiers about their wartime sexual experiences. Results are shown in table 23, which presents the proportions of those who reported differing amounts of sexual intercourse during the past three months by marital status and self-assessed "engagement" status. Wartime virgins were considerably less likely to have had girls back home whom they expected to marry. At the other end of the scale, at

least among the youngest soldiers, the most frequent copulators were the most likely to be quasi-engaged . It is strong testimony to the definition given by the men to wartime sex that there was no negative correlation between their perceived faithfulness of their girls back home and their copulatory behavior while in Italy.

Over six in ten black soldiers told the interviewers (perhaps they were less guarded about admitting such things) they had had sexual intercourse more than monthly over the past three months while in the service; fewer than one in ten said they had had no intercourse at all during this period. Roughly four times as many whites said they had been entirely sexually continent over this period, and only about half as many were regular copulators. While the data for whites indicate they were more likely to lose a bit of their restraint the longer they were in the service, the black soldiers showed no such pattern.

From one perspective, apart from the race differential in overall propensities to sexual experience of this sort, the strongest finding here may be the relative lack of additional inhibition to extramarital sex that marriage promoted. The majority of this sexual experience was casual in the extreme, of course, most of it commercial. But so strongly was casual sex understood to be

within the realm of a soldier's experience that the sexual behavior of white troops who were married rather nearly resembled that of the men who had "sure" girls back home whom they expected to marry. The randiest solders were those with girls whose own faithfulness they doubted, their own sexual adventuresomeness perhaps part product of frustration at their girls' disloyalty, the disloyalty—or its claim—no doubt in part product of the men's sexual adventures. Blacks' wartime sex lives differed less among themselves along this dimension.

Wartime Parenthood

War, then, fit marriage, although the modest information on children in the army surveys confirms that if wartime marriage made sense to these men, wartime parenthood more often than not did not. At one level, the war scarcely disturbed the passage from marriage into parenthood. The reasons were more often practical than sentimental. The proportion of all families living in independent households who were childless was at first slightly below the 1940 census figure in May 1945, but most of this was more the result of the considerably enlarged number of separated families than of reduced parenthood among coresident couples.^[96] Before the war, the ratio of first births in a year had tended roughly to be equal to 60 percent of the number of marriages in the previous year. This ratio rose briefly to 65 percent in 1942, then declined to its usual level throughout the war.

In 1946, however, there was a genuine baby boom, and the ratio rose to 74 percent.^[97] Three factors accounted for the postwar boom: a general exuberance affecting couples generally, at least those with no more than one or two children; a special exuberance and eagerness to get on with married life among new couples formed at war's end; and an amount of "catch-up" parenthood among veterans' families, who in number, perhaps, roughly equaled the number of newly married couples who had been postponing parenthood at the tail end of the Depression. The boom, however, proved not to be a mere interlude in which uncharacteristic behavior promoted by the war was expressed. In fact, it proved to be formative of the

longer-lasting and quite general baby boom that was shortly to appear. The careful study by Rindfuss and Sweet shows that "during the 2 years following World War II, the mean age of fertility declined by approximately one year for each education group except the highest. Similar large shifts were recorded for other parameters of the fertility distribution." They show further that not only frequent and early childbearing were characteristic of this sudden transitional era but that more of that childbearing than before was concentrated in a short number of years early in marriage.^[98]

Initial fertility was much more labile than subsequent fertility, especially for whites. Table 24 displays annual changes in numbers of women becoming mothers for the first time, divided by age and by race. The decision to become a parent, hinged as it was on the decision to get married, clearly was related in a large way to external events. It is immediately apparent, and striking, however, how much more dramatic an effect the war had on the fertility behavior of whites than of nonwhites, presumably a function of the more widespread ability of whites to control their marital fertility but also of the less close engagement of the life courses of blacks with the presumptively national events that so affected whites, as we have

earlier seen to have been to some extent the case with regard to the transition to marriage. We find, thus, that the "ending" of the Depression in 1940–41 did far more to promote increased numbers of whites than of blacks entering parenthood. Correspondingly, the war years saw less of the up-and-down in parenthood patterns for blacks than for whites. Only in 1947 was there a distinctively strong response by blacks.

Among whites, it was obviously the initial fertility of women in their twenties which was most directly influenced by the war; this was, of course, the product of the fact that these were the women who were married to soldiers, or potential soldiers. Parenthood for women of these ages increased very sharply through 1940 and 1941, then became markedly less common year after year through the end of the war. If 1945 saw the beginning of the outburst of postwar marriages, 1946 saw a baby boom among wives in this age group which was a boom indeed. And although the proportionate increase declined after 1946, the numbers continued to rise, and to rise sharply through 1947. To a less dramatic extent, like patterns were present among older and younger whites and among blacks. This was at last a thoroughly universal postwar parenthood boom. In fact, families were not so much universally enlarging as were young men and women making the transition to the challenging, normatively enjoined status of parent. They were young, indeed younger, and more uniformly so than before the war.

As soon as the war appeared to be finished and the troops began to be demobilized, a remarkable burst of family formation ensued. Detailed data from the annual Vital Statistics , reported in table 25, show that almost all the boom was the product of parenthood on the part of young people of military age. The data for fathers' ages show that there was almost no increase in numbers of births to fathers under 20, even between 1945 and 1946, or between 1946 and 1947, but a very sharp increase in both these years for fathers 20 to 24. The commitment of this group to family building was strong indeed. The difference between the showing of this group and those 25 to 29 is instructive: whereas the younger men increased the number of children they fathered by almost one-third in both years,

the rate of increase of children to men 25 to 29 tailed off after the first postwar year. Births to still older men showed the same pattern as those 25 to 29 but at a lower level. By 1948, virtually all age groups were tailing off in their fathering, by roughly the same amount. The immediate postwar baby boom was over.

Veterans Resume a Civilian Life Course

Partly in recognition of the highly structured life course of American young men, serious thought was early given to ways in which veterans would be reincorporated into the national life, their lives put back into right sequence. Remembering vividly the sad experience of the World War I veterans' bonus, the nation devoted considerable wartime planning and postwar programmatic energy to the situation of veterans when peace arrived.^[99] A 1943 poll revealed that provision of immediate postwar income support by the government was overwhelmingly approved by the American people, with the modal period of support envisioned being "about six months." But many favored a year or even more.^[100] The remarkable successes achieved in reincorporating thirteen million veterans into the civilian population bespoke no less the motivation of most of the veterans themselves to resume their life courses than the enormous vibrancy of the economy in supplying normatively appropriate roles to the returnees. Havighurst's study of "Mid-

west's" returned soldiers acutely portrayed the gradual sorting of these men over time into those who threw themselves with striking urgency into peacetime activities—like getting a "real" job—and those who delayed this now-unfamiliar challenge. Some of the latter took advantage of the long-term nonemployment benefits for veterans to form the "52–20 Club," those who through choice or necessity took advantage of part or all of the one-year government-sponsored subsistence-level unemployment at $20 a week. For some, it proved a psychologically difficult transition from army life to a peacetime economy, from a situation in which one's job sought one to a situation in which one had to go out and seek a job in a competitive economy of still-untrusted resilience.^[101]

Most prominent among the policies designed to help the veterans reestablish themselves in American society was the "G.I. Bill of Rights," especially its provision of extended educational benefits.^[102] While many G.I. Bill programs had but occasional takers, such as the policies designed to help soldiers become own-account farmers or small businessmen, the educational benefits were widely used. In no small measure the educational plan fit soldiers' view of the postwar world and seemingly, too, their view of themselves. The strong support of the educational industry contemplating its own conversion to peacetime helped. The number of veterans in school reached its peak of 1.2 million in January 1947, constituting 8.9 percent of all demobilized male World War II veterans. By 1952, 58 percent of the veterans now 25 to 34 years old and 51 percent of those 35 to 44 had achieved a high school graduation, compared with 38 percent among nonveterans of both age groups and of high school graduates. A slightly larger percentage of the veterans went on to college. Proportions taking advantage of G.I. Bill educational benefits included 60 percent of those under 25 at separation from the military, 39 percent of those ten years older, and 21 percent in the oldest category as well as 55 percent of all disabled veterans.^[103]

A superb comparative study of veterans and nonveterans in college in 1946–47 offers insight into the mood of many of the veterans as they found their way back into American society, reconstructing their postponed progress into ordinary adult

roles.^[104] The study of Fredericksen and Schrader sought explicitly to discover what, if anything, the military experience contributed to veterans' well-reported success in college by controlling carefully for socioeconomic selectivity, local conditions, and the initial aptitude that students brought into college with them. Only 13 percent were married at the time they responded to this survey; of the married veterans, three in four were childless. The student-veterans had in fact been less privileged: slightly over one in three came from families where the head's income was over $4,000, as compared with one in two for nonveterans attending the same colleges. Nineteen percent of veterans' fathers, but 29 percent of nonveterans' fathers, were college graduates. Yet although the overwhelming majority of veterans at school had taken advantage of G.I. Bill benefits, perhaps no more than 20 percent of the veterans who attended would definitely not have even had they received no aid. Veterans spent less, not more, time on schoolwork. They were more seriously vocational minded, but this was not closely enough tied to success in college to explain veterans' success there. A number of attitudinal items that were posed to the veterans and the nonveteran comparison groups proved not to be correlated with veterans' superiority in college. Nevertheless, "overachievement" was consistently more common among the veterans than among those who had not served.

The study made some very striking discoveries from a life course perspective. They found, thus, that a standardized test better predicted veterans' performance in college than it did that of the nonveterans. By contrast, high school grades predicted markedly better among the nonveterans than for the veterans. The military experience, that is, had effaced part of those high school attitudes and behaviors that commonly led to achievement at lower levels than capacity would suggest was possible. These were replaced by a set of attitudes that brought attainment closer to potential .^[105]

Both age and recency of separation from the army affected veterans' emergence into the ordinary civilian life. In 1946, for instance, table 26 shows that over one quarter of the very young veterans 18 or 19 years of age—who evidently had been only briefly in the army before demobilization—were still neither in

school nor in the labor force: they were biding their time until they had reoriented themselves to civilian life. This was well above the 10 percent figure for those who had not served in the army. Over time, the young veterans worked their way back into civilian roles. The 18-and 19-year-old veterans were, by 1948, only about as often without clear adult roles as were those of like age who had not served in the armed forces, two years earlier. For older veterans, 1947 was already "normal" in this regard. By 1948, for neither age group did the proportion of veterans who were unemployed exceed that for nonveteran counterparts who shared a school status. In the aggregate, 41 percent of male World War II veterans were not employed in November 1945. By June 1946, this number was down to 21 percent. By June, 1947, it was all the way down to 13 percent.^[106] It was obvious that although some former soldiers were in school, and while some had difficulties entering civilian employment, the great bulk of them found their way into the labor force promptly and surely. Quickly, wartime anxieties on

Figure 17.
Annual Income for Men, by Age and Veteran Status, 1947–1961

the part of planners and men alike of widespread unemployment were overcome both by the success of the government's plans to incorporate the returnees more smoothly than had been the case in the past and by the magnitude of the postwar prosperity—and by the demonstrable competence of most veterans themselves to handle assignments in the peacetime economy.

Veterans suffered an initial income deficit by comparison with nonveterans in the same age groups—but quickly made it up, and then some. Figure 17 examines patterns of annual income for age groups (unfortunately, not age cohorts) of veterans in the decade and a half following the war. The initial deficit for both the younger and the older veterans was rapidly converted to parity and then to an increasing superiority in income, until the mid-1950s, when it leveled off. Fifty-seven percent of spending units with veteran members in them increased their income "much" or "somewhat" in 1946, the same per-

centage again in 1947, and 63 percent in the following year. Comparable figures for other spending units were far lower: 37 percent, 46 percent, and 47 percent, respectively.^[107] The ex-soldiers did not long suffer economically for their having served: if anything, their experience helped to put them on a surer path to economic success, as veterans who attended college similarly succeeded there. Veterans moved smartly toward higher incomes, as newly acquired education and perhaps employer preferment brought them superior jobs, and as the continued prosperity of the postwar period kept employment high enough for them to overcome deficiencies in seniority.

Veterans' ability to marry and to establish families was closely linked to earning capacity—far more so than to such circumstantial considerations as the availability or price of housing in the locality. In a large group of nonsouthern urban areas, only about four in ten employed veterans whose weekly incomes were under $40 were married by 1946, as compared with two in three veterans whose incomes were in the $40 to $60 weekly bracket and five in six of those with higher incomes.^[108] In April 1947, all but 3 percent of male veterans who headed couples were in the labor force. Yet fully 21 percent were living in another family's home. This figure, three times as great as for nonveteran-headed couples, pointed to the only slight ability of physical shortfalls to interrupt the life course of men who were, released from the military and itching to resume their chosen paths as well as to the strongly normative tie of the status of young husband and breadwinner.^[109] Wives, to be sure, continued to work: no doubt, what determined the wife's labor force participation for many veteran families, and what ultimately timed the setting up of a new household, was the arrival of a first child. This explains why the proportion of women above age 35 who were in the labor force in early 1947 was well above the figure for 1940—and almost equal to that for the wartime period—but that women in the prime age for childbirth were markedly less likely to be gainfully employed than before the war.^[110]

The 1950 census recorded that men of the cohort of prime military age during World War II—25 to 29 in 1950—were far more likely to have married than had men of that age a decade

earlier: 76 percent as compared with 64 percent. Examining the nuptiality patterns of men who had not married prior to 1945, presented in table 27, allows us to examine the American veteran "catching up" to his civilian counterpart.^[111] Of the nonveterans in our sample who were unmarried in 1945, 58.5 percent remained single in 1950, whereas only 38.1 percent of the veterans had not married within five years of the war's end. Even at given ages, veterans married in greater proportions than nonveterans in the years following the end of the war.^[112]

The youngest veterans were overall more prone to marry but tended to lag behind more than nonveterans of the same age in the first year or two immediately following the war, catching up shortly, as table 27 indicates. Younger veterans caught up only gradually, in part, because they often had other matters to attend to which generally had to precede marriage, like finishing school and finding a job. Most of the initial difference in

overall proportions married was the far greater proportion of veterans still at school or jobless. In the year following the war, veterans who were in school included a considerably smaller proportion of their numbers at work than did nonveterans who were in school. There was a startling difference, too, between the proportions of veterans who were not in school (at a given age) who had found jobs and like proportions for their civilian counterparts. In 1946, over 85 percent of out-of-school nonveterans had jobs at 18 to 19 years of age, but less than 60 percent of veterans not in school at these ages did. For those 20 to 24, the proportions were 91 percent as compared with 81 percent. In 1947, these disparities began to be reduced, as did also the discrepancy for those in school. By 1948, the veterans had quite caught up to their nonveteran counterparts.^[113] Veterans who were slightly older and had reached their peak marrying years during the war did not exhibit any lag in catching up. Military service had little effect on marriage patterns among the oldest veterans, those in their late thirties and early forties during the war. Black and white veterans fared exactly alike in the advantages in postwar marriage that they enjoyed relative to nonveterans of their own race.

Table 28 shows that both white- and blue-collar veterans, as well as veterans who were farmers, had higher marriage rates than their co-workers who had not served. Veterans at all income levels (as of 1949) had married in greater proportions than their nonveteran counterparts, although the increase in proportion of marriages varied with income level. Those with relatively high incomes ($4,000 and above by 1949) apparently began to catch up almost immediately at war's end, while those with lower incomes seem to have taken about a year before they began to marry in significantly greater proportions. One might argue that these men were waiting to improve their economic situations before marrying, but this may be a spurious association inasmuch as income tended to increase with age.

Veterans were able to marry as promptly as they did in part because the women they married were prepared to accept somewhat nontraditional household arrangements on a temporary basis. The flexibility within marriage that the war had

produced thus continued into the postwar period. The Census Bureau reported that as of June 1946, the proportion of married co-resident couples who were "doubled up" had increased by 100 percent since V-J Day, to a level that was 40 percent above that in 1940.^[114] Such practices were highly concentrated in the veteran population—16 percent compared with 2 percent living as subfamilies, 15 percent compared with 2 percent living with subfamilies in Los Angeles County, 19 percent as subfamilies, 18 percent with subfamilies in Cleveland as compared to 3 percent each for nonveteran couples.^[115]

The deficits in family-building that were so quickly made up by the smooth operation of the marriage market were shortly made up in parenthood too. The data do not bear on first child per se , but the differences between the veterans and the nonveterans are nevertheless so strong that we can have no doubt about what was happening in parenthood. As of June 1946, veterans of any given age who were married and living with their wives had on average only about half as many children under five as their nonveteran age peers had.^[116] The patterns of family-size increase between 1946 and the following year are

most instructive: younger married veterans were prompt to enlarge their families, and older married veterans seemed to be downright assiduous in doing so.^[117]

World War II and its aftermath were, in a sense, paradoxical in their impact on the youthful life course. In some ways—as in luring young people out of the schools and into the labor force—the results seemed retrograde. So, too, did the reinforcement that military service provided for aspects of traditional gender roles. Yet by creating a setting in which marriage might be acceptably (and suitably to institutional context) contracted on a basis that was surely not prudent in the sense ordinarily understood before the war—marriages that moreover were intensely sentimentalized and linked as soon as possible to parenthood as part of their promised fulfillment—the war promoted the emergence of a new organization of the life course. It looked, indeed, to a postwar life course for young Americans that—far better than that of the 1920s and much of the Depression decade—freed the volitions, fulfilled the imperatives, invited the general assent of an increasingly homogeneous, prosperous, and individuated population. The fulfillment of these directions would await the new, but as it developed, oddly impermanent structures that individuals constructed in the baby boom.